UE4 Losing bone transforms when importing facial animations

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello,
This problem seems simple, but I’m not sure how to fix it. Some of the bones in my facial animations are both rotated and transformed. However when I import the animation into UE4, I only see the bone rotations and not the transforms at all. What could be causing this?

When I open the exported FBX in 3DS Max, I see the animations are exactly how I intended them to be. So it has nothing to do with how it’s being exported.

2

Alright I have a solution.

  1. Open the imported animation.
  2. Select the skeleton tree tab
  3. Select the options dropdown and click show re targeting options. (Why? We aren’t re-targeting anything… Answer: Who tf knows.)
  4. Navigate down to the parent bone which has all your facial animations and right click that bone.
  5. click Recursively set translation animations to Animation.
  6. It should now be fixed. Go forth and create your game.
  7. Make sure to send me a free copy because you love me. :wink:
3

Why is the default set to on?
because the engine attempts to eliminate animation translation changes from the start in order to better accommodate retargeting.

Retargeting is basically a mathematical computation of all translations of the bones which maintains the base animation structure when things rotate only.

Any Retargeted bone that should be translating - like facial animations usually - needs to have the retargeting specifically set to animation to allow for the translations…

4

Good thing there is documentation explaining this. JK, the documentation is like one super vague sentence. I’ve learned almost everything I know about UE4 by Trial and Error or youtube videos because of this.

Also, the names ‘Skeleton’ and ‘Animation’ are not self documenting. There is no ‘default set to On’ as you describe. The default is ‘Skeleton’, which you would not expect them to be culling translation data with that name.