Hi All, I have a really strange issue going on with UE5 and cant for the life of me figure it out.
So I have a setup character in Unreal Engine 4.26 with animation montages. Now in 4.26 the montages work perfectly. I checked root motion in the animation made sure that a slot is assigned. The montages have all the necessary notifies I want working its great.
So I decided to move my project to UE5 (5.1 to be exact) When I tried to open the project the engine gave me the expected “make a copy dialogue” And I went ahead and did that. Went ahead and opened the engine. and everything worked out ok. Character could move all the blueprints and such came over ok. But a weird bug popped up with the animation montages.
When I went ahead and activated my attack animation montage on my character they play the animation fine but they dont move forward the animation plays in place. All the other notifies that are associated with the montage are fine and fire properly its just that the root doesn’t seem to move forward so the character plays the animation in place.
I cant figure out whats causing this. I tried to delete the montages and redo them but that didn’t work. I tried to migrate the montages from the UE4 project but that didn’t work either. I even made a duplicate animation in UE4 made sure root motion was unchecked and migrated that over and make the montage but no luck.
Has anyone run into this problem? Im assuming there is something new in UE5 that im not aware of thats causing the issue. Any help you guys can give me would be hugely appreciated.
Ok so an update. I tried to make a anim montage for the generic UE mannequin. Exported out the idle into max. animated the root. And re imported, enable root motion. And the montage worked just fine. the player moved to their new position and everything.
So that tells me its my character specifically.
my character was rigged with mixamo and I added a root bone in max to make sure I could do root motion. Like I said it works fine in 4.26. And even just previewing the animation in 5 the root is clearly moving but the moment I enable root motion the anim montage will only play the animation in place.
Ok I think I may have figured out what might be causing the issue. Its the animations themselves.
When I made the origianl attack animations I did so without the root bone for my mixamo rig. Then added the root bone at a later time. It would seem that unreal 4 is more forgiving than 5 is in this regard because it took the animations just fine after I re targeted them from the old skeleton to the new one. But I guess 5 isnt having any of it.
I did a very simple montage test with my base rig (with the root but without any animation data) and that montage did more forward once activated. So it would seem I need to redo my attack animations again from scratch to see if my theory is correct.
TLDR: my original animations are crap on some kind of root motion level because of a lot of jerry rigging and UE5 wont take them I have to redo my animations from the looks of it.