Use Epic's Blue guy Skeleton for another mesh?

Development Character & Animation
1

I’m a little lost on this, I’m sorry but I’ve tried googling what to do etc to no avail…
But i want to get this right, As i plan on purchasing an animation pro pack off the marketplace and using them with a mesh I’ll buy off of CGtrader…

Here are a few things I’ve tried doing to test…

  • Import a mixamo collection character and assign the skeleton
  • Import a mixamo fuse character and assign the skeleton (Which has worked but given my character and awful posture)
  • Import a character i downloaded off of turbosquid

All of which have either problems with bones, heads going all floppy, limbs missing, or just looking weird like the fuse character.

Is there a proper way to do this? If anyone has a tutorial that would be brilliant.
I just want to save time not having to animate all of the Rifle animations etc when they are on the marketplace! plus the fact i dont want to waste money on a decent model to not have it work with the animations :confused:

Anyway, Thanks in advance for any advice!..

2

I am having these same issues… it’s a huge learning curve to do some of the simple things… well I guess nothing is simple

3

You need to be looking at animation retargeting. I think there was a twitch tutorial stream on it a few weeks ago. Go to www.youtube.com/unrealengine and look for animation in the search.

Its not THAT hard to do the retarget of one skeleton to another. Just make sure to match up the base poses or things will look weird.

4

So doing what you said Zoombapup, you will use a Different Skeleton to the Blue guy’s, but transfer the animations over… Basically?

Thanks for the replies, atleast I’m not alone!

5

Also explained here

6

Animation retargeting gives me problems such as the animations stuttering.

What I usually do is (if I have a FUSE UE4 fbx or a model with same bone hierarchy) import the mesh and just use the Blue guy’s skeleton.

7

Doesn’t mixamo have the Epic skeleton as an export option now anyway?

8

yeah it does(except for the animals) and most anims will retarget but there are usually still some strange anomalies, they really need to fix these issues but i doubt they will though because their bread and butter is selling their own animations…as an example i made a character in fuse exported with the ue4 skeleton then retargeted the anim starterkit, every animation had some deformity like bent back hands or something similar, on the upside with 4.7 you can edit animations, however this didnt work very well and there doesnt seem to be any docs on it yet

9

Retargeting skeletons seems like a daunting task at first, but after you’ve done it a couple of times it’s relatively easy. When you link bones from one skeleton to the other you have to keep in mind where the animation is going to occur. In the case of one skeleton there were two extra hip bones between the hip and the knee that server no purpose in the Epic character’s animation (which animates from the hip to the knee, in this instance.) Link the Epic Character’s hip to one of those “in between” hip bones and you will definitely see distortion.

10

How is this done? I have tried this and my character stays in the t pose

11

Sorry guys, I’ve sort of put the models and animation to one side for now and have been concentrating more on the core of the gameplay.
I did notice last night though, that when I exported an animation from the Blue guy, it gave me an option that I didn’t really pay attention to at the time, which was exporting the mesh aswell as animation.

Anyway, I think the next time i try to tackle this, I will try to:

  • Export the animation with the mesh
  • Import the mesh into blender alongside my desired character mesh
  • Use the scale of the Blue Guy’s mesh as a base (I always seem to get the scale off in blender and have to export umpteen times to get it close -_-)
  • Move the skeleton over to my mesh and weight paint
  • Delete the blue guy
  • Import it into unreal engine.

I’m a total beginner at 3d modelling so, I could be totally wrong, but that’s my plan of action lol…

Cheers guys!

12

Why not just use a Mixamo Autorig (It’s free for your first use!) and rig it there then just download it as an Unreal .FBX and import it to the Blue man Skeleton?

13

Well i was wrong, I thought I’d give it a go but… No. lol

You know what, i totally forgot about the auto-rig, thanks!
Btw, what do you mean import it to the blue man skeleton?
So, i would import my skeleton+mesh from auto-rig mixamo, then retarget the animations or is there something else i would need to do to be as close as possible to the blue guy.
Just thinking of the long run for my budget… The mixamo animations are good, but unless you have mixamo above indie, i guess it could get expensive :confused:

15

Thanks for the help, Really appreciate it :smiley:
Been using the Engine for about 2 weeks now, And rather than focus on one thing, I’ve been floating between Animation/Modelling/Blueprints/Testing Landscaping xD…

You couldn’t point me in the direction of the HeroTTP template though could you? I can’t seem to find a way to export him from the engine ^^.

Cheers!

16

This tutorial worked for me…

https://community.mixamo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204338223-Tutorial-Use-Auto-Rigged-Characters-with-Existing-Blueprints

thanks for the help, but I hope this helps others that are having the same issues that I did… This community has to help each other to build something special… the above tutorial solved my problem but I want to thank Fighter5347 and others like him that continue to help other newbies such as myself…my bones are still distorted, but at least my character moves and is not stuck in that T- pose