Weird Animation Behavior

Development Character & Animation
1

Hey, this is my first Post, so if this isnt the right place or something feel free to move it.

So here is a little Video which shows my Problem:

First of all I am also new to Animations.

I Downloaded a Character from Mixamo and imported it in UE4.
Then I added some Mixamo-Animations which worked fine.

Then I added some Animations we recorded with a Rokoko-Tracking-Suit, and all of the animations share this weird behavior.
the skeletons animation is looking fine, but the Mesh is weirdly rotated.
this doesnt make any sense to me, and i cant find anything online…

I hope the Video shows everything needed to solve this. :wink:

(maybe its too late and i just need a little sleep and tomorrow everything works just fine :P)

2

hmm sleeping didnt help
Here is an Animation fbx if anyone is willing to try

3

Ok, I guess the Problem is not on ue4 side, but the current version of rokoko studio seems to fail at exporting those fbx files.
But if anyone sees another solution here feel free to reply.

I cant open the fbx-animation with blender / cinema4d
and i cant export the animation from ue4 to a file, there seems to be something wrong with the fbx.

4

I have to reopne this topic.
Could anyone try this tutorial:(FBX-Files are in the Video-Description)

Here is what happens to me, when I use those FBX-Files:
This Happens to every Mixamo-Character I tried.
This Only happens to Rokoko Animations.
Mixamo and my Cinema4d Animations work fine.

If anyone is willing to try this and tell me if it works for him or if he/she has the same Problem as me, that would help me alot!
Sitting one Week at this Problem now.
Are my Import-Setting wrong or something?

5

So, I have it on decently good authority (because of the plugin I just made) that the head and tail of a bone matter little when it comes to positioning.

Your particular proble looks like is a simple armature fix, you just need to know blender armatures a little to understand how to correct it.

With the armature in edit mode you should be able to select the Head (the big ball) of the good arm bone which happens to be the forearm.
Keyboard shift s for the set cursor menu and set the cursor go selected.

Now select the tail of the corresponding but incorrect upper arm bone. The little ball.

Shift s again and tell it to move Selection to cursor.

Now you need to adjust the roll. As it seems like the data is all there and that’s probably going to have to match.

Select the upper arm bad bone, and shift click the lower arm bone so its active. Ctrl + N for the roll menu and click March active.

Now you need to tell the good bone that he’s actually supposed to be connected to the bad bone.

click the good bone, in the bone tab you will find the Parent by scrolling.
it has options and obviously the “connected” property will be disconnected. Click/check connected.

Go back to pose mode and see if the animation is what you expect.

Before adjusting anything else I would do a test FBX export and import to unreal to see the results.

also, if you can provide a link to the original file that Rokoko produces I’d be interested to see if there are any better ways to import the data onto a blender armor.
after-all it’s probably just a bunch of Matrix data that needs to be sorted out into a 3d plane.

6

Thanks for the Response

Here are the Files of the Rokoko Tutorial:

the Animations take-2-Fight_MIXAMO* are the important ones.

The Character I Use is the following:

(Akai E Espiritu, but afaik every character should do the job)

The confusing part is that this video shows that the animation-files should be fine:Rokoko Smartsuit Pro Tutorial: Working with Smartsuit Pro data from multiple characters in Unreal - YouTube my video with the same files shows something else:

Non-Rokoko-Animations work fine for me.

I have recorded almost 100 rokoko-Animations, fixing them all would be some pain (i would go through).
The important part for me at the moment is, that i want to know if others have the same problem, or if some unreal-settings are wrong on my side.

7

Given what I see in your video, you are importing an animation with a different skeleton then the one of the skeleton you are trying to use.
And in fact it is.

Here is the T pose skeleton VS the Animation Tpose.

TposeIssue.jpg
TposeIssue.jpg961×1080 105 KB

Ergo, Your re-targeting the wrong skeleton.

Also, the tutorial you linked uses TurboSquid characters. They might be rigged differently, which would explain why.

What you can do is extract the first T-pose off your FBX animation, save it as an armature and import it into Unreal.
You can then re-target the Maximo character to this T-Pose.

After that you should be 100% able to import the animation using the specifically re-targed skeleton.

Also, Blender says that the take-2-fight_HUMANIK_FW3_segment.fbx will be a 1:1 of the skeleton of the character with just basic re-targeting.
So import that animation instead of the Maximo labled one and tell me how it goes.

Oh, before you ask, you have to rename all the bones in the animation to remove “character” from in front.
You can easily do this with a blender script. Hang on. typing it up.

Run it from Script mode in Console:
for bone in bpy.data.objects’Character1_Reference’].data.bones: bone.name = bone.name[11:]

enter 2 times after it.

Now that this is done you can go and set the framerate to 25 unless you want to wait a lifetime between imports.
Export the new FBX with the following settings
-Z forward, Y up (suppresses FBX error message).
select Armat by clicking.
Move to armature tab at top of export dialog.
Disable Leaf Bones.
Select primary y, sec x.
check everything in animation tab + export.

Now in Unreal, Import settings, convert scene and add an Import rotation of 90 on X then import, and there you have it.

Note, for this I have ALL re-targeting set to skeleton on the skeleton, including hips. And here is an FBX you ca re-import.
http://mosthostla.com/downloads/animation_fix.rar

8

Thanks again.

If I try to import a HUMANIK animtion instead of a MIXAMO, it says: “Mesh contains Hips bone as root but animation doesn’t contain the root track. Import failed.”

I looked into it and the skeletons are indeed different.
your animationfix works great, even though i had to speed up times 4 but i think its some blender settings.

TurboSquid characters are just 3d-Models you can upload to mixamo so they get automatically rigged there.

if i follow this tutorial: upload a character to mixamo to autorigg it, and now the Rokoko-Animations seem to work. But i have to download Maximo-Animations specific for my character.

It seems like Mixamo is using different skeletons for the ones you can download und the ones you upload->autorig->download.

this is so confusing, i think i dont really understand skeletons :frowning:

Cant thank you enough for this!
From now on I can continue by myself i guess.

9

Np.

The skeletons are the issue anyway. They need to all be the same, or to be properly retargeted.

I’m sure there are ways to export from the suit to the exact rig you need, including a custom made one.

Afterall the data points (joints) are determined by the fact you are human…
meaning that you can manipulate the data to fit any human like skeleton.

What I’m kind of surprised about is that they don’t just force you to work it on the skeleton of your making, which would be the more logical path to avoid people having errors - force them to learn armatures…

Either way the rotate x by 90 is the classic y is up problem.

I think i had the apply transforms disabled on my blender exports and that’s why I was not seeing any changes. Speed wise the 25fps change is what brought that on probably.
the animations original speed was above 100 fps but it also generated over 1k frames.

Unreal adjusts frames and time dilation on it’s own so you don’t need exorbitant amount of frames to have things look good.
You should adjust the export settings to be within a maximum of 60 actual frames a second.
half that if you care at all about game size.

Anyway, if you haven’t already you can learn some from this series:

10

Yea Ive read/watched the Retargeting documents, I know what to do now :wink:

11

What have you done to get it working? I have the same Problem with mixamo characters and smartsuit animations