I am having the hardest time trying to make animations work with metahumans. It seems every single asset I buy has a different set of bone structures and I am not able to use them in conjunction with different animation houses such as Mixamo, Accurig, Rokoko, or what’s on the marketplace.
I’ve wasted so much money buying characters on the marketplace that say they are compatible with 4.2 - 5.4 but when you get them they are not. UE4 mannequins are not the same or compatible with UE5. On top of that once you have spent months on a project there is no way to downgrade to use a UE4 manny just to make things work, and keeping your sanity.
Recently, I’ve gone to You tube like everyone else to try to figure out how to make things work and everyone has a different method. Once you change or modify a Third Person BP or the SK_mannys skeleton, that’s it. You are stuck with what ever that one mannequin can do. Maybe I’m doing something wrong here?
If not, for the love of God UE Devs, please make it easier to retarget animations regardless of mannequin version. There must be a way to take an animation created on the old ue4 body and retarget to a ue5 Metahuman. Even if that means disabling certain bones on import or creating some kind of system that can recognize what type of bone structure the animation is in and just automatically switch so that the animation works.
I say this because there are just some animations that Mixamo does better than Accurig, there are a lot that Accurig does better than Mixamo. There are some on the marketplace that out shine them all in certain areas. Point being, you should be able to use all of them on one character.
You should look into the animation re-targeting support. It lets you re-use animations made on one skeleton, with another skeleton.
It’s not always perfect, but if you’re the kind of person who changes skeletons around, then either you’re OK with those discrepancies, or you’re aware that you’re signing up for a lot of re-work…
Note that there are two workflows, one for “same hierarchy, different proportions,” and one for “different hierarchy.”
I am familiar with retargeting, however I have not tried the second method of going to UE 4 and bringing in an SK Mannequin to try to retarget ue4 animations to the new skeleton. Hopefully that works.
I still think there will be an issue with trying to mix the different animations, because once you modify the skeleton, your old Mixamo animations will not work because of the new skeletal structure, and if you try to take that new skeleton to Mixamo or Accurig, it will not accept that new FBX for some reason. I’m sure I am doing something wrong, just can’t figure out what that is.
You can’t work wrong and compain that stuff doesn’t work or “isn’t compatible”.
Your rig and animations are your rig and animations.
Unless you go out of your way, stuff you buy isn’t magically compatible with other stuff. Even when you do find something where the skeleton is the same, they are usually poorly compatible at best.
If you spend time to make whatever animation you buy compatible with your rig, then thats a different story. And one way to do it is the retargeting links that were shared above.
What you are doing wrong is that you expect the engine’s sorry excuse for a rig to be compatible with everything. Its not.
Most animations you buy don’t even have the approrpriate skeletal markers needed to display what they were meant to work for correctly.
Its up to you - and only you - to make your own decent skeleton/rig/character and compile the animations from whatever you want into it so that things work for you.
If you start using metahumans or other similar shortcuts (including retargeting if used at runtime), then you are both doing it wrong, and compromising your project.
As far as why there cannot be just one univerals rig - thats because when you try to you end up with s*it like the metahumans.