I’m trying to use an animation I got off of mixamo but when I try and retarget it to the Unreal Engine mannequin it looks all wrong. There is an error message about a chain being too short but I really don’t know what that means, I’m still kind of new to all of this. Does anyone know why this is happening and how I can fix it?
That warning doesn’t matter. Did you match the retarget pose?
I don’t know what that means, this is the first time I’ve ever tried retargeting animations so I don’t completely know what I’m doing. The original tutorial I was following just said “Retarget the Mixamo animations to the Unreal Mannequin” and then didn’t elaborate. I tried following this tutorial but It didn’t work. The Unreal Mannequin doesn’t move when I try to Auto-Map the chains
So what the retargeter is doing is looking at the chain you made for the Mixamo Character and trying to match those bones the best it can to the “chains” you defined on the Unreal ManniQuinn…
So you make a chain that starts at the same bone… like the shoulder bone… then ends at say the hand bone… then it looks at both of those chains and tries to put the animation from the source chains to the target chains…
So you need one chain for the spine… one for neck and head… one for each finger… etc… they all need to make sense or things get wonky…
When you make the retarget chains just think about how it’s going to try to figure out which bones to match with which… It took me a while to get this at first but once you think of it this way it’s pretty simple.
The boxes in the Chains dialog box should say “Start of Chain” and “End of Chain” Those need to be like “Start of chain= shoulder End of Chain= Hand…” on both IK retargeters… You can just use the drop down menu under each chain to experiment with the length… like start and end… then make it so unreal can figure out how to match them up.
The other thing that could be happening is you might have a chain mismatched over in the actual animation retargeting area… where both skeletons are displayed with animations… Just be sure that the one you labeled “ARM LEFT” matches the one that makes sense on the other skeleton Which UE could have named LEFT SHOULDER… etc… sometimes it will match them up wrong if they don’t have the exact same name.
Last thing is the poses on both skeletons need to be close to the same when you are ready to put the animations on… if it’s not… click on the button in the upper left that says “Retargeter running” and you should see “Edit retarget pose…” then match up the Tpose or Apose as close as possible to each other by moving the bones in the target skeleton, in this case ManniQuinn… it will change the animations depending on how they both stand… like sometimes I’ll make a guy with that arms out alpha walk by moving his arms up then re-exporting the animation. It will adjust based on how far off the joints are…
I don’t come here much but I’ll try to keep a lookout if that isn’t clear… Good luck!