X Axis Forward - how important? (Cinema4D)

Development Character & Animation
1

So UE4 is importing C4D FBX’s pretty well (swapping from Y-Up to Z-Up etc) but we do end up with the meshes facing down Y in UE.

Obviously ‘Forward’ is the X Axis in UE. I noticed in the 3rd person template the character is rotated -90˚ inside of his Capsule (which is what I need to do).

Is this a problem in any way? Am I over thinking this. I have found if I build meshes/rig in C4D facing down X and put the -90˚ on the Root object/joint, the meshes and joints come in to UE correctly oriented.

My concern is that future functionally such as vehicles may need this dealing with. I would maybe like to see a rotate option in the importer as all my models/animations etc are facing Z and so changing them all to face X is a fair amount of work.

2

It could also be a problem when root motion gets introduced unless we can arbitrarily rotate characters around their z axis

3

The best option (IMO) is to have all the pivots rotated to 0,0,0 in the resting position, so I would adjust your character pivots to face in the positive-X direction. I tried doing this with Epic’s demo pawn but found it to be stupidly hard work due to all the skinning.

4

When you export to FBX some applications want Y up and some Z up. UE4 wants Y up.

In the exporters dialogue there is a “Axis Conversion” that you can set to Y-up and your player will will be imported standing in the Y direction.

5

Yeah I know. Unfortunately C4D does not have that option. Epic have said over on the answer hub that they detect which app your file comes from where they can and deal with it. Which is happening my y-up becomes z-up. It’s just that unfortunately my old z-forward becomes y-forward in UE which I suspect could be a problem

6

Yup rotating skinned stuff is definitely harder work. Via the motion clip system in C4D it can be done but it’s a few steps every time and not really compatible with anything I can purchase. All my mocap is using z-forward