Root Motion not being reapplied to capsule?

RhythmScript
Fri, 04 Jul 2014 21:41:02 +0000
Character & Animation

I’m trying to set up animations to properly accept root motion, and it seems to me that I’m doing everything correctly. I’ve got the animations being triggered from inside an AnimMontage; if I DON’T check “Enable Root Motion Translation” then when I play back the animations I can watch the character leave the capsule, exactly as expected.

When I check the box, the capsule stays centered on the character’s root, which is, again, what one would expect, EXCEPT the capsule itself isn’t being moved forward in accordance with the root movement.

In all of the documentation about root motion in AnimMontages, it’s treated as set-and-forget; by enabling root motion
(a) the root bone’s motion will be zeroed out, and
(b) that motion will be applied to the capsule, retaining the original animation but driving the capsule along with it.

It seems like, in fact, by following the tutorial I’ve only gotten the first half of that. The root motion IS in fact, removed, so I know that it’s not a question of Unreal seeing an incorrect bone as the root, and the animation DOES look correct when root motion isn’t disabled so I know it’s not a question of the root keyframes not being properly imported.

This picture should help explain; in both cases I’m triggering the animation from the same position, but root motion is enabled for the first and not the second. Note how the animation changes but in both cases the capsule remains in the same place (well, in the root motion example it’s actually nudged forward ever-so-slightly, but not NEARLY as far as it ought to have based on the animation data)

Am I missing something? Does the root motion need to be reapplied to the capsule manually and, if so, is there a reason why the documentation doesn’t delve into this?

3 posts - 2 participants