Mixamo Animation Retargeting

[UNAmedia]

There are many small differences between the mixamo and the epic skeletons, and while manually you can bring them very close, the retarget will be off in the end. I'm not sure if this can be fixed without reskinning the model. The arms will penetrate the chest and such errors will appear.
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Hi Konflict,

the plugin uses an analytical approach to perfectly match the poses of the skeletons and we do few adjustments to compensate some "structural" differences (e.g. the Head bones are oriented differently, if you align them the resulting UE4 skeleton will face-up too much). Note that small errors in the retarget base pose produce big errors in the final animations (e.g. your fingers, in our tests we have better results).

But the problem you pointed out is mostly due to the different meshes of the models: e.g. the chest and arm dimensions of your source Mixamo model are smaller that the UE4 mannequin one, so when you apply the "Mixamo" rotation to the arm it will inevitably intersecate the bigger chest of the UE4 mannequin. This is a problem inherent to all animations retargeting when the meshes are different, not only with Mixamo. The proper solution would require modifications to the animation, not only the skeleton.

Anyway the end result of our plugin can be manually tuned to help minimizing this sort of issues: you can tune the analytically computed "retarget base pose" to counteract the differences between the meshes if/when needed. E.g. slightly rotating "backward" the arms could avoid the intersection with the chest (well, not having tested it it's only an opinion ).

Cheers.

[UNAmedia]

A little update about the question from Konflict: we did a quick test and the result of running the plugin (without further manual tuning) is quite good. Here two screenshots for comparison:

[BarisT]

Looks good, when is release date?

[UNAmedia]

Looks good, when is release date?

Unfortunately we don't have a date, we are still waiting for Epic testing the plugin. We wrote to them few days ago but we didn't receive a response yet.

[RoninVega]

Thank you for developing this! 35 is an amazing deal for a plugin which will save so much time. Hope Epic approves it soon.

[Sitrec]

Thank you! I'll definitely pick this up.

[UNAmedia]

Thanks guys

A quick update: Epic sent us the "marketplace identifier". So we are a step closer to the release! I'll keep you updated as soon as we'll have further information to share.

[spine.design]

Any chance of using this tech on Daz models? Just curious -

[UNAmedia]

Any chance of using this tech on Daz models? Just curious -

Do you mean https://www.daz3d.com/ ? I think it should be possible, like for the Unity models discussed above. We could look at them after the publishing of this plugin.

[FS Creations]

Wow, this is amazing! I'll buy it as soon as it is released. It'll be a huge time saver.

[spine.design]

Yup! As of right now, you can scrap the rig Daz exports and try to run with Mixamo with a little less cleanup or you can try to bring the fbx into Blender or something similar and recreate everything based off of the UE4 Mannequin reference. Anything and everything to speed up the iterative process is welcomed. Keep up the awesome work!

[Piepants]

I'm buying this as soon as it's released, FYI. Great job and great idea.

[Cmcginn]

Epic, Whats taking so long?????

[Neff10]

Oh man thats amazing! this is rly cool! i need it!!

[BoothStudios]

Any chance of using this tech on Daz models? Just curious -

It should work. You can already import Daz characters into Mixamo and then into UE4 (with needed adjustments). Make sure whatever you're using from Daz, you also have the gaming license or you cannot use in your game.

Instant buy upon release though. ESPECIALLY for $35!!