animation

[smoky shell]

The retarget pose is not a realistic pose
And animation retargeting is about accuracy not realism

It means that the IK bones are not going to follow the FK bones in the animations, so if you attempt to apply IK over those animations, the IK will pull the limbs to their world space locations which will look awful
This is easily resolved by making a blueprint animation modifier extending the CopyBonesModifier and adding the IK bones to the array, it will snap the IK bones to the FK bones for any animation you apply it to

[small fog]

yea, absolutley. i am just pointing out that that pose looks more natural.

[smoky shell]

No need for them to explain, you can simply compare:

• Old system was simpler and easier to use
• New system enables runtime retargeting so you no longer need to have multiple copies of your animation setup and animations for characters where a retarget can be obtained
• New system uses IK rig to retarget otherwise incompatible characters with vastly greater control over the end result

[smoky shell]

It doesn't look more natural

He is leaning too far backwards and in a slightly squatted position and the bend in the arm is too extreme

If you are using inertialization then you need a.AnimNode.Inertialization.IgnoreDeficit 1 and likely will get improved results if you modify the engine class AnimNode_Inertialization.cpp::INERTIALIZATION_MAX_POSE_SNAPSHOTS to something like 8 instead of 2. This of course requires source engine. Epic is aware of these issues and are going to expose both properties for 5.4.

It is in the animation layer functionality, not in the core graph

This isn't going to be terribly simple if you're a new dev
But its actually pretty easy in theory
Iterate over the bones in both the source pose and the player's pose and compare the rotations between the bones
You will need to get this information to a central point for comparison
If it were me, I would make a custom anim graph node that feeds it to a custom FAnimInstanceProxy which during post evaluate, feeds it to an actor component (where this goes depends on how your game is setup), then that component would have both the source and player's pose (which is a TArray<FTransform> where the index is the bone index)

[obtuse parrot]

Hello, I'm not sure if this is a bug in 5.3 or intended behavior but I figured out a work around and thought people might be interested. I noticed that when setting up controls in control rig, no matter what I set the inital transforms to when compliled they would always snap back to the transform they had when they were created. If you however turn of AutoCompile in the Control Rig interface then compile it sets the transform correctly. You can then turn AutoCompile back on.

[modest moth]

The animations are going through but it's not playing the animation in the view port. Any idea why that might be?

[smoky shell]

In 5.1 I have to make my changes -> close the control rig -> re-open the control rig -> compile to get it to update properly, until I figured that out I was getting pretty frustrated

[smoky shell]

Disconnect one thing at a time until it works, then you know the thing you just disconnected is likely the culprit

[modest moth]

It works when I test it, but it doesnt work in the viewport

[smoky shell]

Same answer

[obtuse parrot]

Yeah I think that has been "fixed". As long as turn of auto compile and compile it seems to work.

[smoky shell]

Maybe by 5.10 I'll finally want to stop beating my head into the wall when working with it 🙂

[hoary tusk]

This seems like the best place for my question. So I have made a hood in blender and set it up on my character, I have checked the weight paints many times and I still have this issue of the back left shoulder area not moving with my character very well. I tried to make a different hood and same thing happened. I am not sure if its an issue in blender or unreal engine. or where to fix it. been trying to fix it for hours now lol. (dont mind captain underpants, he is a work in progress)

[winter haven]

Hey! Super ue5 beginner.
I bought a character off of the Marketplace and these are the following technical details:
Rigged: Yes
Rigged to Epic skeleton: No
Animated: Yes
Number of Animations: 10
Animation types: In-place

I'm using the default third person template.

1. Just replacing the mesh on my BP_ThirdPersonCharacter obviously doesn't work.
2. The character comes with animations, but should I just use Mixamo stuff instead if I want?
3. I read something about being able to just retarget bones but I'm not sure what that means?

Basically, I want to be able to use all prebuilt input and movement that comes with the ThirdPersonCharacter, but I want it to be this new character I bought. My new character isn't a standard human. But it's bipedal, with a head/chest, 2 feet, 2 hands

[hoary tusk]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvHOamXuZDI @winter haven this is a video I used recently to learn retargeting, and it worked great. you got this!

[winter haven]

Thank you so much! I wasn't even really sure what word to look up.

[ripe gazelle]

thanks great explenation!

[winter haven]

Okay so, the first little bit of the video says that retargeting animations is just using animations from another character into my own. Is this what I even want? Lol

I guess I'm just a little lost lol

Like, I'm okay either using the animations it comes with, or something else like Mixamo. I guess my dream is that I can have this character set up so that I can use all these free animations that are meant for the Epic Skeleton.

[light river]

Thank you. I wish I would have found a good explanation of it before.

[hoary tusk]

from your explanation, I think this is what you want yeah

I am very new to retargeting too, so I couldnt tell ya all the ins and outs really

[winter haven]

Amazing. Thank you again

[light river]

@winter havenLike they say in Police Force: If anyone can do it, so can Frank Drevin!

I mean, so can you!

[light river]

Wow. Now that I've done it a couple of times with a checklist, It's not that bad. I have my character animations retargeting... except for my shoulders that look reversed...

[dull bridge]

So when I add my Basic IK nodes for my character's arm it move's the joint(ball) from the socket. Making an FK chain doesn't have the issue but Basic IK does.

The Axis and secondary axis are set properly but once the basic IK comes in it moves it.

[dull bridge]

Any ideas how to handle?

[little bane]

hopefully quick question, when assigning a preview asset (i.e a weapon in the hand) to an animation blueprint or skeletal mesh, is there a way to assign a different preview asset for each mesh / anim blueprint? At the moment it seems to apply only to the skeleton which then applies that preview asset to all skeletal meshs / anim blueprints that use that skeleton

[topaz crest]

Hey, since UE 5 I can no longer change the sceletal of a animation. If I do so, the Animation is simly A Pose. I need to export the animation and reimport with tne different skeleton. Is there a fix for this bug?

[lilac mason]

Hello! Has anyone encountered this problem after making modifications to a skeleton mesh using the 'Skeleton Mesh Editing Tools' plugin? Whenever I attempt to access animations or the IK rig, control rig, or try to edit animations with the control rig, the editor crashes. I even created new IK and control rigs after deleting and re-adding bones, but the issue persists.

[somber rover]

Hello, I was wondering about Metahuman animation poses. For each metahuman downloaded it creates a folder called (for example): Metahumans/Common/Male/Medium/NormalWeight/Poses with all poses contained. At the moment these poses are taking a long time to load, so I'm replacing all existing poses with one set of poses for all Metahumans. I think it's going to work, but I'm not 100% sure. Does anyone have any knowledge on the purpose of these pose assets (I know they're used in the post-process animation blueprint) and if they're interchangeable for different Metahuman skeletal meshes? ...

[obtuse coral]

Hello everyone! I am asking for tips and directions for something I want to implement. I am building a project and I have a true FPS setup, using Lyra animation system. I don't quite get it honoestly, but I was wondering, is there a way to use animations made for "standard first person characters" (so, just the arms and hands), and adapt them to a full body character? Thank you for your time!

[heady moat]

in the animation scene like god of war, when player has to interact with button to avoid being hit, etc. Is there any reference to do that in unreal? I want to create some interactive game like that, but full animation (similar to GoW but entire game built to do that). I forget if there's any similar example on the same genre? Usually I only saw interactive but with movie

[river briar]

I know you can make a mirror table and mirror animations in the AnimBP. But what if I want to use the mirrored animation in a sequence or blendspace? Is there a method or plugin to create mirror animation sequences?

[chilly dust]

I’m planning to start implementing control rig into our pipeline. We use stylized characters and I wanted to see if anyone knew of some stylized rigs I could start testing with to see if it’s going to be viable and get our animators comfortable with. Then start developing our rig based on what we can learn from that. I have Bungee Man from Epic but curious if anyone knew of other tutorials or marketplace assets?

[noble hemlock]

@smoky shell thanks for that and being new it is a bit confusing. I will look into it.

[sharp radish]

I bought an animation pack from the Epic Marketplace and started the retargeting process. When I finished retargeting and exported it, I noticed that the animation made my character stretch a little bit. I connected the correct bones, etc. It looks PERFECT in the Retargeter Preview but the exported result isn't. The first gif is the preview and the second gif is the exported animation compared to my other animations using a blend space.

[young bone]

I am new to hand key animating in unreal and had a couple of questions, i am doing a simple walk cycle animation
How do i lock a channel so that i cant edit it

The rig im using is bungee man because its super basic, his legs are stretchy by default and I would like to turn this off, do i need to go into the blue print editor to do that or is there a way to turn that off

I had an animation in this level that i was working on, yet when i open up the level the controls disappear and the animation is gone how do i get it to stay when i leave the level and come back.

[dusk tendon]

Hi again 😁
This might help you get some more insight into the whole Animating in unreal 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgJ1stTScxI

[young bone]

yea i watched that video, it had some useful tips and pointed me in the right direction but i think my issues are more along the lines of using the software properly, thank you tho!

[dusk tendon]

You can Lock a layer with right click in sequencer > Lock.
For the Bungee man rig, it seems you want a "Normal" Control rig, i've just finished mine and it doesnt stretch, i Used this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXlBqRqFwc4
It looks long, but it's mostley a lot of the same steps, and this guy explains it very well and its good to follow along.
If your controls dissapear you might wanna check if you are in the viewport, just clikk on it and press "G". hopefully this helps a bit 🙂

[dusk tendon]

Cool!

[onyx moss]

wheel handler node only works if the VMC has 4 wheels assigned?

in ue4

[smoky shell]

You're not in the wrong channel, but I don't think you'll find the people who are familiar with that node in here, maybe #ue5-general , maybe even people in #chaos-physics will use it a lot more often (though they might think its off-topic...)

[onyx moss]

I thought its related to animations not physics, this is why posted in here, but yes maybe people in suggested channels know about this

[smoky shell]

Its pretty grey; an animation node designed for a specific physics application 😄 But those channels have much more experienced devs and this tends to focus on characters (not as a rule, just does)

[onyx moss]

Ok 😄

[real atlas]

is there a right way to reimport a skeletal mesh with some changed bone names without screwing everything up, or do I just have to live with my mistakes forever?

noticed a tiny mistake where I used a . instead of an underscore on two finger bones meaning I cant use mirror in blender, but if I rename and import back in itll mess it all up
also, anyone know of good retargetting tutorials? like if I wanted to import a skeletal mesh thats the same as an existing one but just slightly moved around or parts added to it

[summer hedge]

is there a way i can make these two spheres jiggle?

[dull bridge]

Is there a way to open an animation, copy all the bone transforms and then go to my control rig/sequencer and paste all those transforms to start my animation? I see I can do each one individually but that would take forever and it won't let me bake the animation to control rig for some reason.

[echo ibex]

Is it possible to create a procedural animation logic using a control rig, independent of the skeleton, using only bone names? I have many models that will do the same thing but have different skeletal meshes. I don't want to write the same code over and over for all of these.

[obtuse plume]

https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/blob/release/Samples/Games/Lyra/Source/LyraGame/Equipment/LyraEquipmentManagerComponent.cpp#L101C24-L101C24

i dont remember where they destroy it

[tropic ridge]

hey there
I have a root bone set up in blender but unreal created another bone with the skeleton's name and uses that as the root bone
did I miss something while importing/exporting?

[misty dagger]

that link is 404 bro

[obtuse plume]

it's 404 because you need to join epic games organization on github

the code is in the EquipmentList

there the BP is spawned and attached

[misty dagger]

thank you bro, i have been looking for this a while

[obtuse plume]

that is standard behavior. i believe unreal uses the armature as the root.

[tropic ridge]

that seems counterproductive the moment you need to use root motion

I renamed the skeleton to "Armature" together with the Pose root and now it's using my root bone as the actual root but the scaling is fucked

[quartz heath]

i am using the new animation budget system and it seems like i need to everytime i restart the editor enter the console command : a.Budget.Enabled 1
Where can i set the cvar in the default config file?

[misty dagger]

anyone know where can i get some free medieval weapon animation, so i can use them as a placeholder?

just want to use them to test code logic

[tender flicker]

Hey, does anyone know a bug in ue5.3 which causes anim curves to return invalid values on simulated proxies?

just upgrading from ue5.2 to ue5.3 seems to cause the issue, where my animation curves sometimes returns very different values

[vivid geyser]

Does anyone know how to make an animation montage not restore the previous state, but leave as it as it?

[dusk tendon]

👋🏽 I have a Motorbike that rides around, and I put a SK_Mesh (Rider) under the Bike Mesh in the BP Hierarchy.

How do I animate the Rider on the bike with a Blendspace?, I want the rider to lean when the bike goes left etc. 🤔

Do I have to make a Blueprint(rider) in a Blueprint(Bike)?

[bitter shard]

If the rider and the bike are two different skeletons, you need two different animation blueprints. Then you just add the blendspace to the animation graph in the rider animation blueprint as usual.

[dusk tendon]

Alright thanks, i already have the AnimBP for the Bike (steering and Rotating Wheels).

I'll finish the AnimBP for the Character and then look into how to combine the blendspaces 🤔

[vapid quartz]

Currently struggling with motion warping, on the X and Y axes it is fine, but I have a purely Z root motion jump animation that is scripted that is snapping to the position at the very last frame. It gets to the position I want, but it always snaps and doesn't look smooth at all. I have the setting "Ignore Z Translation" set to false, and I can confirm setting this to true doesn't move me on the Z. I'm just wondering why the Z motion can potentially be so snappy. I have the anim notify across the entirety of my animation track and it only ever snaps to the point at the end. The horizontal animations do not have this issue and in fact Z motion warp properly

update: this is really weird. This motion warps properly ONLY when the point I'm warping has some slight X or Y translation to it.

but the whole point is I want it to be purely root motion, and only on the Z/

is motion warping primarily used for X / Y and Z is just a secondary consideration? It's really weird that it doesn't affect the Z in the same way and will only affect the Z if there is X or Y root motion

[dusk tendon]

I created a Animation Blueprint for my Character, but i'm doing something wrong i think.
I'm following a "normal" tutorial for walkign and jumping, and in there they create a Speed Variable. But i think i need the speed from my Bike, instead of from my Character? Because it doesnt seem to move in relation to the bike since it is attatched to the bike. Srry im having trouble explaining.

So Basicly i think i need to get the speed of the bike, to trigger the different States inside the Blendspace, is that correct?

[ionic quest]

You can get the characters mesh component velocity

The character is not moving in the movement component so that’ll always be 0

[dusk tendon]

like this?

ooh yeah it's working! Thanks!

[frosty moon]

Do you guys know how to fix this bug pls someone help me about it

this is my metahuman which is on queen mesh idk what is problem but it cant show my animation montages, if you guys know smth about it please let me know

[gloomy yoke]

Is there a way to setup a card geometry pre modeled in maya as a groom asset and have it simulate with the animation?

[tender flicker]

No idea if anyone will run into the same issue, but upgrading from ue5.2 to 5.3 seems to enable Update Rate Optimizations in my character skel mesh comp, so turning that off fixed my curve issue

[tender flicker]

Does anyone know how to have Update Rate Optimization not affect the animation curve values?

[dark crow]

Anyone recommend any tutorial or documentation on creating a correct FP character? All videos just attach camera to head socket.

[tender flicker]

do you mean 2 separate meshes for 3rd person and 1st person?

[dark crow]

Yeah

[tender flicker]

I don't think there's many tutorials for it since it's pretty straight forward except for having to deal with duplicate weapon/item meshes. what are you having issues with?

[dark crow]

Well I haven't started yet. I just like to watch/read up on how its done first and get some ideas

[tender flicker]

a tip I can give for the animation side of things is, just have FPS animations instead of 2 sets of animations (separate 1st and 3rd person anims) and then use ik/virtual bones to apply the animations to the third person mesh

I did this mostly cause I was using weapon animations from the marketplace asset, so most of them don't even have 3rd person anims, so I have a generic rifle third person anim from the Rifle Pro Mocap Pack, then I use virtual bones to copy the first person ik_hands and ik_hand_gun bones relative to the head, and then apply the hands (fingers/wrist only) from the first person onto the third person anim, and then ik to the virtual bones

This is for aiming down sight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2oKnX6PtFw but you can use the same virtual bones on your third person mesh

[dark crow]

I do want to have free look so they would see lower body

[tender flicker]

that ones easy, just have a 3rd person, set the scale of spine_5/arms to be 0, then use leader pose component to copy your third person mesh

the good thing with that is that your shadows will match

[dark crow]

If I set scale to 0 the shadows are removed.

[tender flicker]

no, sorry I meant a 3rd mesh

not the 3rd person mesh, just a completely separate mesh for the legs only

[dark crow]

so 1 mesh for legs, 1 mesh for arms, and 1 mesh for full body?

[tender flicker]

yeah

for FP, hide the full body but cast hidden shadows, for the arms and legs, just set owner only see

[dark crow]

ok, how do you handle the camera (eyes) position? Like im thinking if the person jumps, the full body head will move around. but for the FP camera it will always be fixed. So if the full mesh did a jump and the head raised up it could be in sight of the enemy whereas on your first person you might not see

[tender flicker]

animations are in-place, so they won't move up and down, you will move the capsule and the animation will flail the legs around

there will be some small movement but unless you are making an ultra competitive shooter, you shouldn't need to worry about it

you could always add a spring component, and set the location of that to the head bone, or just calculate the head bone offset from the default eye height and just -+ the delta when the head bone moves in the z axis, but it's just a waste of time

[young palm]

guys hello do you know how to make more realistic jumps or do you know what is causing the animation to start after the jump

[dark crow]

This video kinda shows what I was thinking. You can see the camera will be in a fixed place for the first person. then as he moves and stuff the full mesh will be in a different place. So like when he jumps is showing it good. https://youtu.be/A0McowP7-4k?t=38

[tender flicker]

You can do it that way if you prefer, maybe other like it but I hate random camera movement, animations shouldn't control your camera except for maybe when you are interacting with something

unless you want to have the camera movement, the easiest way is to have an animation with as little movement as possible

[dark crow]

ok

[shell helm]

Any tips for getting iks to work properly? Made a rig in blender and imported it (painfully) and I know that FBX doesn't really hold actual connections, just parenting, and trying to set up iks in unreal are getting funky with legs stretching apart.

[mystic dagger]

I need some blender help if anyone is privy. I have two armatures, both animated. One for the arms and one for the gun. I'm trying to prep this for Unreal Engine. Does anyone know the workflow if you're using two armatures?

[cold grove]

Hi everyone 👋 I'm trying to use "Look at" in animation blueprint to have a character look at the player. For some reason it works weird; the head is always facing 90 degrees left (as if the character's right ear is looking at the player 😂 ). Is there a way to offset the character head by 90 degrees so that it actually faces the player when tracking it?

[burnt dragon]

Question- is it better to make an IK bone or make an IK control?

[smoky shell]

Show your code that calculates what you're providing the node
Its probably because you're factoring the mesh which is offset -90, but show the code instead of trying to fix it, it might be intrinsically incorrect

This is the right way:

BaseAimRotation = Character->GetBaseAimRotation();
WorldRotation = Character->GetActorRotation();
LookAtDelta = (BaseAimRotation - WorldRotation).GetNormalized();
AimOffsetYaw = LookAtDelta.Yaw;
AimOffsetPitch = LookAtDelta.Pitch;

Do not use GetControlRotation(), its a common mistake due to people making tutorials the wrong way and spreading it, the PlayerController actually replicates the pitch for you but only GetBaseAimRotation() gives you replicated pitch whereas GetControlRotation() doesn't.

However, they compress it to a byte which can cause stuttering on simulated proxies due to over-compression, so make sure you use interpolation for sim proxies to resolve this:

// Sim proxies jitter a bit due to byte compression, so we add some interp
bSimulatedProxy = Character->GetLocalRole() == ROLE_SimulatedProxy;
if (bSimulatedProxy)
{
    AimOffsetYaw = FMath::FInterpConstantTo(PrevAimOffsetYaw, AimOffsetYaw, DeltaTime, 100.f);
    PointOffsetYaw = FMath::FInterpConstantTo(PrevPointOffsetYaw, PointOffsetYaw, DeltaTime, 100.f);
}

Don't try to replicate rotation manually to circumvent the byte compression, its used for good reason.

Note: The reason I'm caching every getter such as bSimulatedProxy = Character->GetLocalRole() == ROLE_SimulatedProxy; is because I do this in NativeUpdateAnimation for use in NativeThreadSafeUpdateAnimation (there are BP equivalents)

The mistake you're likely making is using GetMesh()->GetComponentRotation() instead of Character->GetActorRotation()

[smoky shell]

Its neither better or worse, depends on your needs and setup
I use the ik bones that come standard with UE5 manny for my prone IK, but the pelvis and chest don't have these so I added controls

[haughty lance]

I'm pretty surprised that, when exporting an armature to FBX using armature_nodetype='ROOT' from Blender, Unreal does not detect the Armature object as a bone. Someone else tried this?

[burnt dragon]

Interesting, are you using the Full body IK when setting the positions to the actual bones?

[dark crow]

Does anyone recommend a good tutorial or documentation on where/how I can get/create a character model for my project?

[fathom portal]

Any tips on how to make this idle animation more...alive? https://i.gyazo.com/6e36be37435831ececf63b764c1f739c.gif

[jolly hatch]

In control rig How would I control the the Body_ctrl up & down from the Head Ik ctrl up and down, Tried here but If I move the head vertically the body control does not move.. I want to keep the refereance pose distance between the head and body ctrl the same

[sturdy cradle]

Is possible to have offset/distance between parent/child bones ?

Or they need to be always attached

[smoky shell]

Yep

[smoky shell]

Make it longer, like 600 frames (you can just loop it multiple times)
Add a few subtle weight shifts later in the animation
Vary the 'breathing' or whatever he's doing throughout
Maybe drop his shoulders a little and relax the hands, he looks quite rigid

[fathom portal]

Bold assumption that its a male.

[smoky shell]

I don't think it has feelings

[fathom portal]

Oh they do

you can tell from their face.

really hope I learn how to animate a 2D face soon....

[lusty spindle]

is this rigging technique viable for UE? https://vimeo.com/388830109

[limber flax]

Does anyone have a model with eye bones?
I'm exporting my model from blender and I do my best to rotate the bones into the same orientation as Manny, but I noticed Manny doesn't have eye bones. should I try to follow the neck orientation?
I'm currently trying to set this bone location from Euler angles and I'm noticing that the X and Y seem to affect each other heavily, so my guess is that because of the mismatch in orientation they are gimbal locking

[misty dagger]

no clue how to fix this. works perfectly fine in blender

mesh has weight painting too...

[rugged sorrel]

Does anyone know why my character animations from Blender show up like this after importing them to unreal? This is driving me insane haha

[celest vector]

He needs to export the animation only. If it has a mesh with it it will attempt to create the assets that go with it. Once you've imported the mesh you can just assign the skeleton that was created to your animation files You're importing.

[celest vector]

Just use sockets???

[storm musk]

hey there im trying to edit the ALS
im adding a sword Draw & Sheathe
it done by using anim montages but the issue is the character have to stop to play them
so i tried to make the anim montages play only in the upperbuddy but its still the same

[limber flax]

What is the difference/advantage of that over bones? 😮

[celest vector]

Sockets can be parented to any bone and any mesh can be assigned to them.
From there some nifty stuff can be done in blueprint like having the eyes always look at a target.

[limber flax]

can bones not look at/point at a target?
It definitely sounds handy, but now I'm left wondering why people use bones at all.... bones for things that are all part of the same mesh? Sockets for separate meshes that are attached or something?

[celest vector]

Because bones are used for IK/FK solvers, they have their place and uses, but for small things that "attach" to a mesh sometimes a socket or virtual bone is preferable, especially if the skeleton doesn't have the bones you need.

You can easily attach a socket and place it without worrying about effecting the rest of the skeleton.

https://youtu.be/bKO_nVGKgLA?si=B68Jg_bLSbUPAoSB

Basic overview

[smoky shell]

Can't be bothered watching it but UE5 Manny already uses corrective bones for deformations

[smoky shell]

Sockets have no advantage over bones other than convenience. They are commonly misused by programmers who don't understand the art/animation side. It is a common theme; they create an inventory system using sockets for sheathes/holding weapons and then request an animation and realize the animator has no access to sockets in their 3D software. Trying to convert spaces to 3D package can be awfully tedious. I made a tool that converts sockets into bones instead.

Bones can do anything sockets can, the only reason sockets exist is because they can be added in the editor

[misty dagger]

@smoky shell Can i have one question?
You seem quite experienced with animation in UE and Lyra, i want to ask: how many days it would take you to implement entire Lyra animation system from scratch, from inherit classes to all the wraping technique, all the detail, assuming no asset required, only the logic system.
I want to do that myself, and i want to know how long a more experienced person would take to do that, so i can set my goals. Thank you!

[smoky shell]

I don't really understand the question, because if you just want Lyra's you can use it as-is.
Are you:

• Porting to C++
• Changing to Fast Path only
• Fixing any features that aren't implemented adequately
• Implementing other features

[misty dagger]

I want to have Lyra animation system but i want to do it myself for the learning purpose.

For the future developing purpose as well, feel like it's better to have a system that you understand, so you can easily upgrade it.

[smoky shell]

That's a good idea. I will forego answering your question though, it doesn't seem to have a point 😄

[misty dagger]

I am a solo dev for a while now, and most of time time it feel like going through a dark dungeon, losing the concept of time, of day and night, of week and month. Every single plan that i made is based of a very vague assuming of how long could i do it, and a 7-days plan could cost as much as 30 days, sometimes for reasonable reason, but most of the time is because i don't put enough pressure on myself. That is why i want to know what is the timeline of more experienced devs, so i can tell myself if i am doing it right, or wrong.

[limber flax]

Admittedly my main desire to avoid sockets is because I had all this working fine purely based on a bone animation system in unity, and I'd like to port it at least as close as possible to as is before I start overhauling anything or doing anything "crazy"

[smoky shell]

I don't think using an experienced dev as a benchmark is reasonable towards yourself. But if its something to strive to, I can rebuild Lyra from scratch in C++ with fast-path only in 3x 8 hour days.

[smoky shell]

No need to use sockets, they are a convenience, not a necessity

[limber flax]

idk... this sounds kind of weird to me no offense...
A big thing that a lot of developers struggle with myself included and it sounds like you as well, is estimation...
i.e. How much time/effort will it take to do X thing.
I think on one level you can definitely strive to improve and become better at just doing work faster but that's also how a lot of people burn out super quickly at least in industry...
I think it's more reasonable to approach problems you don't understand or have never done before with a "you don't know what you don't know" attitude, and then as you become more familiar with the work, you will be able to accurately assess and size things better...
and then you will also become faster at it because you are more familiar with it and have naturally improved.
I don't really know if there's any way to just force yourself to magically learn more or do more work faster.

If you were an artist (and in a sense you are) creating a one of a kind work for the first time, you can't just magically make yourself do art faster anymore than you can just magically build a building faster imo.
Things take time and a lot of that time is learning more about that thing the less you are familiar with it.

[misty dagger]

It depends.. on each individual. I understand myself, and i feel like i do have a way to magically learn faster, i just need a goal

https://tenor.com/view/emma-langevin-langevin-emma-tahg-tom-and-harrison-gifs-gif-20215519

[misty dagger]

thank you bro

[smoky shell]

Its probably just ADHD

[misty dagger]

we also have normal ADHD and Michael Scofield ADHD

[limber flax]

That still sounds like a trap long term...
I get the whole like

Nothing forces you to make something work better than when you can't afford to fail
but long term that strategy will still probably wear you out. It's better to plan and pace yourself long term imo
just my unwarranted advice q.q

[smoky shell]

I think its fine. You do what works for you personally. Everyone is different

[misty dagger]

I had so much long term motivation that now i seek short term ones

[limber flax]

fair enough

[noble epoch]

hey guys

I can't find right category about chaos cloth,,, is there somebody can help me,,?!

[amber wave]

guys why is animation class telling me this ? I selected bone

deleted other 2 and still, rotator is set

[smoky shell]

Probably #chaos-physics but its not a common topic there :/

[smoky shell]

Double check that warning
The "components" its saying you haven't selected are translation/rotation/scale, the dropdowns will be set to ignore, you need to set at least one to do something otherwise the node is pointless

[amber wave]

i had to set ignore 2 left but thx

[noble epoch]

Thank you so much!

[amber wave]

this is updated every tick? do we know?

[hard cedar]

Hello Everyboy, I`m working on a big school project, its a big mechanical sky city. When i finished the model and rig and imported it with a test animation in Unreal Engine 5, the chains of the 4 propellors where screwed up.
Im not sure where the problem is. I think its the rig in Maya, but ik can also have something to do with the export settings in Maya or something with the import setting in Unreal. Any idea????

How it looks in Maya (How it should look)

How it looks in Unreal Engine 5

[dusk tendon]

maybe it's the axis when exporting in Blender i know you have to set Z axis up and X axis as Forward

[cunning locust]

heya, is it possible to get the enhanced input in the animation blueprint, so i dont have to add an extra variable for the name of the ability?

[dark crow]

I am trying to retarget some animations. I select to retarget manny and then I create a animation blueprint but I can only use the animations if I create a anim blueprint for quinn

[velvet knoll]

fr tho that model is IMPRESSIVE

how long did it take u to make?

[smoky shell]

How did you rig the chains, are they just animated bones
I wonder if the compression is dropping some frames, or LODing is removing some bones

Set force min lod to 0 and see

[dark crow]

I have a blendspace that has idle, walk, jog, run. When moving from idle to walk the feet are a little wonky. And then when going from a run to sprint it is like an instant change and noticeable and not natural. Does anyone know what I should be looking into so that I can smooth this out?

[simple grotto]

does anyone have experience authoring custom character rigs for use with the Physics Control component? I could use some help / advice. Things work somewhat but there are some aspects that I am fairly confused about

[blazing saffron]

hi! anyone here familiar with Character creator 4? wondering if its possible to make the clothing and accessories customizable within the game in UE5 once i export the FBX there?

[fiery ice]

When I walk with my character I the way he blends to the walking animation isnt consistant, the way he takes his first step is random. how do i fix this

[oak raft]

https://youtu.be/0bwpFksQJec?si=8HbKpNQqEJtU5XJl
Does anyone know why the legs aren't translating as they should be in the video? The ue5 mannequin can't have the same wide stance in the animations when I use montages

[magic hull]

Anyone know what I need to put in here to make sure this video loops ? It seems like having "loop" checkbox enabled in media player is not enoug h

[velvet knoll]

how do I fix imported bone transform is different from original error?

or like

what are the common causes/solutions for it

[dusk tendon]

👋🏽 I'm trying to add some animations for my character turning on a bike, The tutorial says : GetActorRotation, but in my case it doesnt work, how can i get the rotation from Try Get Pawn Owner? or how should i approach this?

[slender prairie]

Hey guys does anyone know the best way to modify a certain animation procedurally and only in certain parts as well?

I'm trying to make a reload system for an FPS game project and I'm trying to modify the reload animation that I have with code so that the left haend finds the clip and follows it procedurally, rather than creating new animations for each different gun type e.g. rifle,

I was suggested before to look into a state tree and I was able to set it up to play the reload animation in it's own state but now I'm struggling with how to approach getting the left hand to go to the ClipSocket on the gun while taking the clip out and putting it back in during the reload animation and was hoping for maybe some suggestions?

here's the task that handles playing the reload animation

if I don't update LHSocket Location back to ForegripSocket before I finish the task the left hand will stay on the clip so the update of LHSocket Location to ClipSocket before the animation is registered but the animation itself completely ignores it

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/841346146319728700/1160777588675981312/2023-10-09_04-14-43.mp4?ex=6535e55f&is=6523705f&hm=671a672be0a20ef343a8a7a7ea129a71f3f8703186f5d198b8686a95ac7f5575&

[wicked forge]

Does retargeting animations from one skeleton to another always involve creating a new asset?

nvm maybe I should learn to google: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.2/en-US/runtime-ik-retargeting-in-unreal-engine/

[vernal rain]

I vaguely recall there was some Epic demo project or something with a character that had animations for holding a gun and stuff like that - anyone recall where that was or if it even existed?

Just need some placeholders for my test project

Oh- maybe it's the animation starter pack... but of course they haven't updated it so it would let me install that for my 5.3 project 🤔

Nevermind, you actually can bypass that limit, the UI is just super confusing for it

[misty dagger]

Why Lyra uses this shit? Instead of access to the property Velocity on CMC? It returns the same value but without 4x nodes in the graph

[toxic maple]

Hey, this is why Scrum and sprints have worked so well for companies, nothing wrong with that. As a solo developer, you are responsible for planning your long term strategy but also breaking it up into a roadmap of milestones and then breaking those up into sprint goals, if it helps you plan and motivate yourself.

[misty dagger]

i am not sure if you can apply company techniques into solo dev case though. It's very different

[toxic maple]

You get to pick and choose what works for you, I think in this case having short, medium, and long term goals fits both types of development very well. As you said, you're looking for nearer-term milestones to set as intermediate targets for yourself. I think it's a good plan.

[slender prairie]

Anyone? xDD

[dark crow]

Does anyone know what I can do to stop this animation from moving inside of the capsule?

[hard cedar]

thanks! Ive been working on it for 4 weeks now

[dusk tendon]

did u fix the rotations?

[hard cedar]

@dusk tendon , Coudnt get it working, so to save a lot of headaches, I removed the chains an made a other mechanical system

[tranquil lark]

Wait - you can?

I thought I remember being able to, but never really delved further

[vernal rain]

At least on the animation pack - 1. click on add to project, 2. check "show all projects" 3. click on the incompatible project 4. on the very bottom in the select version box choose a version the asset supports

it's a weird set of steps you have to do but it seems to work :P

[smoky shell]

Its completely useless for anything other than blending dying animations with ragdoll, because it only simulates in world space and cannot simulate relative to the root bone / component

[smoky shell]

Because accessing game thread props in worker threads isn't good
The update method is for retrieving props in game thread, then you do your computations in worker threads (thread safe update)
Lyra is a bit of a mess in some regards, it doesn't even fast path, but that part is correct

[fresh adder]

How you would suggest making this simple walk animation smoother?

Is there some tool to stretch to add frames to it and bake new keyframes?

[oblique gate]

Does anyone know why this happens and what I can do to fix it? Theres like a dip in the model when blending between this animation pack's idle state to the running state.

[spiral hazel]

Does any know a tutorial where or how I can add first person viewmodels to my game like csgo/tf2 where there is seperate first person viewmodel to the models that others see

[simple grotto]

I have a character with a bunch of tendrils / tentacles that I want to have animated but also react to the environment. That's what I'm using it for and that part is working nicely.

The confusion was around an animation that moved the root of the skeleton - that only worked when including the root bone but that in turn broke my other animation. I have fixed it by setting the spine to be kinematic and only the tentacles and the head be simulated.

to your point about it only working in WS: you can also have it simulate in Parent Space, wouldn't that be what you mean by relative to component?

[smoky shell]

to your point about it only working in WS: you can also have it simulate in Parent Space, wouldn't that be what you mean by relative to component?

With a character, typically their movement is based on their capsule. If its simulating in world space, then the character will lag behind the capsule. You would think that setting it to parent space would make it simulate in component space, but it doesn't. Maybe I just set it up wrong - I didn't spend tons of time on it. Even if I did something similar to you, setting only the arms to simulate perhaps, the arms would still be lagging behind the capsule which might look good for tentacles but not arms.

[simple grotto]

Oh alright I misunderstood what you meant by component space then. I thought you meant that as "joint space" but if I understand correctly now you were referring to the character capsule as the origin of component space

interestingly that's also the issue I ran into. Either my entire character was lagging behind the capsule which looked and played very badly or animations would break. I have it set up in a way now where that doesn't happen but it also means I can't simulate the whole character. But the effect with the tentacles is really nice so I'm willing to live with that small tradeoff

I have spent a bit of time trying to get it to work but I'm not very experienced with animations and rigs. would be interested in hearing if anyone has gotten this to work nicely as I might very well be doing something wrong

[smoky shell]

Its not the first time Epic have failed to foresee this use-case, I made a (now very outdated) plugin when they did that previously
https://github.com/Vaei/SpringBone

I didn't spend enough time to see if I could do it with this one.

[simple grotto]

cool gonna have a look

the community page linked on the github is private btw

[smoky shell]

That's because they took the old forums away

[simple grotto]

oh yeah

F

[smoky shell]

I basically added component space simulation to their Spring Controller anim graph node

So it could be used with characters

Its a bit mind boggling to see them have the exact same oversight with this component since it seems to target characters, I'm not sure what they were focusing on - sequencer?

[subtle shore]

hello!

Is there an easy way to delay my character animation from mixamo

i don't want it to start right when i play my scene

I want it to delay like 10 seconds

[chilly maple]

I have recently endeavoured into creating animations in blender, to then import them into ue5.3. The main problem I am running into is that as soon as I apply the animation to the character bp the SK mesh is in, the SK mesh becomes really really tiny. I have triple checked that everything looks good in blender, so I am currently a little lost.

The tiny green dot in the image is the SK mesh in the pawn bp.

[chilly maple]

Ah, the solution was to rename the "armature" object in blender to something else. Now the SK mesh gets imported at the correct scale 🥳

[normal olive]

why does my mesh act like bones too when i importet from blender?

[velvet sparrow]

You don't want them to be in the same hierarchy as the bones. Unparent them and bind them to the bones instead.

[normal olive]

how do I bind them?

[velvet sparrow]

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+skinning+tutorial

[odd token]

Thank you for all the info you've posted regarding inertialization issues. Couldn't figure out what was going on but your info is ✨ gold ✨

It looks like I was running into both the issues you described and until now I only knew of Epic saying something along the lines of 'too many calls for inertialization in a short time frame can lead to snapping'
Your specific use cases/causes make this a lot less vague (and provide possible solutions 👀 🫶 ).
Was curious if you had a link to anywhere (forums/udn/social media?) where Epic said they'd expose the properties for IgnoreDeficits and Max Pose Snapshots in UE5.4?

[normal olive]

the tutorial I learned riggig from told me to parent the mesh to the spesific bones that control that part of the mesh. i click on the mesh then the armature then go in pose mode and select the bone I want to parent the mesh to clcik ctrl p and bone. is that not correct?

[velvet sparrow]

Not if you want it to work in Unreal. ;)

[outer karma]

Hi

Um im having a problem with the aim offset to look down and up

the animation is like snapping and not being smooth

with using the idle animation

This only happens when I create this aim offset, generally not

The animation is like snapping in 1 sec earlier

[normal olive]

Ah ok 👍🏻

[normal olive]

Anyone know what can be wrong here?

Trying to make an IK rig work

Rigged in UE5

[rare birch]

Does anyone know the solution to make my character's rotation to follow the animation that is being played? with root motion or without

Is there a way to Extract the rotation information from the animation and update the character's rotation accordingly?

[smoky shell]

I talked to the epic dev responsible for the inertialization node privately, we went through the issues and that was the conclusion. I'm not 100% on it being 5.4, but am 100% on the changes

[shrewd phoenix]

Hello everyone! I am doing virtual production with a metahuman. And I encountered an issue I hope you guys can guide me through since I am not an expert with Unreal. I want to be able to switch the head of my metahuman with an event(on overlap). So far I created another face using mesh morpher. But I realized that the deformation takes place in the animation blue print. Is it possible to bake that to the skeletal mesh? Cuz I can't use 2 animation blueprints since each time I try there is an error inside the metahuman arkit function that states that the animation BP is not valid. I am using an overlap event inside the metahuman to set the skeletal mesh or the animation blue print. But we'll since the transformation is not in the skeletal mesh I can't use that method because it always returns the same basic mesh and l can use only one face_animBP so that doesn't work either. The other way I could achieve it is blending directly inside the animation graph between the morphed head and the regular head for it to work properly. Here is where my knowledge hits the wall. Since I need a way to bring the event information inside the animation graph of the face_anim BP. But the animation graph doesn't support events in that context. So I wonder if someone can point me in the right direction about how to get a variable that feeds on the data generated by an event. The metahuman is not a playable character I have it inside the scene just as an default metahuman actor class that receives the mocap data . So is not a character BP. I wonder if anyone would know how to tackle this issue or find a better way to solve it. May there is a way to bake the deformed head as a skeletal mesh. Or bringing event data inside an animation BP . Cheers!

[copper matrix]

Is blendspace editing just completely broken in 5.2? I can drop exactly 1 animation into a blend space and no more. I can't even do that much in lyra. Lyra gets unrelated warnings in the log. Nothing in my project

[misty dagger]

Why Lyra don't use Blendspaces? for basic locomotion

[smoky shell]

Because distance matching doesn't support blend spaces
And distance matching multiple animations and then blending together the result is computationally expensive
And orientation warping is not computationally expensive
In some cases it handles blending even better than blendspaces

[misty dagger]

Thanks

You seem very confident with animations, do you recommend following the approach that uses Lyra?

[unkempt cradle]

Can anyone help why my character floats when crouched? I feel like I copied the exact bones from both IK rigs. But when they crouch it floats above the floor

So i figured out that if i unmap the pelvis in the chainmapping in the Retargeter my character no longer floats.... why is that? Wouldnt matching the pelvis put the pelvis bone where it should be? Im confused

[celest vector]

Thought I might ask incase anyone has come across this issue before.
I created a procedural foot placement rig and it works fine with the exception of when I incorporate it into the animation blueprint it overrides the base animation. I can set the alpha to .5 to get some of that animation back, but would prefer it be additive.
Anyone have an issue with this before?

[dim tapir]

Has anybody here tried implementing orientation warping with blend spaces, I get it to semi work, but I get issues where the backwards running animation starts bugging out, slightly. I am looking to make something akin to the Paragon locomotion system, but having issues. If anybody that has worked on a similiar system is able, I would love to get some input

[distant dagger]

HelloHello!
Does anybody know if it is possible to merge or bake layers inside of a level sequence?
Like, multiple levels of animation on a control rig, but I want to simplify that down to one layer so I only have one set of keys moving forward.

[dark crow]

Is it bad to have fully procedural animated characters in a game? I am thinking in terms of processing time/power.

[whole current]

What makes an animation compatible with a skeleton? I’m sorry if this is a silly question but I imported an animation (.fbx) and tried to import that for an existing skeleton in my project but it gave me an error and didn’t really specify why I can’t use that animation on that skeleton. Are animations made specifically for certain skeletons or what makes an animation incompatible with certain skeletons?

[whole current]

And also how would I use an animation for any skeleton in my project?

[dusk tendon]

Your skeleton defines how your character's body parts are organized. This includes bones for the head, arms, legs, and so on. Animations are created to match this specific structure. If you try to put an animation designed for one skeleton onto a completely different skeleton, the body parts won't line up correctly. It's like trying to put a puzzle piece in the wrong place - it just won't fit.

Not every animation can go on every skeleton because each character may have a unique structure, joint placement, size, and proportions. Imagine your body, and the skeleton of a smol baby, now put that skeleton of that baby inside your body, even if you are both human (and lets asume same gender), the baby skeleton inside your body wont work... hope that makes some sense 😁

[dusk tendon]

Depending on your UE version, this is a good one I like to follow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84ROixEK3c

[whole current]

That makes a lot of sense, thank you very much for explaining and providing a video I can check out!

[odd token]

Ah, no wonder I couldn't find anything about that 😅
Using IgnoreDeficit seemed to fix the majority of my issues btw. Unsure what performance impact increasing max pose snapshots would have so will avoid that if not crucial.
Btw, seems like there's some interesting alternative Inertialization node called Dead Blending available as well. Might be of interest to you https://x.com/anorangeduck/status/1711758390710378838

[smoky shell]

Yes, its the modern standard
But it has requirements and can take time. All animations that aren't idles need to have root motion to extract data from. And processing these animations for this data via anim modifiers can be time consuming. I was able to automate all of it in my own locomotion system but that's a ton of work itself. So it depends what your goal is.

[smoky shell]

The dev was surprised that increasing max snapshots did anything But it does
He actually recommended Dead Blending as a drop-in replacement for Inertialization, its meant to simply be better, but I'm developing my system in 5.1 for maximum compatibility so can't upgrade just yet

[flat sluice]

Is it possible to feed an animation into control rig and then modify it from there?

I am trying to do the equivalent of a blendspace for aiming a rifle, but I don't have poses for aiming up/down/left/right, and I need it to aim in the exact desired direction so that the gun can hit the desired targets

If I had the blendspace working for aiming up/down/left/right, I don't know the math to have it aim in the right direction - whereas in control rig I already have that figured out

[opal thistle]

I can set crouched height but I cant set crouched width. how can I set it?

[flat sluice]

Is there a way to save the current state of a skeletal mesh in animbp to a pose asset? I am trying to create a blendspace and I am trying to leverage the IK from animbp

[smoky shell]

That's literally what the 'control rig' anim graph node does, it passes the pose into the control rig for the control rig to modify it, then outputs the modified pose

[smoky shell]

You can use the 'record' feature to get an animation, then if you want a pose you can take it from the resulting animation

[smoky shell]

This is what I mean

[verbal parrot]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoljP3MAuLs Not to bad, just starting with animations

[somber light]

heyo

How can i play a skeletal mesh animation on button press and when pressing again reverse it? It's for a skeletal mesh component in a pawn blueprint

right now i am doing this

[smoky shell]

Try using a different node to play it and setting play rate to -1, I haven't tested this tho, so I don't know if its supported
If it doesn't work try setting play rate before telling it to play, if possible, you might be able to do that with your existing node

[somber light]

the play rate is set inside the animation sequence

[smoky shell]

Did you even try? 😄

[somber light]

well i did and like the first time I tried it didn't animate

it prints the string at the end after the animation time, yes. But it doesn't animate actually

like visually

[smoky shell]

OK, so what if you set the play rate like I did there
And what if you duplicate the animation and set play rate to -1 in the editor

[somber light]

the second option you mentioned is what i did before which didn't work

and about the first one i don't know really how you planned on connecting the rate of the set play rate node with the play montae play rate

[somber light]

the problem here is not only that it's not reversing. It's not animating at all

[smoky shell]

Doesn't this provide the solution? https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/play-animation-in-reverse/397235/2
This one, basically

And what if you duplicate the animation and set play rate to -1 in the editor

This too
https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/aeptf5/reversing_an_fbx_animation/?rdt=63980

[smoky shell]

With this, you will probably need to set the 'starting position' to the end of the animation
You can Get Play Length from the montage

[somber light]

look at this ss i sent. Here the top animation is a duplicated version of the bottom one just with play rate set to -1 in editor

[somber light]

but it's not even playing first to reverse it afterwards

[smoky shell]

???

You're not meant to do anything afterwards

[somber light]

like with the montage node it's not playing at all

[smoky shell]

Yes

Because you're playing in reverse but start time is 0

[somber light]

neither opening nor closing the roof

no the first press is not in reverse

[smoky shell]

If its starting at 0 then its starting at the end of the animation if you're reversing

[somber light]

the first press opens the roof

after it is opened i can press again and then only it plays the reversed animation

...which closes the roof again

[smoky shell]

Well, you have at least 2 solutions that are said to work, I think you're misunderstanding them or implementing incorrectly

[somber light]

these are from 2017 first of all

[smoky shell]

Yes

[somber light]

second of all it might be that I am implementing them incorrectly, that's why i am providing screenshots because I don't understand why it's not working xD

[smoky shell]

I haven't seen a screenshot of this

You also need to remove most of your logic and isolate it down to the bare minimum for testing purposes

[somber light]

but we shouldn't focus on the reverse animation if the actual one which opens the roof is not playing in the first place. How is it supposed to close the roof if it's already closed

[smoky shell]

Its an animation, it will play either way

[somber light]

yea ik, but the reverse one is more complex so we should fix the actual one first or get back to the "play animation" node

[somber light]

i can promise you that it won't play the reverse one even then if we didn't fix the fundemental problem beforehand

[smoky shell]

I tested it, it works fine

Plays forward then in reverse

[somber light]

maybe it's different here because it's a pawn bp i am working on and not a character one?

[smoky shell]

Nope.

[somber light]

did you set anything up in animation bp

[smoky shell]

Its skeletal mesh, not character

Nothing other than the slot it plays the montage on

[somber light]

this is all my animation bp

like entirely

[smoky shell]

You need to add the slot its playing the montage on

[somber light]

well then that's the problem apparently xD

LET'S GO okay

now we made a good step, it's animating

now just some fine tuning

give me 2 min i will let you know

[smoky shell]

One thing you will possibly want to do is handle changing while its already animating

So it can change direction before completion

[somber light]

ok so now i have it like that

but it behaves kinda... weird

i will show you

[smoky shell]

Here is the logic if you want to reverse it in-place

Make sure to set blending to inertialization and not standard blend

[somber light]

what do you mean by in place?

[smoky shell]

Look what happens if you "interact" with your roof twice, before it finishes animating

[somber light]

rn it's closing instantly right after opening. It's always returning to it's default pose

[smoky shell]

Yeah, that's what the logic I just posted solves 😄

[somber light]

oh okay perfect!

[smoky shell]

Oh, wait, I get you

No sorry that's something else

[somber light]

look

[smoky shell]

Hold on

Basically, it's not pausing at the end of the montage

[somber light]

yes

[smoky shell]

One moment, this will need to be handled in anim graph

[somber light]

no problem, thanks for your help man, I really appreciate it

[smoky shell]

@somber light I haven't tested this, its psuedo code more or less, because I don't have a setup to test it with

• Take the anim graph its using and connect a state machine to the slot node you added for the montage to work
• Set it's Max Transitions Per Frame to 1, this shouldn't matter much but I don't understand why it isn't the default (not shown via screenshots)
• Add Open & Closed states
• Add Sequence Evaluator to your open and closed states, set explicit time to 0.0 for Open
• Make a property MontagePlayLength and assign it to the explicit time for Closed
• Add transitions between Open and Closed then make a property IsOpen and use it to drive the state change
• Set transition time to 0.0 because the montage should be masking this regardless

Now what you have remaining to do is set the MontagePlayLength and IsOpen properties. The "correct" way is to have your anim graph grab it from your Pawn. You could grab the anim instance from your mesh and cast it then set it directly if you really want (not recommended)
I've provided an example for this in the final screenshot. None of this has been tested, and I anticipate a couple of issues, you'll need to show videos if/when they arise.

[somber light]

alright i will try this out asap

[somber light]

straight away a question. How shall i connect the state machine if i still have the other nodes?

[smoky shell]

You'll need to insert a Local to Component but it should do that automatically IIRC

[somber light]

yea it did alright

[somber light]

what shall the explicit time for closed be?

[smoky shell]

Its in one of the screenshots

[somber light]

both sequence evaluators are showing errors

oh lol my bad

forgot to put in the animation

[somber light]

did you give an example for a not recommended way in your final screenshot lol?

hmm well

[somber light]

I could send you this vid again basically

nothing changed about the behaviour really

[smoky shell]

Nope

Post what you did there

[somber light]

you mean of the car?

or the code

i copied your steps

[smoky shell]

Read the comments I put

You need to get the montage from your vehicle, get its play length, and also its open/close state

Also you should do better than the print node I used for error checking 😄

[somber light]

i changed the uh-oh to ups

that's enough brain power for 1 am xD

[somber light]

thats all just in the pawn bp?

[smoky shell]

Yes, your pawn BP should be tracking whether its open/closed and it should have a property to assign the montage that gets played to

[smoky shell]

The montage you have here, make it a variable instead
And then you already have "Opened Roof" which you can use to set "Is Open"

[somber light]

same problem still

btw it's spamming ups all the time

so i guess something is going wrong with the validation xD

maybe i need to make the casting differently than you because yours is a character bp and mine is a pawn bp

[smoky shell]

You need to disconnect it from update and see if its occurring on initialize

[somber light]

it is

tried it out

[smoky shell]

OK so when the anim bp initializes the pawn isn't valid

[somber light]

no wait i will try it out again, the editor is really buggy rn

[smoky shell]

Do this instead

Did you hot reload or something

[somber light]

what is hot reloading

[smoky shell]

You'll have to google that

[somber light]

no i usually stop the simulation

oh no the initialization works fine apparently

but it went through it like 5 times

so it printed the upper string like 5 times

to be prescise 7 times

[smoky shell]

Don't worry about that. It'll trigger in the editor as well as PIE world

[flat sluice]

Ty so much 🙂

[smoky shell]

Oh heck yes, this is in the "Forward Looking" roadmap so not on the timeline yet, but I've been expecting this
Soon we wont even need 3D software...
There's a whole suite of animation authoring tools planned it seems

[young plover]

When doing an animation do you use a camera rail or do you pilot the camera and set key frames? With the first one it's easier to have a constant speed, while I find the second option easier to set up (piloting the camera with wasd, setting the orientation, and adding a key to the transform track)

[flat sluice]

why is it that my transform (modify) bone node that is setting a fixed rotation stops being applied when I set the skeletal mesh's Collision Enabled property to enabled?

[limber jasper]

Animation graph of a person that doesnt want to pay $170 dolar on procedural tentacles plugin lol (its not working properly)

cw tw: spaghet

[summer bramble]

So, I know with UE5 we can author animations in engine now. Is there a simpler way of authoring walk cycles tho? There doesnt seem to be an easy way of doing it other than manually, which wont loop as well.

[dusk tendon]

👋🏽 Anyone know a method on how to create Vibration on meshes inside Sequencer?
The same as you would use CameraShake for instance, but for non-camera objects. Can't find much on the net about it, maybe someone has a good idea would love to hear it 🙂

[somber light]

Btw it still didn't change. It still goes back to default

[weary gull]

Hey, so, I working with metahuman characters on the mannequin skeleton, and the retargeting works pretty ok, except that the weapons are held too high as they follow the animation (and I assume they would have to, to mkae sure they fit the weapons). So, are there tutorials somewhere which describe ways of modifiying the ik bones. Specifically I want to lower them, so it looks more natural on characters with other dimensions.

[worthy latch]

Hi folk! I want to know how I can crossfade between two animations in a montage. They say that I have to use it in a blendspace, but is it a must?

[proven depot]

Hey guys, I'm trying to make a control rig for a gun, but I'm having an issue setting the transform of controls. I use the set transform bone node and just connect the control's transform to it, however the bone and control's locations get desync and glitchy when I move it too far away from the initial position, as shown in the video. Does anyone know a fix for this? Thanks in advance!

[flat sluice]

How do I rename nodes in Control Rig?

[storm musk]

F2

[gentle apex]

Hello everyone

what im doing wrong ?

it doesnt launch the animation?

[storm musk]

hey there im trying to blend the upper and the lower buddy
but its not blending and when the anim montage play the lower part isn't doing the movement and just plays the anim montage for all the buddy

[smoky shell]

Do you have an anim blueprint assigned with the corresponding montage slot setup?

[gentle apex]

this?

im in "UE5 general" trying to find help with some other people but i still have my problem

[smoky shell]

Your video is so blurry I can't even see the nodes, but it looks like double transforms, a common novice rigging issue, in the case of control rig it typically means that you are modifying something not based on the input and based on the current instead so you're getting i=i+y instead of i=x+y

[smoky shell]

Yes, is the montage set to DefaultSlot

Oh, I must be blind, you haven't connected a skeletal mesh component

[gentle apex]

to where ?

[smoky shell]

I just immediately jumped to the most common cause of this issue 😄

[gentle apex]

i replace it with " Play montage anim " instead

[smoky shell]

You just need to tell it which skeletal mesh to play the anim on 😛

Also check your output log to see if there is a warning, it might be giving one about the skeleton being incompatible

[gentle apex]

the animation is specialy made for this skeleton

[smoky shell]

Yes, but nonetheless, check the output log if its still not playing after you assign a mesh

[boreal eagle]

Just opened a project I haven't touched in a couple months, and getting some crashes. Does anyone have any insight on why I repeatedly get this error when trying to double click an Animation Sequence in the Content Browser?

[flat sluice]

Does Control Rig's backward solve not run in real time? does it only run when you bake an animation to a control rig?

I am trying to run an animation in real time and modify some aspects procedurally with control rig

omg nvm it works,. I just had alpha set to 0 on my ctrl rig node lmao

actually the bones being set in the forward solve all appear to be in their initial non-moving state, but all bones not being affected in the forward solve are following the animation

hmm makes me wonder, in backwards solve I am setting the control transforms to the bone transforms....is that not being set in real time?

ah looks like I need to take the logic I have in forward solve and place it in the beginning of backwards solve

[smoky shell]

You won't be able to find the answer to that with that information
You need more
Which means at minimum editor symbols/source and crash reporter to get a full stack trace
Either way the animation is probably corrupt and won't be saved

But it might be something the animation references instead, can't tell without the trace

[boreal eagle]

happens on a brand new project as well so I'm beginning to think it's larger issue. I'm going to try a full reinstall

[smoky shell]

Oh, then yeah

[gentle apex]

If while im doing the " Layered Blend Per Bone " But the tutorial show i have to set the bone to the Spine so only the upper body part is moving, but my skeleton doenst have spine, what should i do? thanks

[smoky shell]

Assign the bone where you want the blending to start from, for example if a skeleton has:

• Pelvis
• Spine_01
• Spine_02
• Spine_03

And you assign Spine_01 with a Blend Depth of 2, then it will blend partially into each bone below and including Spine_01, which means Pelvis gets nothing and nothing below Pelvis that isn't below Spine_01 gets anything either, thus blending away the legs and pelvis entirely. Normally Pelvis is not included because you can't control the blend direction - legs or spine (so it goes both up and down), thus the spine is used instead of pelvis.

The purpose of this is to create a falloff for nicer results. The formula Epic use is 1.f/((float)BranchFilter.BlendDepth) which can be simplified to 1/BlendDepth, so if you have depth of 2 then you get 0.5 and they add together (depth + 1) * 0.5. Therefore Spine_01 gets blended in with a 0.5 weight, and Spine_02 gets blended in with a weight of 1.

I used 2 as a simpler example, but 3 is a pretty reasonable blend depth for most cases to provide slightly more falloff.

Knowing this, you should be able to determine which is the appropriate bone to start your blending from.

If you're still unsure, post a screenshot of your character's skeleton

This isn't important to you at all, but their formula kind of sucks, you can get nicer falloff doing it other ways 😄

[gentle apex]

The thing is i dont have spine at all, it means there is hierarchy between legs/arms/or head

[smoky shell]

I'll need to see the skeleton

[gentle apex]

Im not on my computer anymore but its the one i sent you my project

[smoky shell]

I can't help you if you're not at your computer anyway, so feel free to ping me with a screenshot when you're back

[gentle apex]

Sure it was about if you get curious lol
2am here i gonnz sleep
Thanks à lot again for your help and see you later

[proven depot]

oh yeah sorry idk why the video got so blurry when I uploaded it to discord, it is just a set transform node that is getting the transform of the control

[proven depot]

here's a beter quality version hopefully

ok, so I think I understand what you are saying the issue is, but how can I fix it? I don't really know how to get the "x" value

[flat sluice]

is control rig just absolutely buggy for anyone else on 5.2?

[deep crown]

Hey I have a quick question. Im having a difficult time trying to figure out how to import animations properly. Is retargeting animations generally difficult?

[gleaming gyro]

Looking for some feedback. Feel free to critique

[gleaming gyro]

The animation above was entirely done with control rig and sequencer in 5.2

[deep crown]

Damn that is pretty good

[gleaming gyro]

No. Where are your animations coming from? If it's mixamo to UE5 you need to convert the anim. Also here's a retargetting vid I used for other stuff. https://youtu.be/DnHxgXTi0aw?si=b_IVCt37jfXx6bWB

[deep crown]

What can be causing the animation to play differently than how it shows in the retargeter?

[flat sluice]

very nice 🙂

[near willow]

Hello! What is the best automated way to animate face in Unreal for the game that have a lot of dialogue lines? Im not looking for perfect solution but at least decent with not much work. It must be handle by 1 or 2 animators that dont have a lot of experience with Unreal. Im able to rigg and animate stuff, create blendshapes but I have no idea about entire workflow-system around dialogue system-automatic face animation for smaller project (not AA/AAA). Realistic / semi-stylized graphic. I would be happy to achive close-similar result to Starfield game where characters have not that great face anims but it still do the job.

[vernal rain]

What's the correct way to turn off animations for a skeletal mesh? I'm basically ragdolling a character, but its animation BP keeps playing which seems to cause it to twitch certain bones, so looking to turn that off but I don't see any obvious way of going about it

[weak orchid]

Hi, is there a way to get get the axis/axes of bones in control rig?

[limber flax]

Is there a way to add IK hints to FABRIK? Or do I need to use a different IK or something like control rig for this? I noticed the arms here are looking quite robotic.
I'd like to be able to add a suggestion/target location that pulls the elbows down.

[outer garden]

Is there a way to get the controllers of a control rig to show through the mesh of the characters, much like how Allright Rig handles it. Right now, you must use an oversized shape so it can be outside the mesh of the character.

[void saddle]

Is there anyone working professionnaly as a rigger for games ou here? I have some question about mesh prepping for games rigging

[weak orchid]

@outer gardenin your level viewport go to animation tab ( shift + 8 in 5.3) and tick "Show Controls as Overlay"

[outer garden]

Awesome, thanks!

[limber flax]

I guess to answer my own question I think the answer is no
My guess is that because FABRIK can be used for a chain of potentially multiple joints there's no way to provide a hint for all of them, but the two bone IK has a joint target location which seems to be functioning how I want

[flat sluice]

Does control rig crash less in 5.3? I am at my wits end in 5.2. It crashes when I use aim math. When I click on anything in the details panel for a node (such as debug), it deselects the node. When I select multiple nodes and try to move them, it only moves the last node I selected.

It only crashes when I compile & when I have an instance in a PIE session being previewed

[mortal granite]

so im creating a layered animation system using linked anim layers, I have a base anim blueprint which handles the main locomotion states, and separate anim blueprints with linked anim layers to handle overlay states for weapons, animation states, etc.

Is there a way to transition or blend linked anim layers when they are linked or unlinked? its really jerky at the moment when I swap between layers

[dawn sail]

Is there a way to bulk create and name notify tracks in an animation? I have to create and name hundreads of them and it's long and painful

[mortal granite]

instead of creating and naming each one, you can create a new blueprint class under AnimNotify and name it to your liking, it will then show up in the add notify menu!

then you wont have to name them by hand each time

[full crag]

Anyone know what happened to 'Search & Replace' in RIG graph?

[dawn sail]

Oh I was not talking about the notify itself, but the track, I already have named notifies that I can add, luckily!

[mortal granite]

oh in that case im not sure, I believe you may be able to make custom scripts for doing that kind of thing if its something that can be automated, but ive personally not done it before

[dawn sail]

Okay, thank you!
Our programmers are way too busy for that rn, and I never scripted in unreal so I guess I'll continue doing it by hand :p

[limber flax]

for IK bones, do people usually just make a bunch of bones hanging out off their armature in their modelling software?
I think I'll need FK and IK bones which I can control the location of from my blueprint so that I can position my character's hands and wrists properly... I'm just not sure how to go about this I guess...

In some cases like the Two Bone IK node I can use a vector and it will move parts of my arm to it, but I notice that the ability to directly drive the rotation the end bone should trying to achieve seems somewhat lost. More specifically I'm noticing weird twisting purely at the wrist of my character instead of a more natural twist up the forearm of my character/centered at the elbow.
I'm hoping FK can help with something like this, but I noticed I need bones for it, not just vectors.

[smoky shell]

Just look at UE5 Manny and do the same

[limber flax]

That's not bad advice. 😮
I notice in the case of Manny however he only has IK bones... so what about FK bones? or is the actual end bone itself usually what drives the FK in something like the IK Retargeting node?

[smoky shell]

I often mask the layer change with a montage that uses inertialization to blend

[smoky shell]

His skeleton itself are the FK bones

[limber flax]

I see... I think that makes sense

so does this end up looking something like this? Where I have to set the FK bone position from a blueprint.... Retarget my IK bones to the FK bones...
and then Two bone IK? my Shoulder - Elbow - Wrist chain to the target location?
Does hand IK retargetting actually set the rotation in this case, or what exactly does it do?

[full crag]

Question for rigging experts - When- why would you use a Backward Solve?

[flat sluice]

for the life of me I can not figure out how to add an execution context pin on the return node of a control rig function

also there is no way to delete a variable?!?!

seriously wtf am I crazy

[mortal granite]

is there a way to contain the equip and unequip anim montages within the linked layer? ive been trying to find the best way to contain related animations within the linked anim layer blueprint instead of cross contaminating them.

like what would be the best way to trigger those montages?

[smoky shell]

Don't quite know what that means. If you have an unarmed layer and a holding rifle layer you would play equip rifle montage using inertialization for blending (because the initial pose will be lost standard blending can't work) and set the anim layer

[fierce idol]

I'm trying to retarget a sliding animation from mixamo, I already used blender to add a root bone to the mixamo character and am trying to IK retarget. The chains map fine except for the arms, for some reason they're completely out of whack. I tried creating smaller retarget chains to see if any specific bone was the issue but it's just all the arm bones. What could be going on here and how do I fix it?

[gleaming gyro]

I would recommend just converting the mixamo anim using the tool instead of adding the bone in blender. Something about the roots being all wacky. You can YouTube "convert mixamo anims to UE5"

[deep crown]

What can be causing the animation to play differently than how it shows in the retargeter?

[vapid quartz]

Is root motion in Unreal dependent on framerate? I have a vertical root motion animation that doesn't go as high if the frame rate is half.
Is there a setting in Maya when exporting animations to make them framerate independent or is it just how unreal processes them?

[gentle apex]

Hello everyone, i'm back with my problem
I have an animation " punch" and my animation " walk "
but you know.. when i punch it stop my walk animation
So i should do the " Layerd blend per Bone " thing

BUT

My problem is, my character has no SPINE, so there is no hierarchy between legs/arms blabla
so it doesnt work..
any idea how can i solve this? thanks !

[storm musk]

hey there i need some help with setting up my animations
im making a combo system and its working fine but i get a glitch in the anim montages
which is i have anim notify for resetting the state of my attacks and others for saving them so now if i play one anim montage but something interrupts it like doing left hand attack or maybe change the to other movement state it wont reset so how can i check if im in attack state but no animations playing for like 5s and then it should reset the state

[light river]

Has anyone gotten UE2Rigify to work with two characters in a blender scene?

[flat sluice]

How can I blend two animations together where every bone under X is playing animation 1 fully, and every bone under Y is playing animation 2 fully? Layered blend per bone cant play both sequences to their full alpha

[smoky shell]

If you want help again, post a screenshot showing the skeleton hierarchy, need to see this whole thing

[opaque fern]

How do i play a anim montage in the actual bp for the character but make it ignor this bone blend thingy bc it plays the arm for anim i want only 1 animation to not have that lock

I need to play the kick animation you can imagine why it dont work considering the lock for anims in the anim bp is for arm only and kicking is ya know for your leg...

[timber badger]

Need help, I'm trying to import a single frame fbx animation which is basically just a pose, with morph targets for facial expressions and fixing joint deformations, but I couldn't import the morph.
It seems to only import the morph as curves if there are actual change in values. It worked fine in other animations that actually moves

[gentle apex]

Hello, sorry it was late for me im in Europe haha
thanks for your answer, i since found solution, its not perfect but it does the job for my learning

this is my skeleton

and i did this

So i set it on each top leg and it works, i dont understand exactly HOW but it does lol

[limber flax]

Can someone please tell me what magic setting or IK setup I have to use to stop my wrists from doing this?
I set the wrist bone position and location, and have then tried the two bone IK, because I'd really like an elbow hint,
But I've also tried FABRIK, and even tried the full body IK in control rig. They all seem to suffer from this problem to varying degrees.
I'd prefer to somehow distribute this twist through the IK chain, or more ideally adjust how much of the twist goes where, and probably put more of it into the elbow joint as I think that would make this look more natural

There's even an "allow twist" option which I have tried enabling and disabling but it looks like it affects literally nothing

[limber flax]

Does your modelling program have a weight painting mode you can look at?
Normally you can look through the bones and see like a heatmap, and you can judge the painting from there

I'm not sure how good the tools inside unreal itself are tbh....
If it's anything like the cloth paint thing I tried earlier it probably leaves something less than to be desired

tis possible...
That's why I like the heatmap view blender offers, because it lets you see how much of what movement belongs to which nearby bone...
Blender also has a mode where you can select individual vertices and set the weights directly... so you could try to manually apply a gradient across those bones. I'm not sure what unreal offers internal tbh, as I've never used it for this

So in the screenshot I showed the red parts are the parts which are 100% owned by each respective bone, the blue is the part completely unaffected by the bone, and the green to yellow is the part with partial ownership between both bones...
So there's slight overlap between the bones and it's not just 100% one or the other

Not sure if that helps x.x

I think it might help more if you showed what kind of artifacts you are getting, or showed what your painted heatmap looks like

[median shard]

hey guys! Hi all! Need help with Modular character. Connecting an asset. Who can help? Add me as a friend, I will show you through the viewport what the problem is.

[timber summit]

is it possible to have a montage play on different slots depending on a variable? I'm working on a dialogue system where you can specify a montage to play during the dialogue. I have have a system where NPC's can sit down. Ideally, I would like the montage to play full body when stood up and play on upper body if sat down. Is this something that can be done or would it need to be two montages?

[misty dagger]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TQmHmZ-UKg

[shut locust]

I rigged a model of a sawn off shotgun following this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Ci8UjvTsQ&t=569s
tutorial. It works in blender but when I try to import it to unreal engine 5.2 I have 2 problems.

1st. I always tries to import as a static mesh vs a skeletal mesh.

2nd. If it try to tick the skeletal mesh box and import the entire program dies and I have to manually restart it through task manager.

plz help (there is no place for armature so i thought animation would be seconf best opyion)

[obsidian sigil]

Are vive trackers gonna be the best low-budget mocap solution?

[full crag]

Question for any animation experts.
How do you animate the property of just a single bone of a Skeletal Mesh in Sequencer?
I need to animate just the rotation value of the pilot_visor1 bone in the attached, but have no idea how to expose this bone in Sequencer.

[smoky shell]

For future reference, adding spine bones even if they have no weights is still good exactly for these kinds of scenarios 👍

[smoky shell]

Don't think so. But I didn't actually try either. I often have at least an upper body only and full body duplicate of most montages for this reason. Keep in mind montages don't have much data because they only reference the sequence, the top file here is the animation and the selected file is the montage, so its not a big problem.

Manny has a lot going on in his skeleton:

• thigh_l, calf_l, foot_l etc that make up the main structure of the limb (main bones)
• thigh_twist_01_l etc, calf_twist_01_l etc that are the twist bones
• thigh_bck_l, thigh_in_l etc that are corrective bones used to preserve volume during deformation that you can't get entirely from weighting alone (in fact, its quicker than good weighting and overall looks better, when time is a factor)

In the screenshot is everything under the thigh_l, there's a lot there.

Weight painting shouldn't be underestimated either, its it's own skillset and can take years to master like anything else, though thats more true for film than it is for games, games get away with a lot here. Corrective bones are a bit complex to setup too, and you'll really have to delve into Manny to understand how it works if you're going down that path.

[smoky shell]

To start with, disconnect literally everything other than the IK and see if it goes away
And if it doesn't go away, leave it disconnected to isolate the problem area, sometimes it can result from two different areas and you'll miss it if you fix it in one area and not the other

[timber summit]

Thanks for the reply. I thought that might have been the case. I was hoping to not have to specify two montages in my dialogue system. I guess I'll have to get creative lol.

[clever gorge]

Why when I retarget animation of ALSv4 to metahuman resulting animation have root motion, what I mean is that: the character moves forward but root bone not changes it's position. In original animation character do not moves forward... How to prevent it? Please help!

[vernal halo]

Can anyone help with this??

[proven depot]

Hey guys, for some reason when I edit the curves for the x on my control rig, it goes at an angle, does anyone know why this might be happening?

idk why the video needs to be downloaded but here's a gif that hopefully works

wtf happened to the colors lol

[storm harness]

looks okay in full screen, discord just does some crazy compression on the previews

[potent sorrel]

I cannot for the life of me figure out this root animation stuff. I've watched some videos and looked up some things, I cannot figure it out. Did I mess up when rigging the character? What am I doing wrong here?

[potent sorrel]

Nevermind guys, I'm an idiot

[mortal girder]

Any idea why a character would disappear when playing an animation in the preview

https://gyazo.com/9f5b651eb05aa28fb7da76b2684af6ad

The code won't even run on compile, I'm confused.

[limber flax]

this is actually a really good point/idea....
Without any IK at all I cant move that wrist... but I've noticed that with my current IK setup... I think I'm having some issue caused by mismatched translation and rotation spaces.... I notice that if I use component space for the initial transform/modify... and then bone space for the IK I actually get reasonable looking wrist rotations and stuff, but I have to severely modify the vector for the wrist location to something I wouldn't expect... Even in component space
anything else results in nonsensical fully locked limbs... so my guess is I'm probably misunderstanding something quite a bit somewhere

[limber flax]

My rotation even in bone space seems to happening around some external pivot... is there a way to/set just the rotation of the actual bone itself?
as if I were rotating the bone from the root?

[limber flax]

I messed with all that crap for a long time and no combination of what I tried didn't seem to have it's own issues, so finally I just stuck to doing all rotations in component space... all translations in component space... and then just manually stealing some of the x axis rotation from the wrist and distributing it between the two bones after the IK is complete

[vernal halo]

seems like a code error - I had a blueprint error that was causing it

[burnt dragon]

help- i dont understand why this happens with full body IK (the arm is supposed to bend more, and the shoulders and body are supposed to move more 'together'?

[fringe ledge]

Hello, I am trying to use the snapper tool with an FK control rig to lock the head bone in place. It works in the level sequencer, the bone is locked in place but its not baked down. Is there anything I need to do to solve this?

[echo ibex]

When I tried to rotate my character with Transform Modify Bone in AnimBP at root bone, its only getting initial rotation. When I increase rotation degree in runtime it doesn't effect. Any idea?

[potent sorrel]

When I first imported my character model and skeletal mesh to unreal, I used mixamo and got a walk, run, and jump going. I did not have the foresight to add a root bone before bringing them in. I decided to export the skeleton to blender to add the root bone at 00,00,00 and parent the skeleton to it. Im now making my own attack animations for it. Is there a way to add this new skeleton to my original character without completely breaking what Ive done so far, or do I need to start completely over with the new root skeleton?

[small dirge]

Helloooooooooooo !!!

I having an issue with replication and threadsafe ABP.

I need to replicate this value.

Its easy to do an rpc but threadsafe won't allow me to cast in the character blueprint which annoy me to use the replicated variable here.

Any workarround ?

[amber wave]

guys I need question i have propeller on my plane and i am moving with it via animations i want make it looke more like fully rotating propeller 😄 it looks very slow any ideas ? i want make it more blury maybe ,here is video how it looks and also how I made animation rotation percentage is from 0 to 100 when engine is fully started and current speed is speed of plane

[potent sorrel]

I feel like one of you guys asking your question, as complicated as they are, probably could have at least tried to help me with my question. At least have pointed me in the right direction....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxXCC3435zY&t=21s This solved my problem, if anyone else sees this has the same problem.

[somber cosmos]

Hello, I'm trying to make animations for the ALSv4 mannequin does anyone know how should I add the ik_hand_root bone to the control rig?

[pure pasture]

Hello, I'm experiencing an issue with skin weights in Unreal Engine, but they seem to function correctly in Maya 2020. Can anyone help me troubleshoot this problem?

[dry totem]

Hello! I’m trying to replace this node in the AnimGraph and can’t find it. Any idea how to call this node?

[pure pasture]

I am basically having this same issue

https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/zxu01u/the_mesh_doesnt_follow_the_skeleton_when_using/

[sinful lava]

Hi, I am making a new custom character for my first Unreal Engine 5.3 game and I am using Mixamo characters and animations as my base. However every character I import to Blender, edit and then export and then import to UE has these oddities with the legs. It seems to be some kind of animation unalignment, as when I turn animations off the legs are straight. Any idea how to fix this? In game they look like the legs are a bit bent and there is a hard edge at the knee joint. It kinda looks like it is a jenga tower and someone karate-chopped the knee and pushed one brick slightly forward. If I use a character straight from Mixamo, no issues. But through Blender and the knee problem.

[ripe gazelle]

I need to explore various methods of applying weapon weight to swing speed. higher weight = lower speed.

Initially, whats the best place to change the animation speeds? Im looking at play rate basis and play rate.

[violet hearth]

Hi everyone! Where is the best way to execute animation monage of an enemy? I'm running it from BTT but this one limits me as I need to have different attack animation for enemies. would be nice to execute them from enemy blueprint, but in this case I dont now how to finish the task by animation notify

if store an animation montage in a variable in the Blackboard, set the variable in an enemy blueprint and play this animation from the var in the BTT ?

[mint raven]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/832399451758657547/1163422966265163858/Unreal_Engine_2023.10.16-11.16.mp4?ex=653f8512&is=652d1012&hm=c51c5e4856d98f9997cdd367c47d2bc7caf97ffcd0903a4a8b5a2a7c7b9e28f1&
is there an fix for this backward glitchy animation

[misty dagger]

Any advice or tip for fix this? Default foot placement is working

But when the height is high this occurs

[stuck zenith]

whats the difference between these two? ApplyAdditive should be local (bone space) no? Additive anim must be set to "Local Space".
ApplyMeshSpace is in skeletal mesh space, which is the root bone space? Additive anim must be set to "Mesh Space".

In practice they don't look any different, both additive appear to be applied in mesh space. in other words Local Space additive anim with Apply Additive looks exactly the same as Mesh Space Additive with Apply Mesh Space Additive. Is this the intended behaviour?

[cyan mirage]

i have a problem my feet are fixed
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/628638005393096745/1163440126022660156/MyProject_-_Unreal_Editor_2023-10-16_13-35-13.mp4

But in the animation montage it moove normaly

[smoky shell]

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/aim-offset-in-unreal-engine/
Your use-case is probably too simple to see a difference, there is definitely one, and quite big

[stuck zenith]

I think my problem was misunderstanding between what Epic labeled "Local Space" and "Bone Space". I thought "Local Space" was the same as "Bone Space", but evidently "Local Space" is actually "Parent Bone Space"

[pure pasture]

Could be that tracing height is not high enough. Does the knee bend at all?

[pure pasture]

Have you enabled root motion?

[cyan mirage]

yes si have

[pure pasture]

Without the animation montage does your animation still stay in place?

[cyan mirage]

Yes

[pure pasture]

That most likely means that the root motion is not working correctly

[pure pasture]

Place it in the level

[pure pasture]

Look into this https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/root-motion-in-unreal-engine/#

[cyan mirage]

okkay thanks

[ripe gazelle]

is it possible to control playrate with a curve?

for an animation in a state?

[vernal halo]

yes

[vernal halo]

I think your animation's are overlapping - that's why its snapping. What I did was to declare a notify whenever the animation ends and created a reset in the Player/AI BP

[cyan mirage]

Do you have the the code bp for the reset ?

[edgy ivy]

Could anyone point me to a video about creating animations for unreal engine 5 with customer character models

All the video's I have found are for the manequin model

and have pre-existing animations

[tepid sundial]

What is the best/proper way to play animations on separate meshes simultaneously - for example with a weapon that has an animation when firing, I want to play a montage on both the character using the weapon, and the weapon itself. Does Unreal have some kind of native solution for this?

[tight basin]

Trying to set up motion matching, not sure I've set up the bones properly, animation is all over the place in testing. The feet seem 90* offset from the model on my Motion Database, anyone know how to sort it?

[clever gorge]

How do you use Unreal Insights for metahuman debugging? I have much of lagging during LODs changing but do not know how to find functions or problem where it happens.... Can someone tell me how to use Unreal Insights to find most time consuming function?

[copper matrix]

Is there a known issue in 5.2 with child ABPs and aim offsets? When I try to assign a new Blend space to my child blueprint, it doesn't seem to apply. Testing with a minimal setup, the LookAt AimOffset still uses the parent asset

Extremely minimal setup:

Seems I can workaround this by making the blendspace asset a variable and overriding that in the child

[sturdy dragon]

Got a question so I can start learning for next part of project: if I wanted to start learning the physics engine for learning how to implement physics into character animations (for example, hold right click and flick mouse to imitate a sword swing in the direction I swung) for the sort of thing I described: should I use blueprints or c++? I’m not sure how intensive physics based programming is on the engine but naturally want it to be optimized to start off with

[vernal halo]

yes - not specifically the code but I can show you how I fixed it

[vernal halo]

I would say it doesn't matter - depends on your personal preference. But I would use blueprint for effective flow. 😉

[vernal halo]

Hey let me know if u still need help

[vernal halo]

Do you want them by using blender or within inside unreal engine?

[vernal halo]

Yes Blending animations

Can you explain more in specific?

[hollow stone]

Why is this happening to my "turn in place" animation? I think some code is conflicting somewhere maybe? I have no clue and I'm just scratching my head

[vernal halo]

Is rootmotion enabled?

[hollow stone]

This is the logic that drives it

[hollow stone]

Yep

[vernal halo]

Did you declared a notify when the animation end?

[hollow stone]

What do you mean?

I haven't had to deal with notifies yet - but this issue wasn't happening to the person who's example I'm following, which is why I think some code elsewhere may be interfering

[vernal halo]

So, inside your animations create a new track and add a notify ("TurnEnd") or something and add the notify in the end and inside the BP call that and add a reset anim node

[vernal halo]

Oh... then recheck the code.. you might have missed something

[hollow stone]

Also, had rootmotion but not force root lock, now I'm forcing the behaviour is slightly different

Not correct, but different

[vernal halo]

I am not sure what tutorial you are following but I had the same issue with my animations and adding the notify was the solution for me

[hollow stone]

He turns, but in the wrong direction - and he doesn't seem happy about it 😂

[vernal halo]

I am pissed my project is crashing... I would have show you.. ufff

[teal magnet]

I added the IK system from the third person anim blueprint to my character and it all worked fine until they start attacking. the legs are staying in place kind of like what you would expect from the ik system but that makes my sword animations completly broken. Is there a fix for this? Not sure what the next steps are this is my first time messing around with an ik system really

[teal magnet]

i guess it appears the animations im using dont have the iks animated for the melee attacks is there a way to get the ik bones to just follow the foot bones that are animated?

[vernal halo]

add keyframes for the feet accordingly inside the animations

[teal magnet]

lmao thats what i figured out but i was really hoping a way to not have to keyframe the bones for all the animations i may look for some animations that have ik foot animations but would love to figure out an efficient way to retarget these ik bones in the animation

[teal magnet]

i was able to fix it by making new virtual ik bones and changing which bones the ik solver was looking at

[tepid sundial]

Er, how does blending animations work between multiple skeletal meshes, and indeed what does it even have to do with synchronizing animations between said components? Not sure that I understand..?

[ripe gazelle]

is there a non scripting method of making sequence play rate be based on a curve?

Or am i looking for the wrong solution?
I have an animation that i want to alter the speed of. I want to at specific places, playrate to be at a specific speed.

i also want this as a sequence agnostic solution so i prefer not to plot a curve of every animation.

the end game here is that i want my melee move set for charging, swinging, recover, etc etc to be affected by things like charge time, weapon weight and so forth. So i have states that play the corresponding movesets depending on whats equipped.

[slow wyvern]

what can i do here? when setting master pose it doesnt care about overrides for location,rotation on the meshes..

[ripe gazelle]

I do this on each skelmesh comp before i set the leader

[hard gorge]

Hi. There is animation "play rate", but is there any way to make animation to play time in seconds. Like if I have variable=1, animation plays 1s and if variable=2 then animation plays 2s.

[slow wyvern]

what is connected to new mesh and target there?

[ripe gazelle]

i suppose in your case the arms is leader and the rest are targets

but its complicated

i found out that i need to have one leader with the skeleton before adding more. so i do it in a sequence.

@slow wyvern

disregarding my data driven approach you should get an idea of how what is needed to compose a body from parts

i am not sure how to do it when the components already exist but im sure its straightforward

[slow wyvern]

but are all your meshes working on 0,0,0? or they need attachments

for exmaple this is mine at 0,0,0 lol

[ripe gazelle]

my meshes are skeleton meshes attached to the skeleton at the place they are supposed to

i guess the leader pose component acts as a method for the subsequent meshes to "know" where they are supposed to be

@slow wyvern
forexample the leg looks like this

[ripe gazelle]

play rate is the rate relative to 100% the animation is played in.

more or less speeds it up or slows it down

What you are asking about is either to define how long an animation should play or the the fps. Which is it?

[hard gorge]

How long the animation plays

[ripe gazelle]

can i ask why ?

[hard gorge]

I have spell casting animation and it would be cleaner for players to understand how long casting last. If it is modified by items.

[ripe gazelle]

why dont you just stop playing the animation with the state machine?

after cast is done

it shouldnt be different from lets say attacking. the attack is done when the animation is ended. But i can at any point interupt the attack.

[misty dagger]

LogPoseSearch: Error: UPoseSearchFeatureChannel_Position::BuildQuery - Failed because Pose History Node is missing.

Any advice to get working motion matching?

[misty dagger]

I get this error

[ripe gazelle]

Failed because Pose History Node is missing.

[ripe gazelle]

what does the blue note say ?

[misty dagger]

Experimental node

[hard gorge]

Not following you right now, but I will dig in to it..
I was thinking something like: Make cast animation 1s, and then control with variable how many times it will loop. Can you make animation loop like 1.5 times?

[ripe gazelle]

im more confused about why you arent exiting the animation when the casting is done

are you not using a state machine in the anim bp ?

@hard gorge
I would solve this with the character.
If the spell say cast: 2 seconds. I would set the active state to "casting" and in the animation blueprint i would play "casting".

i mean the problem you have is solved by some proper propagation 😄

[slow wyvern]

yea in my case it just disregards the attachment entirely..

[ripe gazelle]

im not sure whats happening. are you swapping in a new mesh?

i havent gotten that far yet but im sure down the line i need to refresh the whole chain of events.

[slow wyvern]

nah im just adding the torso part of the character

[hard gorge]

My casting animation (also attack anims) comes from anim montages. Have not done them from state machine. Also I kind a nooby and I try to make some kind of game while learning. But if i make casting from stat machine i will lose versatility to have different cast anims for different spells?

[ripe gazelle]

on the contrary. Organisiting animations in an animation blueprint with anim state machine is the data driven approach. Also the space you usually make varied and specific behaviours

@hard gorge
This is my state machine for melee, plays on the upper body.

inside a state. The sequence is picked from the character. so i have a different animation for every type of weapon

for your example however, just trying and learning by doing is fine.

But you still want to control your animations via what the character is doing. The character is casting for 2 seconds. Thus, an animation is playing for 2 seconds. Until casting stops. Because then another animation takes over.

no need to drive states with animations

[hard gorge]

Ty. lots of new info. i will look it up. Do you recommend some youtube/other tutorial?

[ripe gazelle]

not really. but dont stress it. its a journey to learn all this. Just google for the concepts and watch all the tutorials. Learn what they actually do. replicate.

[misty dagger]

Any advice to fix foot sliding in a run animation?

[normal olive]

Does anyone have the time to show me how I rig a crane arm in blender the correct way to import it in to UE5? I cant find a video on rigging a crane or shit like that om YT and then exporting to ue5 for it to get ik rigged

I can rig a crane in blender and get it to work there but Im having problems with UE5 when importing it

[wicked forge]

I've got two animations, one motion captured without root motion, and one with root motion. I want to transition between the two so after finishing the mocap anim, I move the capsule to where the skeletal mesh is to switch over to root motion

It kinda works but at the end of the mocap anim, the mesh first sweeps towards the capsule before moving, what causes this?

This is the logic that handles that transition

[vivid peak]

anyone know why this is happening?

[green jewel]

Anyone know why when I view the wings from the front I can see them but from most other angles they disapear?

[tight basin]

Hey thanks for the reply dude, sorry it was 2am my time when you responded. Yeah still keen to try and make it work if it can be done, but don't know if quadrapeds can be supported

[velvet sparrow]

I had a similar issue with a skeletal mesh that didn't have a physics asset, because Unreal appears to use them for frustum culling. So maybe look into that, or increase the asset's bound scale?

[dim geyser]

Hello, did anyone ever animated characters doing actions with guns? I need help.

[opaque fern]

How do i play this anim montage? it only plays for the right arm as i have it set like that in the anim graph but i dont want that. How do i make this anim ignor the anim blending thingy

[vivid peak]

Anyone knows why my IK golas dosnt work?

is ok, am just dumb

[south wagon]

I'm having some blend space issues, trying to currently set up a strafing system, but there's some jitter whenever I actually rotate my camera. Is there a way to patch this? I tried googling it, but it didn't produce any helpful results, maybe I just don't know the correct terms to search for.
(Pay attention to how the legs occasionally do a skip whenever I rotate my camera)

[vernal halo]

np... is all set now?

[vernal halo]

try adjusting speed...

[south wagon]

which speed

[smoky shell]

This is an engine bug
Tell me if this "resolves" it:

• Start moving forward + spinning camera
• Release a key that isn't bound to an input (so press it, then let go)

If the jitter goes away until you stop moving and start again, its an engine bug
Unless you have a different issue that I'm not seeing, your gif is choppy

Epic fixed this in 5.3, and I haven't been able to locate the commit that did it
Its actually the control rotation jittering

[tight basin]

No, kept trying but no matter what I do the foot bones are not in the correct place and animations are skipping. I will stay up tonight to await your reply, if you can spare the time to see if it can be made to work! I made a forum post with some more info on my setup

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/quadruped-support-for-motion-matching/1334623

[paper quest]

Has anyone ever used animated characters from axyzAnima in unreal engine?

[eternal mural]

Topic: Seamless transition of a metahuman character

Hi! I’d like to have my metahuman express 3 different facial expressions animated in one sequence. I want the animation to play in random order so the transition between those 3 animations have to be seamless. How would be some approaches to achieve this? any tutorial ideas? thanks!

[hushed zealot]

hey guys, needed help with metahuman skeletal mesh, i am trying to add procedural walking to it but the skeletal mesh for metahumans is not the whole asset, just part of hand and feet,, how can i fix this?

[vernal halo]

Alright let me know ... where are you stuck at

[nimble badge]

Hello folks, I would like to duplicate and modify the various animations used in Lyra, specifically for the purpose of creating "melee" versions of the animations. Easy part: duplicate, then modify with animation tracks in UE.

Less easy part: I would like to export these animations so that I can modify them in Cascadeur (instead of using UE anim tracks); however, it seems like no combination of export options will work correctly with Cascadeur. Always something about the animation is totally fuc*ed up.

Thoughts:

• I would just make all of the modifications in UE; however, there doesn't seem to be a way to copy anim tracks. As such, it would be A LOT of imprecise manual duplication of the changes.
• Maybe I should try to use a different animation tool (I normally use Blender &| Cascadeur).

Anyone have thoughts / experience to share on this front?

[tacit sorrel]

Kind of similar issue;
I want to edit animations in sequencer that are originally made for the mannequins, but when I try to load them into sequencer, their proportions get completely messed up, despite having the correct retarget source. Any quick fix for this outside of straight up baking the animation on the other skeleton with IK retargeting?

[zinc rampart]

Correct me if I'm wrong. Now that we can add bones inside UE, I can slap simple skeleton onto a mesh and then retarget mannequin to quickly have its animations working with that new skeletal mesh?

[tranquil lark]

Theoretically, yes.

[crystal rose]

Does anybody have any idea why my basic locomotion isn't working?

The other two locomotion states work just fine based off the same variables on their blend tree's I cant figure out why the simplest of the 3 blend spaces refuses to work.

As seems typical of today shadow play has also decided it's done working so you will have to take my word for it that it's just stuck in the idle state and I slide around until I pick up a weapon and transition into another blend tree

[brazen niche]

Does anyone know why my character won't change it's animation? I have it set like this: Bottom is idle, middle is walk, and top is run. Then, left side is turn-left, and right side is turn-right.
Then I have this piece of code in the animation blueprint to control the two variables. Hoever, the player character doesn't change animations no matter what.

[crystal rose]

Here is my halberd blend tree for instance which works fine

[crystal rose]

Your anim event graph seems over complicated I have mine setup like this which is working fine for 2/3 of my blend spaces

look at the highlighted section

I promoted the speed and direction variables so they can be referred to in the blend tree have you also done this?

[brazen niche]

Thanks for that, it does simplify a lot. I seemed to have found why my animation never changes. When printing out the current speed/direction, the direction never really changes? It only goes up to 40 or -40, while my blendspace requires it to be 180 to start moving backwards. Any reasons for this?

[crystal rose]

I'm not sure did you mix up horizontal and vertical?

[brazen niche]

I don't think so

[crystal rose]

Have you changed the animgraph blend tree to your new one?

The new blend space I mean

[brazen niche]

well, here is my locomotion for my animgram

and this controlls the bs

My character plays the idle and walking animation, but never changes it's directional animation

[crystal rose]

Are direction and speed the same variables you promoted in your event graph?

For example these set variables here did you create them by promoting the variable?

Promoting "Vector Length XY" into a new variable and naming it Move Speed or Speed in your case.

And for the direction promoting the variable coming off of calculate direction and renaming it Direction?

[torn parrot]

hey, i'm trying to add ik feet placement on a imported skeleton, and i'm seeing these ik bones that are on the manny rig, but i'm not sure how to replicate that on my own skeleton. does anyone know?

[brazen niche]

That's not exactly how I got them, but if I manually change the direction/speed value, it does have an effect on the animation

[crystal rose]

If you don't get them from promoting the variable I don't think it updates in real-time.

So in your blend tree it doesn't really matter what you call the Horizontal and Vertical but the floats for speed and direction in the animgraph have to derive from promoting as I mentioned above. Otherwise you have just created a disconnected float that isn't reading directly from the player characters inputs.

[crystal rose]

Just delete the set variables and remake them as I described and hopefully it should update

[crystal rose]

I think IK placement is tied in with the UE5 Mannequin not custom rigs unless you set this up after the fact most skeletons and animations you bring in won't work with IK's out of the box I don't think

[torn parrot]

i am trying to add the ik to the rig i currently have, that's why im asking how this piece is set up so i can copy it

[crystal rose]

I'm not sure but I'm guessing there will be some content out there somewhere if you search something along the lines of "Setting up IK's on custom rigs in UE5"

[torn parrot]

okay, i'll try another tutorial then

[brazen niche]

nope, nothing changed. I don't think the issue was the the variables weren't updating, as I printed them to the screen and they were updating, just not enough

[crystal rose]

Yeah sorry it's something I wondered myself as it looks much nicer in game with IK's but I haven't got around to it yet

[brazen niche]

if I pressed S, instead running the walk backward animation, it would just turn around and face the camera. This is due to the direction variable never going to 180, it only goes up to like 40 or so

[crystal rose]

The character won't walk backward holding S unless you have your character set up to use the cameras rotational yaw for direction

[crystal rose]

Without this ticked the character will function like a GTA character and you won't be able to strafe or walk backwards

[brazen niche]

Oh... It's working!

thanks a lot, that was quite a simple solution

[crystal rose]

🥳

[crystal rose]

I'm glad I could help!

[brazen niche]

:D

[zinc rampart]

I consider this a success 😂
Created skeletal mesh using Mannequin skeleton and adjusted to the mesh of the elf.
Does this look like only bone orientation issue? 🤔

[crystal rose]

I dunno what this looks like, only that I'll never sleep again...

[crystal rose]

Looks like a weight painting issue to me

[torn parrot]

looks like some verticies might not be bound as well

[crystal rose]

Weight Painting can be annoying but for most "Humanoid" models Blenders "Parent with automatic weights" when attaching the skeleton is normally good enough.

[zinc rampart]

you're welcome

the ankles are due to weighting to the ik bones. but everything else I think is messed up cause I think I pressed "Orient" on the bones :V

might need to redo and see what horror I create this time. will remember to tag you @crystal rose once I post it 🙃

[crystal rose]

Did you normalize the scale of your model before export?

Apply scale essentially so the scale is 1 in the details panel on blender

How are you setting it up did you export the unreal mannequin and then parent your mesh to it in blender?

[zinc rampart]

I downloaded this model and trying to rig it in UE

[crystal rose]

I've never rigged anything in unreal but if I were you I would export a UE5 mannequin and then parent your mesh to that in Blender using automatic weights then import it into unreal afterwards

[zinc rampart]

ye ye, I know. I'm just stubborn and want to do everything in UE. stubborn and stupid

[crystal rose]

It is impressive what you can do solely in unreal such as weight painting etc. but I think for rigging you would be better with specialty software like Blender or Maya etc.

This guy is really good for if you wanna get something done without any extra info tacked on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etXY2udjFls&ab_channel=RoyalSkies

[crystal rose]

The process will basically be exactly the same in Blender

[zinc rampart]

Thanks for that. Will go to blender if I fail at doing it in UE. Just trying to learn doing it all in one place, at least for such small scope and complexity.

[crystal rose]

Yeah if you don't know a little of Blender or Maya it can be very daunting but learning a bit of animation/modelling/coding/texture painting/material nodes etc. can go a long way.

Almost nobody is an expert on all these things and 90% of professionals just specialize in one aspect of game design for their role but having a little knowledge in all these area's has helped me understand the whole process much clearer, especially as a beginner

[crystal rose]

For example "face normals" determine which side of a flat object renders in game unless you apply a two sided texture. I learnt this when I first started modelling on Blender about 9 months ago.

But without this knowledge if I imported a model from elsewhere and one of the sides is invisible I would just be like

"Ah shit it's broke" and not have the slightest clue what to do about it

[zinc rampart]

I learned I need to use proper winding order for face culling about 10 years ago when I was playing with OpenGL 😉

I have (and want) lots to learn, but Blender is not on the list right now. I am an anti-artist, so anything I learn would be wasteful. mostly dead knowledge/skills

if I can stay within known environment, I will. and right now I am exploring whether that's possible for rigging

[crystal rose]

What is an anti-artist lol?

Do you mean you don't wanna commit to learning artistic software with AI encroaching in that space?

[zinc rampart]

I mean I won't do any meaningful modelling on my own

cause I can't imagine it

not that I hate artists or sth 🤣

[crystal rose]

Ah I get you haha

I'm not a natural artist myself most of my models are me using a reference to model from.

Do use mixamo?

Mixamo has a bunch of free animations and you can just drag an unrigged mesh in and set up a few points like the chin/groin etc and it rigs it for you with decent weight painting

[crystal rose]

That will then work fine with any animation you get from mixamo

[crystal rose]

https://youtu.be/0aOBefSBNqk?si=SKCEbOnkzgECCtlk&t=137

Here you can see how easy it is

[zinc rampart]

ok, this worked to get it rigged for mixamo. at least it seems so. though some time ago I was trying to do retargeting from mixamo to mannequin and that was a painful process. so I guess I'm stuck to mixamo animations unless that process was simplified

[crystal rose]

Yeah pretty much that is the major drawback of it but if you are just making a simple project it saves a ton of time

[zinc rampart]

by stuck I mean that I won't be able to use anything from UE marketplace that out of the box is made for the Mannequins

but still the mixamo library is rather extensive so unless I find something I really want to use from marketplace... 😄

but first let's see first if I can download and get it easily working in engine

[crystal rose]

I would download the T-Pose of your model first this is a pose option on Mixamo.

Then use that as your skeletal mesh reference in your project for any other animations you bring in.

Then if you change your mixamo avatar to something else you can always drag that T-Pose FBX back into the mixamo character selector to import more for that one specifically

[crystal rose]

What I do is if it's a simple NPC/Mob character I might use mixamo and then I use an UE5 skeleton mesh for my main character

[crystal rose]

If you want everything to work with the UE5 mannequin your best bet is like I mentioned earlier exporting the mannequin and then parenting your mesh to it with automatic weights in another program.

I've never used unreal's rigging so maybe you can achieve something similar just using that with a bit more research

[zinc rampart]

🤣

[crystal rose]

Lmao

When importing there is a box that says

"Force X to forward" or something along those lines check that

It's because in Mixamo Y is forward I thibk

think*

[zinc rampart]

I am laughing hard now and I am not posting those as "please help" 🤣

[crystal rose]

Haha maybe it's an issue with the models orientation then, or maybe he is just really sad haha?

[zinc rampart]

but some axis definitely got messed up in the translation

unchecked this

[crystal rose]

I had a similar issue when using mixamo earlier in the week for one if my mobs I think the Force X as forward fixed it but play with other import settings that mention "Transform"

[zinc rampart]

holy cow, it worked really well. look at those fingies!

[crystal rose]

Nice!

Now unreal just needs to add a Mixamo>Unreal 5 Mannequin retarget option and we will all be golden

[zinc rampart]

exactly

[icy goblet]

there are nice new tools coming in next version

https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/c/1278-skeletal-editor

[crystal rose]

Cool!

I haven't made anything other than humanoids myself really so I haven't had to put to much effort into my weight painting but it's good to know the tools are coming, by the time they come out I might be good enough to need it for something more complicated haha

[icy goblet]

there is also automated weight painting coming

[crystal rose]

Do you use Blender or Maya? would you say unreals rigging is comparable I always use Blender for my own models and stuff

[icy goblet]

the unreal tools will be on par if not better

[crystal rose]

Cool I might start looking into it then when that newer version is out.

It can be annoying jumping between different software's

[icy goblet]

5.3 already got many of the new tools

i think it has skeleton editing already

[crystal rose]

I have done vertex painting in unreal but only on a flag that I was using material nodes on to make it blow in the wind.

I am working through a dark souls combat course atm but once I have the functionality in my project I will need to do a lot more rigging/modelling stuff so I will definitely check out what unreal has to offer afterward

[icy goblet]

here is list of stuff that were added in 5.3
https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/tabs/88-unreal-engine-5-3

[icy goblet]

im making a little survival game together with a few friends

[crystal rose]

Nice!

Is it multiplayer?

[icy goblet]

yes

[crystal rose]

Cool I haven't tried anything multiplayer yet is it a lot more work?

[icy goblet]

not that much

but still kinda double the work

depends on scale i guess

[crystal rose]

I know you just basically have to tell the server whenever you update something but I imagine once you understand it then you just have to go through and check all the boxes

[icy goblet]

well the main problem is that im trying to make it using only blueprint, but that makes things a lot more complicated xD

[crystal rose]

Ah I see, I would probably struggle as well then as I am not a coder at all haha

I was thinking of making a racing game as my first multiplayer attempt whenever I get around to it in my unreal learning journey. It's actually nuts how few chill racing games there are to play with friends.

MarioKart > Forza > Racing Sims ..... thats about it haha

[icy goblet]

making a racing game isnt too hard, but when making an RPG with complex stats calculations and inventory system, u kinda cant avoid using c++ xD

[crystal rose]

I saw a tutorial for a multiplayer inventory system and it was like a 30 hour series haha

I still haven't started on an inventory system for my game. I'm kinda dreading it as it looks like one of the more convoluted systems to add even more so than melee combat

[icy goblet]

are u making single or multiplayer?

[crystal rose]

Just single player for this project

It's gonna be a sailing/monster hunter RPG

[icy goblet]

well making souls like combat is kinda hard imo xD

and its pretty heavy on animations (which is something i hate xD)

i decided to just go with skyrim-like combat for my game

[crystal rose]

Did you see the new free AI animation software?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrddPZmUHvE&ab_channel=GrantAbbitt

It looks pretty cracked for speeding up the workflow

Skyrim combat is perfect for a survival tbf

[crystal rose]

I got the ARPG combat asset pack and it has 500+ animations and 4 weapon types so most of the work is done for me for £20 an absolute bargain haha

They certainly aren't AAA anims but they are nice enough for a solo project

[zinc rampart]

ok this looks crazy

it's like IK on steroids

[crystal rose]

IKR kinda blew my mind too after attempting a little bit of animation myself in Blender that seems like a gift from god haha

[zinc rampart]

free to start, $360/yr after earning some bucks. seems reasonable

okay, with that, I might even try a bit more animation myself. I had video mocap in mind already, so that would enable me to add custom animations so I can design level how I feel cause then I can just make non-standard animation for problematic pieces (like custom obstacle)

[icy goblet]

i would wait for next engine update

https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/tabs/94-forward-looking

check here character & animation section

[zinc rampart]

oh, yes, the retargeting

but first I need to have animations, so I can start getting familiar with cascadeur now

[icy goblet]

indeed xD

but being able to make and change them in unreal engine will be a whole different experience 🙂

[zinc rampart]

I am already using skeleton creation/editing and skin weights

[icy goblet]

i wish i had time for diving into animations, but im learning c++ now xD

the new tools look really exciting though, maybe ill look into it when i get frustrated with c++ xD

[storm musk]

hey there
i got an issue with my jumping animations
i was trying to blend the lower and upper buddy for some of the animations and its working but whenever i jump the character legs just spins around and doesnt follow the jump start animations
even if disable the upper lower buddy blending
any clue why is or how to fix it ?

[vernal halo]

Can anyone tell me - how do I fix sprint system.

My character plays the sprint animation without going forward... I am using set max walk speed on input press method

[storm musk]

show your code

[vernal halo]

This is the logic I'm using currently

For animation bp - I am just using bool if < or > then transition

But when on play I press shift the speed increases but no forward movement

[storm musk]

did you try using the started pin

[vernal halo]

yup same issue

[storm musk]

okay one sec

[vernal halo]

just a heads up - I am not using forward vector in my anim bp is that something that's causing it?

[storm musk]

i dont think so your issue is your character isn't running

are you sure you setup the sprint speed variable

[vernal halo]

Basically.. it runs when i press (forward key + sprint) but when I only press sprint it plays the sprint animation in place

[storm musk]

if so try doing a print string after setting the speed and check for the current speed

[storm musk]

so i would like to see how you setup the anim bp

[storm musk]

so your not using blendspace

[vernal halo]

Nope

I'm using motion matching

[storm musk]

okay and you dont want the character to play the run anim if you hold the sprint key without the forward key right ?

[vernal halo]

Yes correct

I mean ... I want it to play the anim but it should move forward is all.

Its playing the animation but stays in place

[storm musk]

okay then you can check if vector length > 0 then play the sprint anims
you can do it in idle to walk

[vernal halo]

and where do i call that - from the chararacter movement component?

[storm musk]

i mean like this get the speed then check if you have movement or not in the animation

in event update in your event graph

[vernal halo]

I can't find the speed thou..

As I am using 2 different variables walk and sprint speed..

wht should I use

[storm musk]

this just for checking if you have any movement input and has nothing to do with the walk sprint speed variables

i can show you how to do it if you can join a vc and share you screen

[vernal halo]

Ah.. so can I just create a variable speed in the anim event graph

[storm musk]

it would be easer

[vernal halo]

sure thing

[distant dagger]

hey guys, question about animations. specifically control rigs

I need to know if there is any way to just. Grab a bone and rotate it with a gizmo in either the control rig editor OR the animation blueprint in 5.3

Alternatively can I show all bones in the animation mode viewport?

[storm musk]

?

[distant dagger]

Got it! I found the Debug preview

[vivid peak]

Hi, dose anyone have idea why when i set EnableRootMotion to true, the animation is still moving?

[keen apex]

@vivid peak you need to make sure you have a root bone it can fixate to 0,0,0

in the skeleton

[vivid peak]

i have a root bone

[keen apex]

also everyone here, ive added some custom animations to lyra but the weapon is rotated weirdly any resources i can read up on to understand why its doing this ?

[keen apex]

can you show me the skeleton ?

ill try and help

[vivid peak]

Am retargeting from mixamo, and in preview its works fine. But if i export the animation its starts moving

[keen apex]

are you using the mixamo converter ?

[vivid peak]

yep

[keen apex]

yeah it should work when you extract root motion

when you select that root boon can you show me the viewport ?

[vivid peak]

root boon?

[vivid peak]

like this?

[vivid peak]

the character wont stay on my root for some reason

[frozen relic]

is there any simple ways of exporting a skeletal mesh socket from blender to unreal? other than manually calculating offset and copying the values?

[vernal halo]

Can you explain more - what exactly you are trying to achieve?

[bronze fable]

Does anyone have experience with retargeting CC4 rigs? I have this curious issue where my clothing and body mesh use the exact same skeleton at the same scale, yet animations pull differently on them. If I retarget clothes specifically, everything runs great but the animation breaks the body mesh. If I retarget to the body, everything runs great but breaks the clothes mesh.

It looks like the pants from CC4 add new bones to the skeleton. These bones aren't accounted for in the IK or RTG because I don't know what I'm supposed to map them to.

I'm used to using the retargeter when all the bones match. I'm not 100% sure what to do in these situations where my target has extra bones.

Am I supposed to add extra chains to the IK rig of the source UE4 mannequin?

[vivid peak]

exacly what i sayd, i want it to stay on place

[zinc rampart]

did you check the EnableRootMotion?

[vivid peak]

yep

root is in place

mesh is not

[vernal halo]

did u create the anim in blender or imported from mixamo/somewhere?

[vivid peak]

mixamo

[vernal halo]

ahh did u check in place while exporting?

This

[vivid peak]

that one didnt have it

[vernal halo]

fixed?

[vivid peak]

nop

[vernal halo]

can you send me the link of the animation?

or just the name

[vivid peak]

https://www.mixamo.com/#/?page=1&query=stop+walk

[vernal halo]

Then you have to manually clean it up - open that animation in blender or other software and then delete the X, Y or Z according to ur needs it should do it

[vivid peak]

oooh

ok

[vernal halo]

try it and let me know if it still doesn't work

should be pretty straight forward

[hollow stone]

I'm having this error when I try to import FBX animations that should be targeting the same SK_Mannequin as my other animations

If I say "no", the imported animation is stretched and it imports 4 files rather than just one animation.

If I say "yes" it updates the skeleton for all my other animations and the imported animation is just T-posing.

This is the animation, if anyone wants to test it themselves

[pulsar ether]

Importing a 300mb fbx containing multiple animations then exporting them individually results in a total file size of almost 3 gigs, anyone know why this could be? The sample rate seems fine as well as the other settings

[vernal halo]

ooh.. wht's the frame rate?

[zinc rampart]

I'm a noob, but maybe all animations contain full mesh data, so the resulting size comes from its duplication?

[vernal halo]

This is just the fbx without animation

[pulsar ether]

60

[pulsar ether]

it's only the animation

[hollow stone]

If I import that FBX into unreal I'm able to see animations?

[vernal halo]

might me a glitch on my end let me retry

[novel blaze]

Trying To Build A FREE Mocap Plugin Using Control Rig, Live Link & Vive Trackers But This Keeps Happening! This Plugin is based off the MegaMocapVR Asset With Some Code Optimizations & Built In Modularity. Somehow The Tracker's Transform Is Breaking The Control Rig Control Transform! Any Ideas??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8HOraAgrMs

[hollow stone]

It only shows the animation if I click "no" on that 'Failed to Merge Bones' error

[vernal halo]

Did you made this animation in blender or grabbed online from somewhere?

[hollow stone]

I grabbed it from a tutorial series on YouTube

Nobody else seemed to be having issues

[vernal halo]

can you send me the tut link?

[hollow stone]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbUxWTcvpec

When I import it and I click "no" on the "failed to merge bones" error, I'm given these three assets (plus materials)

The animation sequence is super stretchy

And I only need the animation sequence anyway

[vernal halo]

It works for me on the same Ue4 manny but breaks for new Manny

I guess you have to retarget the anim

[hollow stone]

Is it because the lyra mannequin is different from the default third person mannequin?

I'm mostly using Lyra anims for now

[vernal halo]

No - Ue4 and Ue5 are slightly diff when it comes to custom animations I belive or that's what I have experienced..

[hollow stone]

It's just, I had a similar problem before when I tried to import the Lyra animations - they imported fine but didn't like the skeleton I was using (which was just the default SK_Mannequin from the third person template

When I migrated the animations and their skeleton over from the lyra project, they worked fine

[vernal halo]

its fixed for me

[hollow stone]

How did you fix?

[vernal halo]

Retarget

[hollow stone]

Wow you retargeted that fast - I haven't delved into retargeting yet

[vernal halo]

Works ??

[hollow stone]

It does import yes!

[vernal halo]

Awesome! 🙂

[hollow stone]

Would you be okay with fixing the Left turn as well?