animation

[naive mountain]

Everything should still work, at least in the times I see that message 900 times per day

[nimble torrent]

You generally want to import clothing meshes that have new bones as separate skeletons and then control them using the Copy Pose From Mesh node in an animation graph.

[nimble torrent]

Oh no.

I... fully expect that to cause you some shenanigans in the future.

[naive mountain]

Well i'm testing bone deletion so I expect it.

[glossy anchor]

this is all it pops out

[naive mountain]

scroll to the right - does it say which bones?

[glossy anchor]

no

[naive mountain]

damn yeah i just reproduced this. its not a bug

[glossy anchor]

i see a lot of them are greyd out

[naive mountain]

I simply deleted a bone from the boots, and this message auto pops up.

[glossy anchor]

i don.t really know what bones

[nimble torrent]

Oh gosh, you definitely don't want to be deleting random bones either.

[naive mountain]

I can help, let me look

[nimble torrent]

You really want to import clothing as a separate skeleton.

You don't want to adding tons of clothing bones to your main skeleton.

[naive mountain]

lmao no thank you. not what im doing either

[glossy anchor]

where to join to show you?

[naive mountain]

@glossy anchor what modifications did you make to the original metahuman base skel

[nimble torrent]

That's both messy, and dangerous, but you do you. I strongly recommend against importing clothing mesh bones into your main skeleton.

[glossy anchor]

nothing, just added an animation to the base and that was it

[naive mountain]

no1 mentioned that between me and marius

[naive mountain]

Well this message only pops up when bone modifications have been made to the Skeletal Mesh

can you reload the "good" project again?

or have you saved your project since this message

[nimble torrent]

Well, I mean:

Hello, i have a question, after one week i opened the project and i have this error The Skeleton metahuman_base_skel is missing bones that SkeletalMesh m_tal_nrw_shs_boots needs. They will be added now. Please save the Skeleton!, does somone know how to fix it? i had an animation on it

I'm not sure how I'd explain this as anything other than that: "The Skeleton metahuman_base_skel is missing bones that SkeletalMesh m_tal_nrw_shs_boots needs. They will be added now."

The base skeleton is missing bones, and now they're going to be added.

So that... that is what you're talking about.

[old falcon]

On that topic, how do you keep such stuff from overloading your main skeleton?
I have started adding "weapon attach" bones for sheathed weapons and the like.

[naive mountain]

the engine does it automatically though, it is not intent

[old falcon]

Better to work with leader pose instead?

[glossy anchor]

I did not saved, but that is the strange part, it worked with no issues, i closed the project, took a breack and when i oppened it to work again on it, this poped up

[nimble torrent]

100% yeah, or Copy Pose From Mesh.

[naive mountain]

typically this message appears when you delete a bone - but he did not - which is what we are trying to figure out

Marius, does your project work as usual? Is anything broken?

[nimble torrent]

I believe what they did instead was import a new mesh with additional bones, and assign it to the base skeleton rather than creating a new skeleton for their boots.

[glossy anchor]

it seems to be ok instead of this issue

[naive mountain]

Might not be a big issue if your project is working correctly. Adding a bone to the skeleton isn't a big deal at all if it's not weighted to any Skeletal Mesh vertices.

[nimble torrent]

I would consider weapon and attachment bones to be good things to include in your base skeleton. It's clothing specific bones that you generally want to have as separate skeletons.

[naive mountain]

and if you wanted to experiment - turn off auto-save & reimport your metahuman. assuming you did not modify the skeletal mesh at all - your animations would still work perfectly.

[glossy anchor]

last time when reimporting i had re redo a lot of thing like animations, resize, and the sequencet

r

[old falcon]

Gotcha. Makes sense considering everyone potentially can have weapons or props attached to those. But not everyone is going to wear a trench coat or whatever

[glossy anchor]

Eventually of u can show me how to do it without losing all the progress I had

[naive mountain]

in theory - if your skeletal mesh is exactly the same as when it was imported, you should be OK. buuut i'm guessing you did something somewhere that modified it and you just weren't sure. I'm sure you can just leave your project as is, as the message doesnt really have much concequence.

The Skeleton is just a hierarchical list of bones. The Skeletal Mesh has all the data. You can add hundreds of bones to the Skeleton with no consequence. It's when you weight those bones to vertices & animate - that you get performance concerns.

[naive mountain]

if youre still concerned you can explain in a simple way, the modification steps you did take post metahuman import

[glossy anchor]

I followed a tutorial, i imported the animation assigned to base animation

And then added to sequencer

Base skeleton

I used axis studio to export as fbx rhe animation

[naive mountain]

you imported an animation and assigned it as the base skeleton?

[glossy anchor]

yes, i can drop the tuttorial

if helps

[naive mountain]

pls

[glossy anchor]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJj9yUGTc4Q&ab_channel=SolomonJagwe

[naive mountain]

Well all you did was change the retargeting settings after importing the animation. Which isn't adding or removing any bones. Must be some weird reference issue which is why that message popped up. Do the messages keep coming or was it only once?

[glossy anchor]

Keeps poping up

[naive mountain]

clear message log - save project & reopen project, see if it pops up again

99% sure its harmless, but if the message keeps popping up - that would drive me crazy

[glossy anchor]

i will try it now, thanks!!

[naive mountain]

if you look online - apparently other users have the same issue. no literal bone modifications - yet the message appears.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/the-skeleton-hands-lo-skeleton-is-missing-bones-that-skeletalmesh-echo-lo-l-needs-they-will-be-added-now-please-save-the-skeleton/363380

[glossy anchor]

i redid the animation, now works

thabks!!

thanks!!

[sacred helm]

Guys, how do you solve the characters' fingers when you retarget unreal skeletal animations? They are deformed and I don't remember what I did to fix it.

[naive mountain]

Sometimes there's an extra finger bone or metacarpal bone period or you have your retargeting groups set up incorrectly

Or maybe you have an incorrect pose match between a pose and t pose

[serene fiber]

can someone explain to me how bone systems work when attached.
example: I have Full SK Manny skeleton and I add a weaponsocket for it. Weapon with skeletal mesh gets attached to it. Weapon has itself 2 sockets for the start and end (used for line trace by channel).

if I now use custom anim notify BP and access the weapon sockets, it wont worrk, even though the weapon is attached to the main character's mesh

so how would I exactly access those sockets on the weapon, given that weapon and character have their own separate skeletons, do they both have to have one single skeleton?

[old falcon]

How are you trying to access the weapon sockets?

[serene fiber]

Custom anim notify blueprint -> Received_NotifyTick(Override function) ->

GetSocketLocation(SceneComponent)

[old falcon]

But that MeshComp if not your weapon, it's your character right?
Your character's skeleton does not have these sockets, so those locations are 0,0,0. It doesn't recursively check every attached skeleton either.

I wouldn't recommend doing your tracing in an anim notify. You should instead call a function on your character, or better if you have GAS you can activate an ability to do it.

[serene fiber]

uh, I tried accessing the weapon sockets aswell. I do know that these are handsockets which I added later, but it doesnt matter (it doesnt draw even debug lines)

[old falcon]

Oh so those do exist on your character skeleton? Then the problem is that you're using a relative socket location to do a trace in world space

[serene fiber]

If for an example I had the starting socket from Hand (body socket) and end socket from weapon socket, It works, but it glitches (the start trace is somehow coming from near the player legs, but in 3D editor the socket is near the right hand

its like it doesnt want to access weapon socket

but i mean weapon has its own skeleton. maybe thats the issue?

[old falcon]

Those socket locations are probably something like (50, 30, 5) or so? Really small numbers. So the trace node is working in world space. It's doing the trace, but really close to your world origin and not relative to your character's position.

No, you have 2 issues there

1. You can't access your weapon's socket, which is solved by not using anim notifies for the trace

2. You're using relative socket locations for world space traces

[hollow moat]

Hi im trying to make a ads system and every time i try to ads it isnt in the right spot. (yes i tried changing all transform spaces)

[serene fiber]

if I dont use anim notify then whats the alternative. how would I trace at specific time of animation?

[old falcon]

You have not since you're still setting your camera boom's relative location from a component space socket from another mesh component

[old falcon]

I wouldn't recommend doing your tracing in an anim notify. You should instead call a function on your character, or better if you have GAS you can activate an ability to do it.

You can use an anim notify

Just don't trace there

[serene fiber]

ah ok

[old falcon]

Trace somewhere where you have access to your weapon for example

[serene fiber]

player blueprint.

https://tenor.com/view/tired-exhausted-bored-bordem-pmb-gif-23000955

[old falcon]

Also be wary that notifies are frame dependent. You'll get inconsistencies at low framerates

[serene fiber]

unreal engine programming in a nutshell, have coded for 8 hours and my brain isnt working properly lmao

ah ok, never knew that

[old falcon]

If you use a notify state that is!

[violet gazelle]

Does anyone know of any reasons why OnBecomeRelevant would not be called when re-entering a state? I'm mimicking the turn in place behaviour in Lyra, but when it comes to transitioning back to the turn in place rotation state from turn in place recovery, it endlessly transitions between the two states but never calls my OnBecomeRelevant function in the turn in place rotation state that would invalidate the transition into turn in place recovery.

[naive mountain]

well I am screwed lmao

[nimble torrent]

Is it possible that, if you never fully blend out of the state, it never stops being relevant?

And so it doesn't call 'On Become Relevant'?

On Become Relevant only triggers if it was completely off before being reactivated.

[violet gazelle]

It could be something along those lines, although I'm not entirely sure how best to ensure that it blends fully into in the second state before transitioning back. The behaviour from Lyra essentially splits a single animation across two states by controlling the animation time and reading curves to determine when the turn is complete, so that it knows to move to the recovery state whilst it enters the recovery portion of the turn animation.

[dark crow]

I am trying to change the rotation on the ik_hand_gun bone and then if I restart UE, it goes back to the original settings. Any way to fix this?

[nimble torrent]

I'm not sure how Lyra does it, but you can test to see if they're still relevant by plugging a print statement into 'On Update'.

On Update only gets called when the node is Relevant.

So if you see constant updates then you know that the problem is there.

[nimble torrent]

Where are you rotating it?

[dark crow]

On the skeleton

[nimble torrent]

Rotations on the skeleton are always transient. You can't do what you're trying to do.

If you want to change the rotation of the skeleton at runtime, you could use the animation graph or a control rig.

If you want to change the rotation of the skeleton definition you need to change the skeleton in your DCC and reimport it.

[dark crow]

Ohhh I am dumb. I was thinking it should change like a socket

[violet gazelle]

I think you're right and this is what is happening. Instead of printing from OnUpdate I'm setting a bool to true in OnBecomeRelevant and printing that. It is never actually updated, so it's definitely not entering OnBecomeRelevant where I'd expect it to do so.

The difference in what I'm doing is that I'm not using inertialization, so the blends are not fully blending across before they actually call the expected function. In this rewind debugger output I can see the point where my blends start failing (circled in red)

The equilvalent in Lrya looks like this, with interialization enabled

So it looks like there are complete state transitions between each phase on tick, without a blend between them (as that is handled by the intertialization), maybe?

[nimble torrent]

Yeah, inertialization fully cuts the animation when the blend starts. It stops evaluating relevant animations.

So that's what's going on. They're using inertialization which forces the animation into irrelevance, which lets them use the 'On Become Relevant' callback as a event.

[violet gazelle]

Is there a simple way to force a full blend before allowing re-evaluation of transitions in the case where inertialization isn't being used?

So that I can guarantee that OnBecomeRelevant will be called

[hollow moat]

So is this correct or am i way off because this doesnt work.

[nimble torrent]

Uhh... maybe? I don't know what you're using that event for. Could you use another event?

Or could you use inertialization like they do?

[violet gazelle]

Guess it wouldn't hurt to try, thanks!

[violet gazelle]

Yup, that does it! Thanks for the help! When I have a bit more time I'm going to start digging into the why of all of this a bit more, but for now at least I have a working solution.

[nimble torrent]

Hurrah!

[vivid pollen]

Anyone know why my vaulting animation isn't playing but instead I get teleported to the other side of the static mesh? I also endlessly slide. I'm trying out Motion Warping.

[nimble torrent]

That's an interesting one!

Sorry, I don't know what's causing it as Motion Warping is still pretty new!

[wheat charm]

It looks like you set different movement mode for your character and truly there's too little information about how you make this system work. Like how you trigger your animation and it is interrupted or not and etc.

[waxen vapor]

Hi, is me again ;-; retargetting animations has been quite a bumpy ride.... Now I got most to work, but the forward backward movent doesnt seem to be tracked by the motion matching system? Any leads of what might cause this?

[nimble torrent]

Sorry, this might not be particularly useful, but I do have a question - what prompted you to create this x-shaped design?

Did you have an example file showing this kind of thing?

[waxen vapor]

Design? Is just me selecting all animations in the pose search database at once

I use it as a way to quickly visualize how animations compare

[nimble torrent]

OK, but you don't have turning animations or starts and stops, you appear to have animations running straight in multiple directions. Am I wrong about that?

[waxen vapor]

there are turn animations yes, also starts and stops. I am lacking diagonals for sure but im not too concerned about it for the time being. Motion matching seemed to be filling the gaps well enough for diagonal movements between motion matching and orientation warping

[nimble torrent]

OK, interesting. All right. My understanding of motion matching is that you really only need the one run.

You don't need multiple directions like that, because you can turn the pawn.

If you look at their presentation, they have one run, one run forward, and two loops, as well as a lot of starts and stops.

This kind of coverage is not the way I understand motion matching is really designed to work.

[waxen vapor]

I am certainly a tad overkill atm xD In the stream they did mention the bigger the database the more motion matching has to work with. But yes, the animations Im using have a lot of overlap between them.

I am currently testing remapping of animations so when their new pack comes I can quickly adapt it over to my project

I was planning to "minmax" motion matching after the fact

[nimble torrent]

They also bragged that the example system only had, I think, 22 animations.

[waxen vapor]

I have a cleaner set up elsewhere lemme find it...

[nimble torrent]

My experience with motion matching has been using the older system of dance cards, so this is all outside my current knowledge level, but I do suspect that it's possible that having multiple of the same animations at different angles may be confusing the algorithm.

I would be not surprised if that turned out to be the case.

[waxen vapor]

It is the case for "motionless" animations

like idles

[nimble torrent]

My understanding is that it's that way for all the animations.

If your system is working perfectly - that's awesome.

[waxen vapor]

There chooser tables they are providing with motion matching serve well to filter out animations as you need them

[nimble torrent]

But if you're having issues, that might be source of the issues.

[waxen vapor]

mine looks like this atm and is very good for my use

[nimble torrent]

All right. Cool.

[waxen vapor]

Im have a strong feeling my issues are related to remapping rather than motion matching

on my earlier testing I could track back and forward movemnt with the same configuration. Being animations and skelletal mesh different, I suspect the issue comes from there

[vivid pollen]

Here's the event graph from left to right:

[wheat charm]

What if you remove the motion warping nodes, the play montage node works?

[waxen vapor]

Fixed it- Somehow the axis tracking is wrong? When checking for position velocity facing XY it failed to see back and forward movent, But when is not restricted by axis it works properly. This is certainly at a cost of performance, but I wonder how much

[vivid pollen]

Erm. How do I do that? I'm basically following along with this long ass YT tutorial. lol

[vivid pollen]

Here's the function for the vault left to right:

[vivid pollen]

I'll check that.

[wheat charm]

Just unhook the add or update motion warping nodes and connect to play montage directly.

[waxen vapor]

Can I have a link to it? 👀

[vivid pollen]

It's part of a RPG series but it's in parts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVhH2qi2B5Q&t

[wheat charm]

Because the problem for you now is not playing the animation montage. So check that first to find the reason then consider about motion warping. It should play anyway with or w/o motion warping.

[vivid pollen]

If I unhook the Add Update Warp Target do I have to rehook it to another node in the event graph? Sorry my brain is fried.

[wheat charm]

Set Enable Collision outpin to Play Montage in pin.

If still not playing, check the animation slot settings and your anim blueprint has the slot which montage is using.

[vivid pollen]

The montage is set to the correct one cause it's the only one I made lemme see about the other thing. Sorry I'm very noob to this. Still don't know all the naming jargon.

[vivid pollen]

so do I unhook play montage on completed to set actor enable collision?

[wheat charm]

Well, you have the set actor enable collision then add or update motion warping nodes then play montage, right?
Just skip the add or update motion warping nodes from Set actor enable collision straight to play montage

[vivid pollen]

Oooh I think I see what you mean now

[vivid pollen]

So unhook the collision and plug it into the play montage?

ignoring the add or update warp targets?

I think I'm confusing myself

[hot helm]

Hi Squishy. I tried both methods and they helped me pinpoint the cause for the left finger control. Turns out it was a glitch from naming conventions (idk why the engine does this) so I just renamed the control and it works perfectly. Thank you so much!

[nimble torrent]

Ahh! What was the glitch!?

I'm really glad you got it working though!!

[hot helm]

I'm not sure how to explain it, but originally I named the control "L_Index01_J_ctrl" which the sequencer couldn't register for some reason. So then I copy-pasted the programming logic I used for the finger row and applied it to the individual left index joint. Then I changed the suffix to "_control" in the concat node (along with the control) and it now works in the Sequencer. I don't know if my explanation made sense, but your steps helped me pinpoint the name glitch as the cause.

[nimble torrent]

Weird! Thanks for telling me! I wonder what could be the cause though! So strange!

[wheat charm]

Yes, exactly.

[hot helm]

For sure! Thanks for your help

[desert zenith]

question why is the niagara particle effect playing so many times. It seems to generate a new continous particle every time i change any of its transform and it persists even if i close the window and reopen it

[old falcon]

No idea where those inverse nodes come from, there should be nothing to invert at all. And you're still setting a relative transform on your camera boom.
Nothing will work until you convert whatever transform you're getting into your camera boom's space when you use "set relative".

This node will help

Then you can keep using "set relative"

But it expects inputs in the same space, so make sure you give it the correct transforms

[limpid zenith]

Hi, this was not a problem ever before, but i imported the animation from mixamo and it is rotated 90 degrees to floor, and i need the player to stay, and before i just set import Rotation and all was fine, but this animation does not react to import rotation, how to fix it?

[austere patrol]

Regarding crash when opening retargetted animations
Assertion failed: (Index >= 0) & (Index < ArrayNum) [File:D:\build++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Public\Containers\Array.h]

I bug reported this issue couple of weeks ago, but only got reception confirmation and case number, still no bug on issue tracker.
Likely there is a bug somewhere around DetailsCustomization code, because it has different array size there and in array that is stored inside animation.

Only thing I was able to do to open animations is to open any other animation that is not crashing, from a starter pack for example, and switch active tab from Asset Details to Skeleton Tree
or close Asset Details tab altogether. Then I was able to open retargetted animations, but editor crashes as soon as I try to open asset details, so it's not a fix, more of a workaround until epic does fixing.

[ripe gazelle]

I have almost forgotten everything i do in my animation blueprint

with all the new stuff coming into animation, is there anything new that supports upper/lower separation for stuff like melee movesets + locomotion

[old falcon]

Nothing new, but the good ol' Layered Blend per Bone works just fine

[ripe gazelle]

s'wat i do

[old falcon]

Then you're good!

Are you having problems with it or something?

[ripe gazelle]

no im doing mental prep

i mean, i did remake a lot of ALS to fit into my own project and now we are getting motion matching tools.

just gots me thinking if there was more to it

[old falcon]

Depends if you want to do motion matching

The basics have been pretty much the same for a long time though

[ripe gazelle]

yup

[old falcon]

Just the new tools give you flexibility at the leaf nodes of the traditional setup. Or if you want you can replace entire sections of the traditional setup, e.g. replacing state machines with motion matching

Not every game will want motion matching though

[ripe gazelle]

statemachine as 'any statemachine for any category of animation?'

or just locomotive?

[old falcon]

They can be used for anything. But they shouldn't.

Locomotion is a good candidate for state machines.

Combat animations less so.

[ripe gazelle]

its good to know

its in the name i guess

[weary glade]

anyone know why the gizmos used to bend and position the arms are not showing up or how i could add them?

all i did was create a first person shooter preset added FP_Idle animation sequence to the world created a new level sequence, added the actor to the sequencer and the editer gizmos/control rig things aren't showing up

like i want to make a custom animation for the arms but i cant because of this issue

[old falcon]

You need to add your skeletalmesh/ABP/BP as a track and then add a control rig track as a subtrack to it

[weary glade]

sorry i'm really new to UE and game development in general, would you be able to explain how to do that?

[old falcon]

Add your skeletal mesh into sequencer, just like you did with that idle animation. Remove the idle animation completely for now.

[weary glade]

i removed the idle animation and added the only thing i saw called a skeletal mesh

i added FKControlRig to the track and got this to pop up but it doesn't look like all the videos i saw with the colored bands around the model to edit the positioning of stuff

[old falcon]

Good! So what you've added is what's called an FK rig

That one allows you to manipulate each bone individually

What you're describing is called "Control Rig"
You would need to create tht one yourself

Either manually set it up, or there's also the new modular control rig in 5.4 which makes it more user-friendly, but comes with lots of issues at the moment

[weary glade]

ah alright, thanks for the help 😄

[graceful tundra]

Nice! I was going to submit a report once I had a few mins. That workaround could work but I'd rather avoid that volatility for now. I'm using a few animations retargeted from the ue5 Manny and they are ok. For now I'm using those mixed with my own and a bunch of procedural stuff. There are some ue4 animations that I'd like to use though, so I look forward to that bug fix

[limpid zenith]

#animation message can someone help pls

[static vapor]

So I was trying to import an attack animation from mixamo. Animation seems to be working fine, however the legs feel like they are stuck on the ground. Character isn't moving at all from their position either. I figured it has to do with the IK but how would I go about making that animation compatible with the IK movement? Is my only option to remove it alltogether?

[pliant cairn]

I have an animation that plays to pull out a cell phone. I have that in the animation blueprint so it's not a montage. When the cell phone gets brought out, I have it so you can still run but the legs don't move once the cell phone is out. Any idea how I can get the legs to run when the phone is brought out? I don't need a solution but really feedback on a good place to start. Is it a blendspace I need? An additive animation? I'm a little lost

[hoary void]

Animation Test/Practice with one of my character models

[pliant cairn]

@static vapor Do you have root motion enabled by chance?

[static vapor]

Yup! And it didn't seem to really work
Like the dude on the video said that if you want the character to move along with the animation's leg movement it would make It work by enabling

Tried with another one too where the character jumps up and slams with a sword to the ground. Doesn't seem to work properly either. In unreal character stays in the ground, won't go upwards and just doesn't move from their place at all even though the animation plays normally

[old falcon]

Are you actually layering your animations using "Layered blend per bone"? And then playing your cell-phone animation only on the upper body?

[pliant cairn]

Upper body yes. Have not tried ;ayered blend per bone

[old falcon]

Without layered blend per bone you are not playing it on the upper body then.

Depends on your setup. Usually you'll have "layered blend per bone" somewhere if you want to layer animations per body part

Otherwise anything you plug in will completely override any other animations

[pliant cairn]

gotcha . I think. I made some progress using additive and cache locomotion pose but it doesn't look right

[old falcon]

There's no way around it if you want to play Locomotion animation on the lower body and some action on the upper body

Here's an example from my ABP since I have it open right now

You play whatever you want for each body part, but it's all brought together into one pose by LBPB

[bitter vault]

I've been trying to create fps animations using mr mannequin and the ue4 skeleton. I've parented the ik_hand_gun to the root bone of the weapon. It seems to work in blender but when I import the animations in unreal, it never works. Can anyone help me with this?? plsss

[pliant cairn]

I figured it out. Layered blend per bone - part of main state and then I used cache loco with some bone modifiers

Pretty easy actually. Feel kind of dumb for not figuring this one out

[nimble torrent]

Ooh! Beautiful! Extremely strong style!

Love the green gloves. That's a really nice accent.

[nimble torrent]

Does your character animate fine the rest of the time, and then their legs stop moving when they do your attack animation?

[nimble torrent]

It often feels that way, but learning is work. Don't knock your acquisition of knowledge, it's difficult and important!

[nimble torrent]

When you look at the rotation of the root bone in unreal, does it have a weird rotation on it?

[limpid zenith]

Wdym?

The animation is good, but it is rotated

[nimble torrent]

You're having a rotation problem in unreal, so when you looked at the rotation problem in the sequence viewer, and you looked at the root (where the problem would be) what did you see?

Did it have a weird rotation?

[limpid zenith]

Nope, i don't thik so

[nimble torrent]

I'd double check.

If there's no weird rotation on it, then it's probably a problem in the FBx.

I'd check it in blender - to see if it's also rotated funny there.

[pliant cairn]

@nimble torrent Thanks for the reminder

[limpid zenith]

Hm, i will ceck in a sec

[static vapor]

Yup and I'm using the default Third Person character unreal has set up. I'm trying to understand the process of adding attacks and combos ATM but it just won't work.

I did some further research and it seems that the IK bones themselves on that new animation are not really moving while the models feet are which causes the legs to simply not move at all inside of the game.

A guy mentioned something about adding virtual bones corresponding to every IK bone and then replace the control rig's I'm bones to the new virtual bones

I will have to look into how to achieve that. So much I don't know

[limpid zenith]

I don't think it's bad

Seems normal to me

[nimble torrent]

Well, you can't see the rotation on the bone there.

[limpid zenith]

But how do u check it then?

[nimble torrent]

In the 'Details' pane on the right side of the screen.

There will be transform details there.

Also - it seems very strange that the character appears to have a root motion offset to the pelvis position (the red line) while having the pelvis and root objects ('player' in this case - not a great choice for names there). So I think something weird is going on there.

[limpid zenith]

Yeah, it is normal, all other anims work perfectly

They are also from mixamo

[nimble torrent]

In the animation that you imported - do the IK feet bones exist?

Because you're right, that's where the problem is.

The unreal skeleton uses IK legs, and without that foot ik hierarchy animated - they will not raise their feet.

[static vapor]

Doesn't seem like it. They are greyed out. It's a mixamo animation and even if I disable I'm entirely, the model itself still isn't moving from it's place. Like actually doing the jump etc

[nimble torrent]

That's interesting. So the default jump, that normally works for Manny, doesn't work anymore?

Like - something has broken?

[static vapor]

Will have to look into it further once I'm home. I'm just testing with mixamo animations since if I animate it and it just doesn't work then I will have wasted tons of time

[static vapor]

Oh nope, it's like an attack animation I imported that also seems to be jumping quite high inside of mixamo

However inside of unreal the jump happens with the mannequin being stationary. Does that make sense

[nimble torrent]

It does. So what's happening there is that the root is probably moving into the air in that animation.

And in unreal, the Movement Component prevents that unless you're in the 'fly' state.

(you're the second person I've talked to in this channel with this specific issue, I suspect it might even be the same animation from Mixamo)

To 'fix' the missing IK tracks, you can create a simple Control Rig with the ik feet bones constrained to the appropriate foot, and just load and re-export the animation in Sequencer.

This might sound elaborate, but it's probably a good learning task, because you'll learn how the control rig works, and how sequencer works - with a fairly simple control rig (you're just constraining one set of bones to another).

The 'modern' version of this would be to use Virtual Bones, but they assume that your skeleton doesn't have animated bones for those IK systems. You can't say 'treat this bone as virtual' if it already exists.

Manny and Quinn predate that feature.

So their skeletons already have them.

[limpid zenith]

This answer for me or for @static vapor

?

[hoary void]

Thanks so much!

[nimble torrent]

Nightgal.

[limpid zenith]

Okey

What can i do to see if mine is bad?

[nimble torrent]

Click on the root object, open the Details Panel, and look at the transform values.

On the first frame, the values for rotation and translation should be zero, and scale should be 1.

[nimble torrent]

OK, that's not the root, that's the hips.

The hips are not the root.

[limpid zenith]

Hm

[nimble torrent]

That scale of zero is alarming.

And likely to cause shenanigans.

But also - the root isn't in this animation (the bone is greyed out.)

[limpid zenith]

Yeah, i set it to 1

Nothing changed

[limpid zenith]

Yeah

[nimble torrent]

So I suspect that your export settings were not good. You want a root called 'root' not 'player' and you want it included in the animation.

[limpid zenith]

It is the same in the other anims

[nimble torrent]

So - there's your problem.

[nimble torrent]

Then they are also bad.

You want a root.

[limpid zenith]

Hm

am i importing something wrongly?

[nimble torrent]

Well that's not export, that's import.

[limpid zenith]

Yeah

I know

[nimble torrent]

So I suspect the problem starts further up the chain with mixamo itself.

The 90 degree rotation on import is strange, but not importing the root is such a catastrophic level of failure in terms of 'having a animation that works' that it doesn't matter.

You need the root. Period.

Without it, your animation is junk.

[limpid zenith]

Yeah, i set it like that

[limpid zenith]

Okey, so how to rename it?

[nimble torrent]

It's not a matter of renaming it. It's a matter of importing it. Your animations appear to not be importing the root.

Which is very bad.

I don't know how or where you got the mesh, but I believe the mesh is where you defined the skeleton, and that is where you would change the name.

But the strange name, while not a good idea, is still not the problem. The problem is that they're not importing.

[limpid zenith]

No, the problem is, i have had this mash for like 4 mounths, and i have downloaded anims and all was great, but then i lost it and just exported it from ue to fbx and used on mixamo

And now all anims i download are bad

[nimble torrent]

Neat.

[limpid zenith]

Am i stupid and messed up the export?

[nimble torrent]

I don't know. I can tell you that you need the root. I can tell you that it will be extremely odd if can manage to make it work in any way without one.

I can't tell you why your experience of using this mesh is the way it is.

Or why things played out the way they have.

[limpid zenith]

This is what i have

On export settings

[nimble torrent]

That's exporting from unreal.

[limpid zenith]

Yeah

[nimble torrent]

My suspicion is that the problem may be in the original animations that you got.

Or the mesh.

Or some combination of both.

If you send me the mesh and an example animation file, I'll be able to tell you.

[limpid zenith]

Nope, i am 99% sure the mesh and anims before are good

[limpid zenith]

Yeah, sec

In dm or here?

[nimble torrent]

Up to you!

OK, well both problems I suspected are present.

In your Player file, the armature doesn't have a root, and is named 'Player' so unreal is going to treat it as a root object.

In the animation file, it also doesn't have a root, and it's armature is named 'Hips', which... I'm honestly not sure what's going to happen there.

I expect various shenanigans.

In both cases, they are missing a root.

So if these aren't exported from unreal (they're not right? These are your original files?) - then your problem is with your acquired assets.

[limpid zenith]

Player i exported just now, anim is "original"

So you think the problem is in the new downloaded anims?

[nimble torrent]

I can't say for sure that the problem starts with the player mesh then.

[nimble torrent]

No, I think it's a combination of the two.

[limpid zenith]

I guess i used to do other steps

Like in mixamo i can download With and Without player model

[naive carbon]

hey, question if anyone can answer, do I need to have my time line set to 60fps if I want to render a sequence at 60 fps ?

[limpid zenith]

And i think before i was downloading with skin and just changing it in ue5

Hm

I don't really remember

Thanks, i will get to you if i will figure that out!

[nimble torrent]

Cool! Best of luck!

[limpid zenith]

Thanks, you too!)

[nimble torrent]

I don't think so, but I think that if you have like 150 frames of sequence, and you render at 60fps, it might speed your exported file up.

If you originally created it at 30fps.

But I don't know for sure! Usually, you can set whatever export fps you want for rendering - but unreal is special...

[naive carbon]

hummm, Here is the thing, I need to create a walkcycle for a sequence animation, no gameplay, just render.

the render must be iat 60fps

[nimble torrent]

Just give it a try. It'll take like a minute.

[old falcon]

Did anyone ever experience weird behavior of AnimCurves in ControlRig?
I have a curve which I swear is set to constant value of 90 in a single animation and does not exist on any others. But Control Rig for some reason interpolates from 0 to 20, then back down to 0 and then suddenly jumps to 90 and interpolates down to 0.
Any ideas?

If I remove any blend in/out on the animation it will at least start with 90 but still interpolates down to 0 and for the last frame jumps back to 90

My LBPB curve blending is also set to "Override" so I wouldn't expect any blending to happen there...

Also doesn't seem to be CR specific. I get the same behavior in my anim BP (post process AND regular)

[hollow moat]

Like this?

[old falcon]

Don't think that works, like I said the "Make Relative To" expects transforms in the same space. But your first transform is relative to the camera and your second transform is relative to the ADS

You can try throwing in world space transforms, for example

[old falcon]

Think I figured it out. Apparently setting LBPB's curve blend to "override" does not behave the way I thought. It will actually blend in your new curve value instead of overriding it... which is a whole lotta bs if you ask me.
Setting it to "Max Value" works, but of course that would break other stuff where you do expect it to blend.

If anyone knows a secret to making this work with "override" I'm all ears 👂

[hollow moat]

So like this? (sorry if its wrong again my brain is starting to hurt)

[old falcon]

No, doesn't work probably.
You want your socket transform in world space.
You want your camera transform in world space.
Then you want to use "Make Relative To" to make your world space socket transform relative to your camera's world space transform.

The result of that you can simply plug into "Set relative transform" of your camera

[hollow moat]

I think i got it is this correct?

[old falcon]

Almost there 😄
You've got the inputs to "Make relative to" the wrong way around

[misty dagger]

how do you import uexp ubulk and umaps to show up to open them in ue4

also i couldnt import built data for two days aah

still cant lol

[hollow moat]

Like this? (if yea it doesnt work :()

[old falcon]

Might wanna remove that lerping to debug first

Also depends what your camera is attached to

And whether it has an offset from there

[hollow moat]

Head

[hollow moat]

Nope

[hollow moat]

Not the lerp or timeline

Why does this keep happenign i thought ads was suppose to be simple😭

[old falcon]

Since you're lerping from some hardcoded values there must be an offset on your cam, no?

[limpid zenith]

@nimble torrent update, i have figured this out, as i said, if i import with mesh from mixamo, and in import settings i just change mesh, and it does work, so thanks a lot for leading me to this!

[hollow moat]

no i think i just pull the camera little down form the where its postioned.

[old falcon]

That's what an offset is

[hollow moat]

Oh i thought we talking about like a spring arm offset

Wait nvm i dont have anything on camera

That node is just some test values oops

[old falcon]

I would really recommend you to remove all the fluff first and see if you can get it to snap to the socket's position first

Any lerping can be done once you have the right values

[hollow moat]

Yea i just took everything out but i found something when ever move socket its all messed up like up and down is moving it forward backward, forward and backward is moving it up down etc

[old falcon]

OK, try this:

[vivid pollen]

So I figured it out. I actually had two meshes in the 3rd Character BP and the one that I was trying out didn't have the correct skeleton. I think you mentioned that before. Anyway, thanks for the help.

[hollow moat]

It works but now it messes up the camera after you zoom out. I tried putting the lerp back but it still just puts the camera at a random place probbaly becasue of that

[old falcon]

You'll have to set the transform back to relative 0 to get back to the original camera position

Forget about the lerp for now, it's only distracting you

[north cove]

Is there some function I can call in c++ that just resets a skeletal mesh to its default a-pose? Trying to "reset" a skeleton so I can use it again and not sure how to get it back to a default pose

[old falcon]

That's... weird? How did you change the skeleton's default pose?

[nimble torrent]

I am interested in this as well.

[north cove]

no i mean, the skeleton has animated and done a bunch of stuff, and i just want to reset it back to how it started

[nimble torrent]

OK, but how?

[north cove]

at runtime

[nimble torrent]

Are you using an animation blueprint?

Are you using Play Animation?

How are you doing it?

I'm guessing this isn't a character, it's some kind of level object.

Like bridge or something.

[north cove]

uhhh, its a bit tricky. its a character but its a vertex animated character that occasionally gets replaced by a skeletal mesh temporarily to be interactible

but animation blueprint i think

i didnt write the system just trying to fix a bug with reassigning a skeletal mesh to a different guy

[nimble torrent]

OK, well - that sounds complicated, but if you have an animation blueprint, then just feeding in the... gosh I can't remember the name of the node, but it's called 'local space pose' or something like that, will return it to the default skeleton position.

[nimble torrent]

That's the one!

[north cove]

okay thanks ill look into that

[old falcon]

Found the solution. Just have to set LBPB's "Curve Blend Option" to "Do not override".
Not sure why I didn't think of this earlier. I can't think of a sensible use case for the "Override" option anyways.

[static vapor]

So i was watching tons of animation tutorials to get myself started and i found multiple youtubers mention how using Event Blueprint Update Animation is similar to Event Tick which is pretty bad for performance. What else/how else could i go about it? Any ideas as to where i could look/ what to look into?

[old falcon]

Using "Blueprint Thread Safe Update Animation" is the best way to go about it, but it requires some extra work because it's all done on a separate thread apart from the main game thread

[static vapor]

ah fair enough, i will note it down to look into! thanks!

[hollow moat]

Thanks for all the help man i combined your way and some other way into one and it came out great. (mind the arrow)

[old falcon]

Very cool! Good job!

[nimble torrent]

Also, two things are true:

1. Doing stuff all the time can be expensive if you're doing expensive things.

2. In games - you often have to do things! Premature optimization is usually a source of problems. Only optimize things when you have too.

[kindred stratus]

I'm having this issue while trying to make a control rig, it seems every control is scaling off the last in the hierarchy and making basically every control huge, I need to scale to down to .00000001 for some of them and I've gotten to a point where I just can't make them small enough

[nimble torrent]

This is probably an import issue from Blender. Check your main skeleton file's root node. The scale on it will probably be very large.

You will likely have to reimport your skeleton and meshes with better FBX export options and unit scale in blender.

[kindred stratus]

I made the skeleton in unreal actually

which is why this is extra confusing

[nimble torrent]

Neat. I'd still check that scale then.

Because you should not have to modify the scale the way that you are.

Somewhere you have an incorrect scale which is causing your problems.

[kindred stratus]

well darn, it is the scale, weird, fixing it also breaks the whole model, guess I'm making this model's 10th skeleton...

[nimble torrent]

That sucks!

Scale is like... a contaminant. If you get it wrong, it will mess up absolutely everything it touches.

And it touches everything.

[kindred stratus]

yeah... but at least I'm getting closer to finally be able to just animate this guy, it's my first project and model so I've run into a lot of problems just figuring out workflow

[nimble torrent]

That is how it goes. The plus side is, this is the most awkward and annoying it's going to be!

It does get easier from here.

[kindred stratus]

at this point I can see that pretty clearly, it used to take me a day to rig this model and this is probably only gonna take me an hour to redo it

[earnest stump]

Hello, is it possible to expose the bone parameter of Layered Blend per Bone? So that in an inherited ABP I can change which bone it's using?

[viscid willow]

I don't believe so. In fact I think Epic wrote a custom node for this exact functionality in Fortnite, but this is not available in the public release of the engine: https://youtu.be/u9Z8CK561_Y?si=M0qhm80ZkFfHzIYG&t=2297 (timestamped)

[earnest stump]

Ah ok good to know! Also hey Sam, small world 🙂

(Chris from MDS)

[viscid willow]

Oh shit lmao

Hey man

[earnest stump]

We all come here at some point 😄

[viscid willow]

seeking answers to life's big questions like "how tf does dynamic additve work?" and "where tf is the motion matching sample pack?!"

[earnest stump]

hahahah

[sage ibex]

Does anyone know to generate a trajectory from any object for use with motion matching? I'm gathering the velocity of an object to animate it traditionally, and I want to switch to motion matching but I don't really understand the Trajectory structure it needs.

[copper sigil]

Hey folks, I'm attempting to make a procedural "rope hang" effect in Control Rig. Essentially there are several floating bones, and I want to create a natural U shape between the Start and End control, based on the position of the "Mid" control (which controls how far it's hanging), terrible drawing to show you what I mean.

Ideally, it the "hang" amount would be derived from the current distance compared to the initial distance between the Start and End controls as well, but I'm happy to have a control point for the middle if necessary.

Anyway, I have the bones individually pointing or parented to the start and end, but I can't figure out where to start when it comes to almost make the start/end bones "aim too much" at the mid point so that they appear to be hanging directly down when the start and end are close enough.

Sadly can't use a standard chain setup because the bones need to be unparented for other logic later on. To be honest I did try a standard chain from Start to End before anyway, just to get to grips with that function, but it didn't work when the bones were parented as you'd expect for something like that.

(Another issue with a standard chain of bones is that setting the start also offsets the child bones in the chain, which is fine, but when you want the end bone to also define it's own location that really starts to fall apart.

[nimble torrent]

You can't do that using Layered Blend, but you could do it using a Linked Anim Layer. It wouldn't be fully dynamic, but you could have multiple different layer blends setup in different linked graphs and dynamically link them based on context.

[viscid willow]

https://tenor.com/view/spongebob-patrick-star-noted-notes-gif-26231953

[obsidian pawn]

hey guys, I'm running an anim montage on my weapon class to represent the bolt action cycle. I have a notify that I need to reset the can fire bool. Is there a way I can get that notify reference in the weapon's BP?

I also tried getting a ref to the weapons class on the anim BP with try get pawn owner, but that didnt work

[nimble torrent]

You cannot directly get the notify in the weapon class. You will need to access the animation instance somehow - so you need to keep exploring that avenue.

My strong recommendation is to not rely on animation notifies for game relevant effects. They're not 100% reliable. If you really want to though, I would suggest creating an event dispatcher on the animation BP, and then having the weapon subscribe to that. You can trigger the event with the notify.

But I'm not kidding about the unreliability of animation notifies.

[obsidian pawn]

Ok, that is super good to know! Another avenue I thought about is just setting a timer for the duration of the animation and then using that to reset the bool, but seems a tad janky to figure out the exact length. Last option I saw was a C++ delegate for on MontageEnd, but had trouble binding to it

[nimble torrent]

You can bind to montage end in blueprints as well.

Montage end is more reliable than an animation notify.

And like - my aversion to using animation for gameplay logic is entirely a style thing. People do, and it works.

But animation notifies are not 100% reliable and when they're not it can be frustrating to track down why they're not triggering.

[obsidian pawn]

Well I’m really glad I asked about this! I didn’t know any of that. Thanks for the tips!

[nimble torrent]

👍

[craggy cape]

Has anyone had issues before with using Copy Pose from Mesh? Namely: the mesh that is the copy is jittering a bunch during the animation? My case is i have one default mannequin mesh running a procedural run animation, that is invisible with no collisions. Then, i have another mesh that is in the same location, that just copies this mesh's pose. Attached is a clip:

[old falcon]

Just for completion, here's how to bind it in c++. But beware that you can only bind once per montage. Subsequent bindings will override the previous ones.

UAnimInstance* Instance = ...; 
UAnimMontage* Montage = ...;
auto MontageEndedDelegate = FOnMontageEnded::CreateUObject(this, &ULifecycleAnimMetaData::OnMontageEnded, Instance);
Instance->Montage_SetEndDelegate(MontageEndedDelegate, Montage);

And the signature of the function must be:

virtual void OnMontageEnded(UAnimMontage* Montage, const bool Interrupted, UAnimInstance* Instance);

[nimble torrent]

That is very unusual. Copy Pose From Mesh does not normally create that kind of behavior. Why do you specify that one of them doesn't have collisions? You very seldom have collisions on your mesh unless the mesh is ragdolling. Do you have the ragdoll on?

[craggy cape]

Same result with both set to collisions off so can ignore that part. Only had one on because was trying to use physical animations on the one that is copying

[nimble torrent]

OK, interesting. Are you sure it's Copy Pose From Mesh?

If you display both of them at once, does the original not display the hitching behavior?

[craggy cape]

I’ve isolated it to some weird behavior in the rig I’m using for procedural walking, and yes the original displays the same. It even happens when they don’t overlap, like when I apply a location offset to one

[nimble torrent]

Ok. So the problem isn't the Copy Pose then. It's the procedural walking.

If that's the source of the problem - then you should fix that?

[craggy cape]

Yeah will try and isolate further, thanks

[nimble torrent]

👍

[calm crescent]

Howdy everyone! Im having problems on fixing this issue with my anims not working properly in Unreal 5 in Maya everything is working as its intended (its just a test walk just to see how it will look in Unreal) but when I imported it, the anim to Unreal only some certain parts of the model only moved while the torso and probably the waist part didnt work.. thanks to anyone who has the fix for it! thanks to @old falcon on bringing attention to my issue

heres what it looks like with bones

[nimble torrent]

Have you checked the skeleton in the animation viewer to see which bones aren't moving?

Also - did you create a new skeleton in unreal, or did you target one of the existing skeletons?

[static vapor]

That's some good logic right there. It's better to get the core mechanics jn check and then optimize I guess. Then again as someone who is just making his first game (without a team that is) there is tons of stuff to look into. Animation seems to be way worse than programming to me right now hahah

[calm crescent]

Hey! yep just checkd it rn from the looks of it from the Root bone to the spine hierarchy and its shoulders aint moving at all (in Unreal)

[calm crescent]

I have my own rig made in Maya and yeah I just use my exisisting skeleton for the anim

I did also try moving the bones in Unreal just to see if the exported mesh works fine and yes all parts are skinned

[nimble torrent]

OK, good to know.

Did you try reimporting your exported FBX into maya?

[calm crescent]

yeah both actually

[nimble torrent]

Did they play the animation?

[calm crescent]

yes but

[nimble torrent]

But it's missing the same data.

[calm crescent]

yeah

[nimble torrent]

Which is great!

Because that pinpoints where the problem is!

It's in your export process in Maya!

[calm crescent]

is that so... so the base mesh doesnt have any issues.. its just a anim file export issue?

[nimble torrent]

That seems to be the case!

You've got a big elaborate rig in Maya, right?

Lots of controllers and constraints?

[calm crescent]

Correct!

[nimble torrent]

It's possible that your movement data isn't baked onto the export skeleton.

[calm crescent]

was expecting with just selecting the rig with anim and export that

[nimble torrent]

And, as those controllers and constraints don't come-with - you get no movement instead.

[nimble torrent]

Sadly no. Often the export process can be a bit baroque honestly.

[calm crescent]

but why thus some parts of it atleast moves like the legs, arms and even the foot worked but not the Torso??

anyways as youve said probably my anims isnt baked to my exported skeleton.. well atleast some of it like the ones I mentioned

how can I fix it tho?

uhmmmm

I think I might have fixed it

but what im missing now is the bounce

[queen matrix]

Hey, anyone could recommend me a good Blender rig for UE5 manny? Tested a few things but with very mixed results. Thanks! ❤️

[plain oracle]

can someone help me pls, im trying to use the 5.4 modular control rig, but the places i have to drop the bons are very off from the mesh, and some meshes dont even show the places to drop the bones.

[old falcon]

You're not the first person to deal with this, lots of people are having this and other issues with modular CR right now

[plain oracle]

is there any solution to it yet??

[distant trout]

Hello! Working on star wars animation in Unreal and it's going well, but I'm stumped currently on trying to just have a simple blaster fire animation for like a soldier using his blaster gun

Best I've gotten is random blaster fire using Niagra using Hanging Particles but I'm trying to just do a simple blaster fire from the barrel of a soldier's gun? Any idea?

[old falcon]

Using plain Control Rig and setting up a custom rig works without issues, so...

[plain oracle]

understand, guess no saving time for now, thanks for help btw.

[calm crescent]

I think Ill take it from here Thanks btw!

[mild granite]

How do i get a base skeletons animations to work for a new skeletal mesh? I know i can retarget the anims but i dont want to do that.

[novel viper]

Hello. Is there any way to make this node more stable / robust? Currently when using this to snap the left hand of my character to a weapon sadly doesn't 100% perfectly snap it. Instead it tries to approximate it which results in the hand floating around the desired target socket transform. The faster the animation, the bigger the problem. What is the better / proper way of doing something like this?

The problem I'm facing is that because of different body types the hand never align as they should with how the animation is made. Hence I need some type of override snap system. I thought FABRIK was exactly that, but it doesn't seem to work that well. :/

Or maybe I'm using the node wrong?

[old falcon]

That has little to do with FABRIK, I think your Effector Transform calculation is probably 1 frame behind.
You get better results at high framerates, but very large inaccuracies at low framerates right?

[novel viper]

yup that's correct

more fps makes it more accurate

[old falcon]

Yup, the effector transform is the one from last frame's pose

[novel viper]

Is there a way to fix that?

[old falcon]

Sure, which bone does your weapon attach to?

[novel viper]

currently to the right hand

a socket I created

the left hand is then positioned using FABRIK

[old falcon]

OK, you just calculate your left hand's effector transform relative to the right hand and pass that into the node. This issue always happens when using world tranforms for IK

Make sure to adjust your FABRIK settings accordingly

[novel viper]

Aha ok will try that!

So relative transform mode is basically the same frame while world transform mode is a frame behind?

[old falcon]

Not quite, you calculate the world transform before the anim graph runs, right?
So by the time you reach the IK node, your skeleton's pose has updated

Which invalidates the world transform

[novel viper]

Currently the location is calculated in the event graph. Is that okay?

[old falcon]

That's fine sure

[novel viper]

Yeah indeed. But how does calculating the relative transform not have the lateness issue? 🤔

Wouldn't that also be too late?

[old falcon]

Cause it's relative to the hand bone

[novel viper]

Oooh right right

I get it

[old falcon]

FABRIK will apply it to the current pose

[novel viper]

So actually that would also mean that I would only have to calculate the relative loc once, right?

Not on tick as with the world pos

[old falcon]

Indeed, it's a one-off offset.
But if you intend to change the socket transform or the weapon's relative transform then you'd need to do it on tick again and incorporate those transform too

Or if you're using sockets on your weapon and your weapon has skeletal animations, too

[novel viper]

Normally the left hand position should only change when the player takes out another weapon

[old falcon]

Yeah you'll have to check how it works out for you

[novel viper]

Alright. Thanks a ton for the help!

[deft furnace]

Hey is there a way to make it so that my character can move forward while attacking.

[old falcon]

You want to use this node
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-blueprint-blend-nodes-in-unreal-engine#layeredblendperbone

[deft furnace]

I'm not sure if that's what I want, here's my attack animation blueprint.

[old falcon]

Since you're using AnimMontages that node is exactly what you want.

[deft furnace]

Oh ok.

sorry I'm still very new to this.

[old falcon]

It'll allow you to play your walking animation in the legs, but at the same time play an attack animation on the upper body

No worries!

[deft furnace]

That's not what I really want, I just want the character to move forward slightly when the character attacks.

[old falcon]

Oh, then there are a couple of ways to go about it.

You can look into "Root motion" if you want the movement to be driven by your animation.

Anything else would have to be a custom implementation to kind of "nudge" the player in a direction

[deft furnace]

How do I use root motion?

[rotund musk]

https://youtu.be/wZ11YqdidFA?si=mflqkCh6RWcCzqo7 a good video depending on what type of combat you want, he uses root motion I think, now I just used this to get my combat to work, directional thou but he’s like dark soul I think

It’s a playlist

[deft furnace]

That's actually the video I used to make my combos.

[rotund musk]

😂

Im not a tab target or a dark souls fan but it helped 😅

Not that he’s making a tab target 😅

[rotund musk]

You could also message him about your issue if he has the time 🤗 some do respond others makes videos and never get in touch with their viewers 🤣

I’m still waiting for someone for tutorials that explains stuff a bit more than just the easy way around stuff.. one day😅 hate reading 😂

[deft furnace]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1LOpSQcRPs I also used this tutorial.

I have no goddamn idea what I'm doing lol.

[rotund musk]

I think I have it saved in the playlist 😅 dunno if I need more on the combat besides the attacking, blocking and so, I have the directional attacks set and done for 1, now I just need to add the other melee weapons and fix them then work on the boring part haha

[rotund musk]

For the upper body thing? Or something else

[deft furnace]

I believe it was for the upper body, I'm not sure how to make my character move slightly every time it attacks though.

[rotund musk]

The upper body is easy but how to make char move slower when you attack i got no clue🤷🏽‍♂️😅

[deft furnace]

Oh ok, thanks though man.

[rotund musk]

I’d just ask here in the discord and hope someone with more knowledge has the time to help💯😉

[weary glade]

anyone know why the arm positioning is breaking when i add the hand to the Basic IK?

[deft furnace]

Ok, I've changed my layered blend per bone to the root and now it is moving forward, but the character isn't actually moving, once the animation plays, it just zips back into it's starting position

[woven urchin]

should I start doing animations in blender or ue5 for my game? kinda new to animation

[rotund musk]

I know when I had the issue it’s because I had to use the animation form mixamo “in place” but for root motion combat I’m unsure what you should use

[rotund musk]

@shut kraken I know you are a pro 🤗and unsure if we are allowed to ping😅 if no then sorry haha but if you have time to help here a bit

[night rover]

the rubber band happend because you don[t use root motion in your animation

tick Enable root motion in your animation asset

It will drive the capsule component based on the root motion

[dusky dust]

can you rename this base montage notify?

[night rover]

probably but why not create your own custom notify anyway

[dusky dust]

this doesnt see custom notify

because they are "skeleton notifies"

so this just will always print None

[night rover]

I never use those nodes, maybe someone else know.

[deft furnace]

But what if I'm using an animmontage.

[night rover]

same thing

in your anim montage, track the animation then open that animation. Enable root motion in that animation assetl

[old falcon]

What does your Notify look like in the montage?

[deft furnace]

How do I track the animation?

[dusky dust]

eyes closed doesnt register i need other red notifies with custom names

[night rover]

open the montage and just see the animation that rubber band

open the problematic animation asset and enable root motion

[old falcon]

Try to set it to "Branched", just like your "None" notify. You can manage all your skeleton notifies on the skeleton too

[dusky dust]

branched where? and i dont need skeleton notifies

[deft furnace]

So if it alter the original animation, the animation montage will change?

[dusky dust]

only montage one

[novel viper]

@old falcon Sorry. Here I am again. But I'm struggling to set up the FABRIK node to work with relative transforms. I've tried just about everything but the left hand of my character always seems to be somewhere around 0,0,0 in the world. Like it's using a relative offset from the world's origin point instead of the right hand.

[night rover]

The montage use the animation asset. If you set the animation to enable root motion. The montage will play the animation which have it's root motion enabled

[novel viper]

I'm also not sure how to calculcate / get the proper relative transform for the left hand

[old falcon]

Then you need to create a custom subclass for a notify depending on your needs

[novel viper]

this is currently how I have it set up

[dusky dust]

ahh nice , this one or the upper one?

[deft furnace]

HOLY SHIT, YOU'RE A GENIUS.

[chilly ore]

Hello everyone, what could be the source of this problem? animation does not loop. I'm trying to use Motion Matching

[dusky dust]

@old falcon figured it out thanks

[old falcon]

I think you want to use "MakeRelativeTransform" instead of inverse transform

[novel viper]

Ok will try thanks

hmm sadly that gives the same result 😦

[rotund musk]

In the end everything gets solved with the right help💯

[novel viper]

Wait I think I fixed it

[old falcon]

Looks great!

[novel viper]

I made a small mistake with another bone transform node after the FABRIK node

which caused the hand to flip out

[old falcon]

Is the hand locked now? Even at low FPS?

[novel viper]

almost done, let's hope!

still some issues, but the relative system works

problem is that due to the animation changing while running for example the offset is no longer correct so I think a update on tick is still required

[old falcon]

Yeah that is more a problem with attaching the weapon to the hand than anything else. E.g. additive animations will also give you trouble with the left hand

Attaching the weapon to a dedicated weapon bone and then IKing both hands to it tend to give better results, because you can filter out the weapon bone from any additives and so on

Or using virtual bones you can also solve those issues

[novel viper]

How does one IK the left hand to a socket? I actually thought FABRIK was an automatic IK system. Is there another way?

[old falcon]

How does one IK the left hand to a socket?

Is that not what you did?

[novel viper]

Yeah with the FABRIK node, right?

[old falcon]

Oh

[novel viper]

Is FABRIK not an IK system?

[old falcon]

It is

But it can't correct additives for you

[novel viper]

And there's nothing else that can do IK's?

[old falcon]

There's plenty IK nodes

Personally I use control rig for that

[novel viper]

Oh, ok I'll have a look at that!

[static vapor]

I'm sorry for the terrible quality video but I have no other way to showcase the issue right now. So the animation on mixamo looks fine (same skeleton as SK Mannequin (used exported fbx)
And in unreal it just doesn't wanna work. It won't move at all

Root motion has been enabled and did nothing at all

It's driving me crazy at this point, I got no idea how to fix it

[rotund musk]

Windows key + G and you can record thank Microsoft 🤗 and if you need to edit - Clipchamp on Google Chrome and you have your free recording and and editing 😉

[coral sun]

i have an animation with root motion, I can see the red line on the root bone appear. But when I enable root motion it doesn't move the pawn.
If I resave the animation in UE rather than using the source file it works fine.
Does anyone know why this could happen?

[static vapor]

Didn't know of that. I used to have OBS but the file size is insane

[rotund musk]

Same with Win + G but quality is superb thus editing with Clipchamp

Depending on your recording

But someone with knowledge will help you once they see your msg

[static vapor]

Nevermind I experimented a bit. In case someone else has the same issue, it's not a perfect solution but you can instead import a model from mixamo, then retarget the animations to the skeleton you want them to be used on and the movement works fine (there might be better solutions but that works for me for now)

[deft furnace]

Oh one more thing, is there any way to turn while attacking

[rotund musk]

Prob is, unsure how to do it yet😅

[nimble torrent]

If the proportions are different, you're going to have to use some kind of retargeting. If you have an exact hierarchy and name match, you could import your new character onto the old skeleton, and use runtime retargeting.

However, if you have any variation in hierarchy or names - you gotta use retargeting. That's what it's for.

[nimble torrent]

This is tricky to answer. Your best bet is to use the one you're most comfortable with, and if you're not comfortable with either - choose the one you want to become more comfortable with.

There isn't really a 'correct' choice on that one.

[nimble torrent]

Do you have starts and stops in your animation set for motion matching?

[nimble torrent]

Yes, though the question of "How do I get this character to move towards the player in a way where they can actually hit them if the player is attempting to evade" is a complex problem.

There isn't a simple node or function to do this.

It's both a game design challenge (because you want it to be fair for the player) and a technical challenge (how do you actually get the enemy to make the attack at the right moment, at the right distance?).

[novel viper]

@old falcon I fixed it 🙂

https://i.gyazo.com/9b46dfdb5de20f722448915c9f24edb9.mp4

this node was the key

Now, even at super low fps, the hand stays exactly where it should

[deft furnace]

Oh ok, so I take it that it is actually a difficult thing to do.

[nimble torrent]

I mean - just getting them to turn is not particularly hard.

You adjust their rotation relative to the player during the attack animation. It's done on their pawn, and not in the animation.

Usually the tracking ramps off, so they can track well during the first few moments of the attack animation and then they commit to an angle and complete the animation in that direction (this allows players to dodge).

The length of the anticipation where they can turn is an art into itself (many Dark Souls Enemies have attacks that have enormous anticipation sections and then lightning quick actual attacks, to bait players into dodging prematurely).

[chilly ore]

yes i have starts and stop

[nimble torrent]

Well, it doesn't look like they're being used.

[chilly ore]

i am using this

start and stop working but loop not working

[nimble torrent]

OK, but we don't see a start animation there do we?

[chilly ore]

wait a sec pls

[nimble torrent]

We just see it begin animating into a walk animation, without doing a 'start walking' animation.

[chilly ore]

Actually the start animation starts and then the last part of the start animation plays continuously.

I will open the project and post it now.

[nimble torrent]

Interesting. OK. What were you doing control-wise in your video. Were you jamming the control stick forward trying to accelerate or were you trying to move slowly?

[chilly ore]

I was trying to walk by holding down all the w a s d keys.

this is my asset list

[nimble torrent]

OK, so you were trying to accelerate though.

[nimble torrent]

Hmm. I don't really have any immediate solutions. I would try removing all assets except the walk and the idle - and see what happens then.

But that's just my usual debugging technique of "Remove things until I get a behavior I understand."

[nimble torrent]

My guess, based on this, is that the characters desired forward momentum is so slow that the character is trying to use parts of the start animation as a very very slow walk.

That's my guess, but it's just a guess.

[chilly ore]

I tried this and the character cannot move at all.

[nimble torrent]

Interesting. That suggests to me that the run doesn't have forward movement.

Does your run have forward movement?

[chilly ore]

yeah wait a sec

Maybe it's too short a time for animation motion matching, I'm not sure.

[nimble torrent]

Provided you have any forward movement on your root - any length should get the character moving.

It might look janky as heck, but it should work.

[chilly ore]

this is my walk animation

root motion

[nimble torrent]

OK. So that is some movement. Interesting!

All right, well - clearly something's going on!

[chilly ore]

I'm not very knowledgeable in Motion Matching so I can't figure it out :/

[nimble torrent]

Nobody is! It just came out and there are no example files.

[chilly ore]

yeah you're right

[nimble torrent]

If it were me, at this point, because I have exhausted my current ability to get anything working at all, and I can't remove anything else from the system, I would try recreating both the character and the motion matching system from scratch.

Assuming that somewhere along the line I missed something.

[nimble torrent]

I wouldn't delete the old one. I would make a new one, just to see if that worked.

[chilly ore]

I will delete all files and try again.

still same :/

[chilly ore]

i found something i will share a video now

[nimble torrent]

Again - wouldn't delete the old one. Having a comparison is valuable.

[chilly ore]

I didn't delete it either, I just moved it to a folder.

[nimble torrent]

Well, that does help you isolate the problem to the motion matching system, but it doesn't help you figure out what, inside the system, is wrong.

[chilly ore]

I replaced walk with sprint And I opened the blue one here and it started walking.

There is no loop (shaking a little) but the animation works, it's really interesting

[distant trout]

Hello! Working on star wars animation in Unreal and it's going well, but I'm stumped currently on trying to just have a simple blaster fire animation for like a soldier using his blaster gun

Best I've gotten is random blaster fire using Niagra using Hanging Particles but I'm trying to just do a simple blaster fire from the barrel of a soldier's gun? Any ideas?

[spice estuary]

Guys this is a good guide to Motion Matching Working https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/tutorial-your-first-60-minutes-with-motion-matching

[serene fiber]

whats the best way to compare 2 different humanoid skeletal meshes between each other

or easiest, without deleting one or the other and not replacing references

[brazen wharf]

compare what

[serene fiber]

lets say I have mannequin arm skeletal mesh with all bones in it and regular manny skeletal mesh aswell

if I delete the arm skeletal mesh and replace references with manny, all animations are becoming distorted, for an example during animation the upper part of character becomes really tall

as if someone is stretching the player upwards

[serene fiber]

bone hierarchy

[brazen wharf]

they should use the same skeleton asset

[serene fiber]

thats the thing

[brazen wharf]

if you want to make them swapable

[serene fiber]

if i delete one of them the animations will become distorted after redirecting the references to a new skeleton

i want to know which bones are causing issues

but wahts the fastest way to figure it out

i dont really want to go through every single bone and its parent bones and child bones

then export to blender and modify that way

[brazen wharf]

i guess you have to make your own tool for that

[serene fiber]

its tedious

so there is no shortcut really?

[brazen wharf]

not that i'm aware of

[serene fiber]

there should be a better way in future.. its 2024 and fbx support was discontinued by microsoft because of vulnerability and this should be more dynamic instead of rechecking everything.. but thats just my pov

thanks either way

[naive carbon]

does anyone knows how to disable the auto tracked folder in sequencer ? this thing just appeared and I can't turn it off ! annoying

[brazen wharf]

that's not related to FBX at all

and you can try your luck with USD if you don't trust your FBX files...

[lusty venture]

are you trying to put animations authored on one skeleton onto another skeleton?

[serene fiber]

Its what redirecting is yes

Replacing references for pending assets

In memory

[lusty venture]

i would use the ik retargeter for that

that’s not really how animation works

[serene fiber]

Im guessing its the bones

[weary glade]

can someone please help me figure out why this arm is breaking when i use this Basic IK

[lusty venture]

you’re getting problems because you’re trying to import animations from one skeleton into another directly but like you said, the bone hierarchy is different between the source animation and your target rig

[serene fiber]

I had this before happenin different situation and the reason was that i used unreal engine 4 animations with ue5 skeleton. Maybe thats the reason..

[lusty venture]

look into the ik retargeter. you can’t just import animations from one skeleton to a completely different skeleton

[serene fiber]

Okay. What about montages though? Does playing montage ignore the skeletal mesh difference?

[lusty venture]

? no

[weary glade]

😭

[serene fiber]

I mean when i play montage for the arms it works without distortion even when skeletal meshes are still different

But its when i replace the skeletal mesh that im getting the distortion

I dont get it at all

I shouldnt be able to play montage because the animations have different skeleton (not ue5 manny)

[old falcon]

First, you probably don't have the correct Primary & Secondary Axis setup
Second, your effector transform is not wired up
Third, your pole target does not seem to be wired up to anything either

[viscid willow]

What are you trying to achieve exactly? Do you have any screenshots to give some context?

[weary glade]

your right! im dumb, i didn't realize i had to have that stuff set up for it to not be broken

thanks

[weary glade]

well now im running into issues with the wrist pinching cause the arm isnt rotating at all with the hand and the other controls i made wont move with the arms and i dont know how to fix it

[viscid willow]

The way the mannequin character is set up to deal with this is corrective twist joints. I'm not 100% familiar with the first person template, but I know the third person template is set up with correctives.

Typically these are set up in a Post Process ABP, do you have one assigned to your Skeletal Mesh?

[weary glade]

yeah the upper and lower arm have 2 twist bones each

[viscid willow]

Nice, do you know if they're being driven?

[weary glade]

this is how i have the control rig set up

i tried adding these cause this was shown in the guide i was following but it doesnt seem to do anything

[viscid willow]

Cool, with twist joints their motion is either baked into the animation, or driven at runtime. In your case the twist joints will need to be driven procedurally by your hand motion because you are making these animations in the engine.

You can do this by making a new ABP and look into the Twist Corrective Node (You can also do this in control rig): https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-blueprint-twist-corrective-in-unreal-engine

If you set up this twist correction in a separate abp you can then assign it to your skeletal mesh as a post process abp: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/AnimatingObjects/SkeletalMeshAnimation/AnimBlueprints/#assigningpostprocessanimationblueprints

This will mean your twist will apply at ALL TIMES to your skeletal mesh because it runs as a post process on any manipulation to your skel mesh.

[weary glade]

alright i will check that stuff out, thanks for the help 😃

[viscid willow]

np 👍

[obsidian pawn]

Hmm, I'm having trouble with the ULifecycleAnimMetaData::OnMontageEnded. Its not recognized in my cpp

[obsidian pawn]

hey squishy, I'm trying this approach of binding to the montage ended. I found the montage ended node, but would you mind helping me understand how to set this up?

[nimble torrent]

Sure, are you doing it in blueprint or in c++?

[nimble torrent]

Weapon effects are not really animation related much. They're often triggered by Anim Notifies, but the fx themselves are effects. You'd probably have more luck asking for help down in #visual-fx !

[obsidian pawn]

I was trying it out in BP and I'm not as familiar with BP. I ended up just going the FTimer route, since the animmontage screen will tell you the time in seconds. Not sure how performant timers are tho

[nimble torrent]

Timers are not free, but unless you're doing a crapload of them, you're probably fine.

[obsidian pawn]

hmm, well with 70 bots times the fire rate of every weapon...that could be a crap ton haha

[nimble torrent]

Well, 70 agents of any kind are going to get pricey.

You'll probably need to do some pretty elaborate optimizations.

That said, Play Montage is pretty simple.

See those 'On Interrupted' and 'On Completed' nodes?

Just use those.

[obsidian pawn]

well shit, yea i could just use on completed lmao

screw c++!

[obsidian pawn]

yea, with 80 rn i can get about 40 FPS in my built project, so I'm pretty happy with that

and i havent done any optimization at all yet

[distant trout]

Gotcha thanks!

[past jungle]

Any anim wizards in here? I am fighting some subtle shaking/jittering in some character animations, and no matter how i try it doesnt seem like any compression method is getting rid of them

the jittering changes, they get slightly better and worse (and much worse) but none of the presets/codecs/error thresholds set to 0 get rid of them

[viscid willow]

Do you have a video example?

[past jungle]

its for an unreleased film 😐 the animation is overall spot on, it appears rotation might be causing it as changing it's compression method has an effect

but translation/scale dont change anything

i appreciate the response tho

[viscid willow]

okay, yeah if i had to guess i would say it's rotation error accumulating down the chain of bones. are you noticing it on the extremities of the character?

[past jungle]

this is a closeup of dialogue where theres a head tilt and its very apparent in the tilt, appears to be stairstepping instead of smooth movement

[viscid willow]

hmm, you havent changed the interpolation type to stepped have you?

[past jungle]

good call, but no 😐

[viscid willow]

okay, (this is like 20 questions) are you coming from Blender?

[past jungle]

maya, fbx - rig/skelmesh exists and animation fbx is separately imported and applied in the sequencer

exported fbx looks all good (not baked in)

[viscid willow]

right, and if you open the asset does it have the jittering? or is that only present in sequencer?

[past jungle]

good q, it is apparent in both

[viscid willow]

gross

[past jungle]

its frustrating, there were compression issues in other shots, i updated the component/codec settings and it removed the issues with other shots

just this closeup still has it

[viscid willow]

this is tricky to debug, could it perhaps be a mismatch between your authored sample rate vs the import sample rate of the asset?

[past jungle]

i have messed w sample rate, as it almost appears to be some interpolation thing also, but 24 is 24 across the board

[nimble torrent]

When you look at the curves in the sequencer - are they good?

No jitters or weird values?

[viscid willow]

what's the playback framerate in that case?

[past jungle]

24

[nimble torrent]

And if you pause on a bad frame, does it correct - or does it stay bad?

[past jungle]

lol wtf

[nimble torrent]

Welp.

[viscid willow]

ohohoho

[nimble torrent]

OK, that's weird.

[past jungle]

i had to scrool waaaay down theres like 1000 blendshapes

wow big brains in here

that is so weird

[viscid willow]

squishy's the brains of the operation

[nimble torrent]

: P

[viscid willow]

i mostly

https://tenor.com/view/spongebob-patrick-star-noted-notes-gif-26231953

[past jungle]

most look fine, there are a few funky ones

well i have a lead to go on now...

[nimble torrent]

Yeah, how much technical assistance do you have? If this were me, and I were desperate, I would check the contents of the fbx file to see if the curves are getting garbled on export or import.

Like - use the python SDK to open the FBX and look at the actual key data.

[past jungle]

im doing all the exporting/installing so ill take a look

[viscid willow]

yeah or bring your exported animated skeleton back into maya and see if those curves look the same

[past jungle]

the exported fbx looked good at first glance but now i know where to look

didnt check the curves like that

[nimble torrent]

👍

[past jungle]

owe you both a beer, thanks yall

[nimble torrent]

Best of luck!

[viscid willow]

i didnt know you COULD check the curves in sequencer like that

[past jungle]

its in the anim file itself

[nimble torrent]

It's a very handy thing! It's honestly weird that you can't see the curves in the animation viewer!

[viscid willow]

very true

[nimble torrent]

You have to load them into the sequencer!

(Unreal is not so much planned as it grew)

[past jungle]

lol im learning

[viscid willow]

lol

[viscid willow]

ah so Maya is to blame

[past jungle]

well, will dig further but appears to be coming in earlier

than UE

[viscid willow]

Sequencer, probably:

[nimble torrent]

Basically.

[past jungle]

just to follow up, ya its literally keyed in maya that way

animator went off the rails 😄 thanks again guys. man that was a long slog.

[nimble torrent]

Ahh!

Well - glad you know how to fix it now!

(aaah!!)

[past jungle]

it looked exactly like compression, so i was going crazy on those settings, barking up the wrong tree

ahhhh!!

[old falcon]

That class is my custom thing, does not exist in-engine. You'll have to define your own function to be called by the delegate

[obsidian pawn]

Ahhhhh silly me. Yea, I tried doing that to and was having trouble with it. That’s ok tho, I got a working system

[lusty venture]

i had this issue in the past, found that when exporting from maya i had to set my curves to linear for some reason 🤷

[past jungle]

im thinking this shot started in mocap or something - its truly keyed that way not just on export

but youre right i did make that linear switch at some point also

thanks for the note

[vivid roost]

How can I take an existing animSequence and export a snippet of it as a new anim sequence?

[lusty venture]

that’s so strange!

maybe if they baked down the animation 🤔

[lusty venture]

is it an asset that exists as an fbx that you have imported, or is it just in your project?

there are a few ways you can export just a snippet

[vivid roost]

It's just in my project. I got it from the marketplace.

Currently it's a pirouette and then a cut with a sword. I want just the cut with the sword.

I could change the start position in a montage but I'd like to avoid that if possible

[lusty venture]

you can duplicate the animation sequence and in the animation viewer, if you right click on the timeline an option should pop up that lets you remove frames?

or the other way is to put the animation into a level sequence and trim (may be faster this way, i have always found trimming animations in the viewer very finicky)

[novel viper]

Hello. Does anyone know how to get an active playing montage's time after pausing it?

nvm think I found it

[static vapor]

Gosh I hate for asking stuff over and over, I don't wanna bother you guys all the time xD
But how would one go about making the camera follow an animation that consists of the player jumping high as part of the animation? The root is already followed properly but once the character jumps the camera stays down

An example to make things easier

If I wanted for example to make the camera "jump" along with the character to properly follow him, would that require animating the camera itself? And how could I go about it

Unless I attached the camera to a bone socket? 🤔

[wheat charm]

How you make your current character camera? How is your jump? I

[static vapor]

I'm using the third person template from unreal so no changes there. It seems to be using a springarm to control the camera's collisions to stuff. Ss for the jump, the jump itself is inside the attack animation (taken from mixamo)

I was just trying to experiment and see if it's doable to make the camera follow the character when he is in the air during the animation. As shown in the video it's not following him

[wheat charm]

Ok, I see the problem. If you turn on root motion, it could be solved.

[static vapor]

Oh I already did, but it's only following the character on the ground

On the video, root motion is already enabled
That's why I got a bit confused

[wheat charm]

Can you show the capsule of the character? Probably the root didn't do Z axis move.

[deft furnace]

Hey, is there any way to change the direction of my attacks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC7XkWXAKoE&list=PLlswSOADCx3fG8ATHm3GDmmdGGCfPhl0y&index=7 I've been using this guide but I don't think it's ever brought up.

[signal veldt]

Hey guys, regarding motion mathing, I implemented it and it works, but i cant play a anim montage, I have a Sword combat game and my character cant swing the sword. I could do a boolean to deactivate the motion mathing before the anim montage but that seems too grotesque, do you have any idea? i found no intruction in the documentation regarding playing montages

[viscid willow]

To play a montage you would need a Slot in your ABP, ideally between your motion matching nodes and the Output pose. Motion matching isn't really intended to handle things like attacks. Motion matching has been shown to use montages as part of a traversal system but for input initiated attacks, you'd be better off playing a montage through a Slot.

[timid onyx]

Hey gang! I've been trying to hammer away at an issue for a bit now and I need some better minds to see if there is a solution.

I've got a modular character in a blueprint (split into body parts for customisation/swapping out) I'm currently using a leader pose node to make everything follow the same skeleton, which works PERFECTLY... But this means I can't use FK control rigs on certain parts (notably the face controls in the head which has it own skele and isn't in the base skele)

So I thought the easiest solution is to attach a socket/bone to another socket/bone (Head skele and Body skele share a neck bone in the same location) but it seems like you can only parent a mesh to another socket via its root/pivot point and not bone to bone. So it would mean attaching it and having to eyeball the mesh back into the correct position.

In an ideal world, I'd just attach the neck bone to the exact same neck bone and it should work perfectly... But I can't seem to find a way to do that. Any ideas on how you would go about this? Cheers!

[nimble torrent]

What do you mean by 'change the direction of my attacks'?

Like - is your character only attacking in one direction? Do you want to be able to attack behind you?

[nimble torrent]

You can do this, but too much camera movement will make people sick. If your character is going to be jumping around a lot - often it's best to just pull the camera back to be able to see the whole action, rather than making it follow more directly.

[fathom bluff]

@deft furnace like so? https://youtu.be/MTRD4utL2iE?si=UqRe38ucaxT8li5_

My dashes use the same setup as lyra - it sets an animation based off last input directions

just without the apply constant root motion

[nimble torrent]

Look up an Anim Graph node called 'Copy Pose From Mesh'. This node lets you reference another mesh and copy matching bone transforms from there.

The Leader Pose system works well for meshes that do not have additional bones, but if you need to do additional animation on top of the primary animation skeleton - Copy Pose From Mesh is your friend.

[nimble torrent]

This looks really nice! Good job!

[fathom bluff]

Thanks, it’s been interesting learning my own locomotion and combat setup 🙂

[timid onyx]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I sadly can't seem to find a lot of resources on it. Got any recommendations on a guide? Thank you so much!

[nimble torrent]

I don't have a guide, no. It matches names and hierarchy, but does not need to have the same skeleton.

Typically, you'll include the pieces of the main hierarchy one would need to skin the mesh, as well as the hierarchy antecedents up to the root. So for a face rig, you'd have the root, pelvis, spine, neck, and head bones in your head mesh skeleton - as well as your face bones.

During setup, you either have your Animation-BP reach out to it's Owner and get the main mesh from there, or you have the Pawn assign the main mesh to the Animation-BP. From there, you plug a Skeletal Mesh Component variable into the Copy Pose From Mesh component - and the pose that comes out is the pose from that skeletal mesh. You can then splice in your own animations and other animBP nodes from there, often using Layered Blend Per Bone.

[static vapor]

So I'm trying to change the animations on the blendspace and for whatever reason, this one animation I have for running is SUPER slow up until it reaches 499 speed then at 500 it plays completely fine. There is no transition in the speed whatsoever either! Any ideas what might be wrong?

[rugged shuttle]

Why do none of the Root Motion settings work with this animation? I got it off Mixamo and retargeted to UE4 Mannequin, what am I doing wrong?

[deft furnace]

I think I was more refering to how when an attack happens it points in the direction I want it to.

[deft furnace]

It only targets in the direction it's facing and not changing directions while attacking.

[nimble torrent]

Oh, this thing. I remember that I mentioned how you'd do it.

And that it's a considerable task.

[nimble torrent]

The root isn't animating.

That's why none of the root motion tech works.

The animation does not have root motion (you can see the root staying stationary, and the pelvis moving)

[heavy hedge]

I'm doing a sword attack where player can control the angle of swing. I currently have individual sword swing animations in 20 degree intervals. I thought of using blend space, but I can't seem to play a one-off blendspace animation. How and what should I be using?

[nimble torrent]

You could play two montages at once (you need two Slotgroups to play two montages at the same time), and then use a regular blend node to blend between them.

So you'd play a lower and upper sword attack simultaneously, and blend them.

[heavy hedge]

I see, so I'd effectively be building my own 2D blendspace system. I was hoping there'd be a ready to use solution in engine.

[nimble torrent]

Blendspaces are generally used for continuous or looping movement.

You can turn off looping in a blendspace, but registering the completion of the animation is harder with a blendspace than a montage.

So - up to you.

[heavy hedge]

Yea, I messed around with that, seems like a jank solution haha

Thanks for the help nonetheless

[nimble torrent]

Have you looked into state transition rules?

[heavy hedge]

Hmm, I don't follow, how would that help?

[nimble torrent]

Using the... I think it's called 'Get Relevant Anim Time Remaining'. I think that does work with blendspaces.

I think!

It's been a while.

You could use that to transition out of the state when the animation completes.

State transitions can emit events, so you could register the stop of the attack that way.

[heavy hedge]

I see, I'll look into it, thanks!

[halcyon garden]

What is the best way to fix this turn animation discontinuities?

[fallen vigil]

can anyone help with a run stop transition? my main blendspace has idle, walk and run animations in it, with Idle obviously being 0 speed, walk 450 and Run at 900 how ever it seems no matter what i do i either somehow get the animation playing again and then my character is just static or the character plays just fine but no run stop animation plays

[nimble torrent]

What do you mean by 'turn animation discontinuities'?

[halcyon garden]

Looks how he stop then start moving on other direction

on ALS is a lot more smooth

[nimble torrent]

I'm not sure what you mean. Sorry. I don't see jerking or stuttering. The characters feet even seem reasonably planted.

[halcyon garden]

Look how the character never stop moving

[nimble torrent]

I think that has more to do with the character and acceleration settings than animations?

Your character slows and then stops and then starts moving in the new direction.

The blue character appears to have nearly instant acceleration.

[halcyon garden]

It is easier to see

Here

[nimble torrent]

OK, there's definitely a hitch there.

[halcyon garden]

Wrong video

[nimble torrent]

What does your animation graph look like? ALS is enormously complicated.

[nimble torrent]

It's impressive, but it pays for that impressiveness with considerable complexity.

[halcyon garden]

It is the right config

anyway it is possible to see the problem ons taff

[nimble torrent]

You mean how he moves the staff quickly when changing directions?

[halcyon garden]

Yes

[nimble torrent]

So, ALS is enormously complex, hundreds, maybe thousands of nodes interacting, so... you will not get similar results with three.

[frail zenith]

Hey everyone. Any idea how to turn the characters head towards the target?

[halcyon garden]

Yeah ;c

ALS is too much for me and my game is multiplayer

[nimble torrent]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8skq8t_Fffk

?

[frail zenith]

Awesome thex, ill take a look at it

[halcyon garden]

I hoped somehow there was a blending between staff movements

[nimble torrent]

You could separate the upper and lower body of the character and treat them separately to avoid doing a hard blend on the upper body when changing directions.

Look up 'Layered Blend Per Bone' for that.

[halcyon garden]

But how do i avoid the hard blend on upper body?

is it a hard blend when i have a blend time

[nimble torrent]

By giving the character reactions to sudden changes in velocity. There's a lot of ways of doing it.

If someone specifically tasked me with this, I would probably push back and says "Very few people will care. This is polish. We have way more important things to focus on. Let's get the rest of the game working before we start worrying about the details of the locomotion system!"

If they overrode that objection, I would probably use a state machine that tracked character velocity and had reaction states for starts and stops based on the character facing direction.

[halcyon garden]

I think i fixed it

Look

[nimble torrent]

Good!

[halcyon garden]

This smoothing time

on speed axis

[frail zenith]

If you'd ask me. i would add an angle to the staff. so it would slightly move in the opposite direction of the movement velocity. (in blendspace)

[frail zenith]

is it nice witha damper as well?

[halcyon garden]

Using Spring damper on animation settings

[nimble torrent]

Neat! If that works, it works!

[halcyon garden]

It looks great

a lot better atleast

[frail zenith]

nice 🙂