animation

[vernal echo]

Wym stuttery?

[silent trail]

gimme a sec

If need more context then just say whatchu need

[nimble torrent]

Yes. You're looking for a collider. You can attach the collider to your character's blueprint so they carry it around when they move. You can then use their overlap events to do code - like triggering noises and animations.

[nimble torrent]

You might benefit from looking up Sync Groups:

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-sync-groups-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.3

[vernal echo]

There's no default pose?

[nimble torrent]

If you put both animations in a sync group (and the animations are designed to start and end on the same foot) then that should fix things up I think.

[silent trail]

I... to be honest I forgot how I set it up only that it works and it just goes by those two

[vernal echo]

Does the blendspace look fine in editor? (Moving it around)

[silent trail]

Like the animations? yeah it's fine, it's the same blendspace (I will change it but for now it's the same) and everything runs fine until change weapons then if wrong leg then snap.

[silent trail]

As for Sync groups yeah I saw it's used in ALS but tbh I don't know how it works, I'll try to experiment with it but ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[nimble torrent]

Animations in a sync group will blend into each other at the same relative offset from the start of the animation.

So if you blend a walk and a run, if they're not in a sync group, you'll be in the walk, and then you'll start blending and the start of the run will start playing from whatever offset you are currently in to the walk.

This means that you'll get a stutter or hiccup when you switch between animations.

If they're in a sync group, the run will start with the same relative offset as the walk, and so they should blend smoothly.

[silent trail]

Yet another sleepless night...

thanks for the tip I'll try to see if that can work...

[plain marten]

probably, I'll check

[serene fiber]

can i remove animation frames in the middle

lets say i have animation, middle (34-72) is what i want to remove but 0-34 and 73-90 i want to keep, just remove the middle part

[timber summit]

So when you set it as a dynamic variable it's like setting the var as public so it can be set. Setting it however does require you to get the node itself. (I guess there technically objects?) So if you bind to the on update and on become relevant events, you can get the node as it's type, (sequence player for example) and then set the specific variable thats been set as dynamic.

Alternatively, you can give the node a tag which will allow you to get a reference to the node anywhere else in the animbp. You can then convert to the specific node type and set the variable.

[gloomy bronze]

I have a state machine with 2 states, Run_F, Strafe_L. Run_F has run fwd loop animation and Strafe_L has run strafe left loop animation. The problem is that during transition from F->L, if the Run_F at the frame where the right foot is in front then it will cross through left foot to do the strafe. Anything I can do to prevent this?

[nimble torrent]

Oh! Weird! Very odd way to do things there. Thank you for telling me!

[nimble torrent]

This can be tricky. Are your animations all in the same sync group?

[gloomy bronze]

Yeah, I set foot sync for each animation and the sync group in the node. I really thought the sync group will do the trick but not so. Tried to use the Feet_Crossing curve like in ALS but I think that makes it worse because I will have to keep pressing move left until the animation loop around to the point where the right foot is behind the left foot

[nimble torrent]

Hmm, yeah - sync groups can prevent stuttering, but they don't prevent legs going through each other.

[gloomy bronze]

yeah, I misunderstood this, the sync group is for keeping the animation length in sync

[nimble torrent]

Generally, when I have seen this solved - either people accept that there's going to be some jank and use a blendspace (so you pass through idle before accelerating in the opposite direction) or they need something quite complicated that tracks relative foot position and seeks forwards into the file they're about to blend into to get a matching food position.

So if you're playing 'run_left' and you want to switch to 'run_right' and your right foot is in front of the left foot, then you seek forward into 'run_right' to the point with that foot position and start blending.

[gloomy bronze]

Yeah, exactly as you said, I'm going to explore the latter, I think matching foot position is a worthwhile endeavour. It's easy to be jank and call it done via blendspace but I believe in doing it right. But depends how much time I gonna sink into this. Thanks anyway

[nimble torrent]

I'd be interested to see what you come up with.

Oh!

Before you go, do you know about Animation Modifiers?

[gloomy bronze]

yeah, like in Lyra to set foot sync marker on root motion animation

[ancient marsh]

I suppose its impossible to use additive animations for a more realistic animation blendings without control rig, right?

[nimble torrent]

Yes, but they can be used to create a variety of curves, so you could use an animation modifier to create your relative foot position curve.

[gloomy bronze]

thanks for the tip but I will probably do it by hand first 😄

[nimble torrent]

Oki! Good luck!

[nimble torrent]

No, not at all. Why would you think you need control rig to use additive animations?

[ancient marsh]

two words

foot sync

[nimble torrent]

Also - additive animations aren't typically used for improving blending fidelity.

They're usually used to layer animation effects over top of other animation systems, like layering a breathing loop over idle animations.

[ancient marsh]

by foot sync I meant for feet to still stick to the ground when a lean animation goes into action

[nimble torrent]

I can't imagine using an additive animation in that situation, and an additive animation would probably require less foot locking tech because only the additive parts of the skeleton would move.

So if you don't move the legs in your additive, the leg animation would be unaffected.

[ancient marsh]

yes

but the lean animations I'm planning on using in the future has the whole waist moved to a direction

[empty mica]

hi, i m trying to transform a bone, using Transform (modify ) bone in animation blueprint, seting value in controller blueprint tick, but i m getting jitter or shake efect, when the bone rotate, any help for this?

[ancient marsh]

in blender, its fully rigged, so the legs having ik won't move much

but using that lean animation as additive would make the feet go off sync and would also clip through the ground

ruining the realism

[nimble torrent]

Why use it as an additive then?

[ancient marsh]

its complicated

[nimble torrent]

Are the numbers you're using in any way causing a evaluation loop? Like - are you reading a value from the skeleton, and then reapplying it?

[ancient marsh]

can you send a screenshot of how you're using the transform node?

[empty mica]

no, i also put tick group in blueprint before the tick in skeletal mesh

[nimble torrent]

Have you printed out or graphed the values you're feeding into the bone? Are they jittering?

[empty mica]

yes, values are smooth

[nimble torrent]

OK, what if you turn off all animations - like disconnect your whole animation graph - and just test the transform?

Does it jitter then?

[empty mica]

i m not really sure, because its t pose now, but it loo like dont jitter now

this video you can see little vertical jitter

[ivory aurora]

Not sure If this is the right place to ask this but I am trying to rig a character to the UE5 rig and as you can see on the right the foot has heels so I am just wondering how the bones should be placed. The left one is an UE5 rig and I'm wondering if I should place it like that(so directly on the foot) or do I have to place it differently so it includes the heel? I'm sorry if this is a dumb question but I'm pretty new and I want to make sure I do it the right way

[empty mica]

definitely dont jitter when disable all animation graph, and let only the transform bone

nevermind, i fixed

putting Character Movement component, and disable “Orient Rotation to Movement”

thanks

[nimble torrent]

Ah! Cool!

[empty mica]

readed in the comment of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOo_3zShhHA&ab_channel=MizzoFrizzo

XD

dont know what the deal, but its working

[nimble torrent]

Interesting!

As I always do when I see someone making a first person game with a full character model - consider not doing that! It's expensive and it's going to fight you your whole production!

[empty mica]

thanks for advise, i know that, its not fps only game, have camera changes, and i m making this for learning purposes.

[nimble torrent]

Oki! Good luck!!

[empty mica]

thanks

[solar totem]

Motion warping: dashes you to a specified location
I've tried it and it works beautifully
It dashes in a straight line to a target
However, what if you want to zigzag as you dash? Is this possible with motion warping?

[nimble torrent]

I don't think so. Motion Warping wouldn't be something that I would normally describe as a 'dash'. It would more often be described as 'alignment'. So you're warping the animations movement to align one character to another, or to an object, or to a particular position.

So the goal of the feature is to end with you in a particular place.

[solar totem]

Gotcha, okay that makes sense
I'll stick to my working custom implementation AN_Dash then
Thanks.

[nimble torrent]

Where did the arm go? A bone animation should not be able to delete part of a mesh.

[south badge]

anybody know why the physics looks like this

its rigidbod physics its so floaty idk why

[left spade]

if im new to animating, should i use blender or ue5? both are easily accessible to me

[nimble torrent]

Well, unfortunately ragdolls tend towards misbehavior as a rule. Getting them to not do bizarre stuff constantly is the exception not the rule.

So you need to tweak your physics values on the capsules, and on the constraints between them.

Also - you need to make sure none of your capsules that are not set to ignore collision with each other are intersecting in your T-pose position.

[nimble torrent]

Either is good. You'll learn similar things in both. If you're aiming to be a professional animator, right now, blender probably has more opportunities, but most animation skills are transferrable between packages.

[left spade]

thank you for your help... again..... again 😭

[nimble torrent]

[sage sierra]

anybody that could help?

[scarlet moth]

I'm trying to modify SK_Mannequin in Maya. But when exporting from Maya to FBX and importing it to UE most of the non-weighted bones are missing. Does anyone know how to fix this?

[scarlet moth]

just noticed they might not be in the FBX I'm exporting from Unreal?

I think I'm not understanding properly what these are for and why they are sometimes there and sometimes not

if I assign skm_quinn to this new skeleton it tells me they are missing

[harsh plover]

Hey there! I am swapping anim BPs during runtime with the "Set Anim Instance Class" node, but it seems to create a duplicate instance when I do. I end up with a ton of unused instances of animationBPs. How can I delete the old instance?

[simple crystal]

anyone who has time to tweek some animation i can offer $ in return

[quaint dome]

Hey, does anyone know how to make an animation sequence? im still pretty new and no YouTube videos actually explain how to make one but rather explains how to use them and its been really annoying, any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Like im not sure if im supposed to animate in unreal or if im supposed to use another app to make animation sequences

[thorn turret]

Does anybody experienced in importing characters and using them as your default character have a minute or two for me to ask a couple of questions?

[agile horizon]

I duplicated an animation sequence to create a new one based on the old. But even if I rename the duplicte, all the changes I made in it are also being made in the original, and, for whatever reason, in montages based on the origingal AS
what am I missing? How can I properly create a duplicate to edit it, without ruining the original animation?

[vernal echo]

why doesn't the ik disable when I have swimming true?

[fresh whale]

Hey everybody, I have more of a workflow question for early game prototyping: in terms of getting some animation setup (we are building a top down shooter game) is it better to try and go in and setup our own custom rig of some sort as early as possible or is it more beneficial to try and create animations to add to the default unreal mannequin?

I'm not an animator but trying to figure out the best way to go around setting things up properly, I just can't decide what the best approach is.

[nimble torrent]

Because you're not falling, I assume.

You have "If you are not falling or not swimming, run the trace".

What I think you want is, "If you are falling or swimming, don't run the trace."

So you probably want to put both of your variables directly into the 'OR', and then NOT the result of that.

[nimble torrent]

If your character is going to be of roughly the same dimensions as the mannequin (like, roughly a human shape and size) - then I would probably start with the mannequin, just because it's good to get stuff up and running quickly, and getting a good version of a character model can take a good couple of weeks at minimum.

If they're very different, like your character is a quadruped, or a vehicle, or a chibi - then it's different because the dimensions of the character might make it more of a hassle to retrofit.

I would probably still build prototypes out of assets, but I might go on turbosquid or something and buy and download a character that is closer to my target shape.

[nimble torrent]

That's really weird! When you say 'all the changes', what kind of changes are you making?

[nimble torrent]

You can make an animation sequence in multiple places. Often they're done in Maya or Blender, but Unreal has recently added the ability to create new animations inside the engine using Sequencer and the Control Rig.

[quaint dome]

Thank you so much

[fresh whale]

Its a regular humanoid biped so hopefully not too different. ☺️ I'll see how far I can get with the mannequin for now then, maybe I can try to retarget the mannequin anims to our proper character model later. My next question is there a way to get a version of the mannequin to use in Blender that has the proper rig controls?

[nimble torrent]

I don't know if there's one for the modern one, but I believe there's a plugin that works for the old UE4 one.

You can also animate in Unreal using the control rig and sequencer.

This is a quick (very quick) tutorial on how to do that!

https://youtu.be/tnZv7KQPai0

[nimble torrent]

So, in Unreal, there is a difference between the skeleton that a mesh has, and the shared skeleton that the mesh is assigned too. When you look at the list of bones, bones marked with a circle, rather than the little bone icon, are in the shared skeleton but are not present in the mesh skeleton.

If you export the mesh, the only bones present in the FBX will be the ones in the meshes skeleton, not the shared skeleton. To get all the shared skeleton bones, you have to export the mesh that created the shared skeleton.

I'm afraid I can't replicate your results. Have you done this test on more than one mesh? Rotating a socket should not cause it to accelerate away from the origin like you show.

[sage sierra]

not only accelerate also lose sense of direction

its only on this mesh

and i worked around it buy adjusting through the details panel the place

[nimble torrent]

Then it seems likely that something is wrong or broken with that mesh.

[sage sierra]

clicking and sliding

[nimble torrent]

My guess would be scale.

Often scale is the problem.

[sage sierra]

heck idk how to model things, its just a model i got as a static mesh put into blender changed pivot and made skeletal

[nimble torrent]

What's the scale on the root bone of that object?

[nimble torrent]

Well, that negative scale probably isn't helping.

That is truly surreal, is that what is happening all the time on the character, or only when playing that animation?

What happens if you show the bones?

OK.

What about the bones?

[sage sierra]

lol

this is what happens when i put 1

it becomes -7

💀

something about this mesh is way off

idk what though

i literally never made an export from blender

[nimble torrent]

You hit tilde to open the console, then you type either 'showdebug bones' or 'ShowFlag.Bones 1'

Either of those should show the skeleton.

And hopefully assist you in finding your wayward arm.

[nimble torrent]

That's very weird!

I might recommend going into your blender file and applying your transforms to all the objects!

[sage sierra]

i dont event know what that means 🥵

the mesh seems to be creating other issues too

see #ue5-general where i just described

[nimble torrent]

Genuinely bizarre.

If you look at the animation in the anim sequence viewer - is the arm there?

Not in Sequencer, the in-level animation tool, in the anim sequence viewer that opens when you double click on the animation sequence in the content browser.

(Unreal's naming decisions make things so frustrating)

Interesting.

What happens if you play that animation and only that animation on the character?

Like - you unplug everything else in your animation BP, and just play that?

Does the arm disappear?

That's interesting. You're just using the one pose?

Have you considered that this might be causing the problem?

What happens if you turn that back into a normal sequence node?

Oh! And what happens if you put another random sequence in there?

Does the arm also disappear?

[scarlet moth]

Ok, understood. But what are the shared bones with a circle on SK_Mannequin then? It's a shared skeleton itself, right?

[nimble torrent]

I think you'll find all the bones in SKM_Manny.

If you export that one, you should have all of them.

Very strange. I can't say I understand what's going on. I've never seen an animation remove part of a mesh like that. It seems truly bizarre.

Now, personally - I would still do the test.

I would go to the Output Pose, and I would plug that bad animation directly into the output pose.

Just to see what happens if it's played directly with no blending or interference.

Sure, though you should be able to use the control rig and Sequencer to edit the animations.

Your result is truly spectacularly weird.

And not something that happens normally.

[scarlet moth]

Ok, I'll try that. But still for my understanding... what does a shared bone in sk_mannequin mean?

[nimble torrent]

It means that the assigned display mesh that you would be exporting if you try to export the skeleton, doesn't have the bones.

But all of that is almost certainly irrelevant, as all the bones you're talking about are not animated.

They're procedural bones for improving deformation for the two mannequin characters.

Manny has a few more than Quin.

The only relevant bones for animation purposes are the ones in the 'Simple' meshes.

What do you mean by 'place the weapon in sequencer'?

And you can use a ton of packages to create animations for Unreal. Anything that can export an FBX - which is practically every 3D software package these days.

Personally, I would still run that test, because I find the results fascinatingly strange.

Oh 1000% not.

You have to export the animation into cascadeur. Then import it back into unreal, then assign it to the correct location.

And the import/export process often has complex wrinkles. Unreal and other software packages often disagree about lots of things.

Like what direction 'up' is.

And how big a unit is.

So your animation could come in way to big, or way too small, or facing the wrong way, or upside down.

There are people (me) who most of our job is figuring all of that out so that animators don't have to deal with that.

What do you mean by 'assigning locations'?

Well, often, if you're creating the animations - you do that during the creation process? So, you'll have a weapon bone in your character, and you'll attach your weapon mesh to that in Maya or whatever you're animating in, then you'll animate or use motion capture to move the character, and you'll use a series of constraints to have the weapon follow the character or animate on it's own depending on the move.

In the image you have here with the knife, it doesn't look like you're having the knife follow the weapon bone. It looks like the weapon bone is still attached to the characters wrist.

So, I'm not sure how you've set it up, but I would normally use a bone.

[agile horizon]

I changed the rotation of some bones on one animation sequence, and "keyed" them, they saved, I created an animation montage from that sequence.
Now I try to do a new variant of that sequence, made a copy from it, but whenever I change rotation of any bone, it changes in all animation sequences across the project

And in montages too

[nimble torrent]

It's a non trivial process. I don't know what your goals are, or your resources, so it's hard to advise you. If you are someone with several animators and lots of money and time:

• export every animation into your package of choice
• import your weapon mesh into your animation scene
• build a flexible constraint system for the weapon to mostly follow the hand and wrist, but allow for animators to create expressive animations over top of it for certain movements
• build a sheath / unsheath system for putting the knife away for parkour animations and construct a system to identify when the character should do this

It's quite elaborate.

[nimble torrent]

That's very strange. Things shouldn't work that way. That said - generally speaking, using the in animation sequence curve values to edit the rotations of the character is, I would say, not a typical way of creating new animations.

I see a lot of people doing that, and I understand why - the curves are right there when you're looking at an animation.

But I would strongly suggest instead of doing it that way, that you load your character into the Sequencer, and bake onto a control rig, and make your changes there.

And export a new animation sequence from that.

Not that I know of, sorry.

Hard to say, I don't know what your goals or budget are.

If you're just learning, probably I would try to do the process that you tried the first time again.

So make a slightly modified version of your animation in Sequencer.

And see if that recreates your bug.

[agile horizon]

I plan to create a new animations from scratch in another software, I just wanted a pair of animations for prototyping purposes right now, to test how my planned mechanics will work (block from projectile with weapon actor, not just with player character state).
So I got my block animation that covering right side, and wanted to cover left side too.

[nimble torrent]

Neat!

[agile horizon]

Funny enough, when I scrambled for solution for my current bug, I even reimported the original animation sequence into the project under different name. No luck, bug persisted.

I'll think of something)
At the very least, blocking from one side working as expected rn

Thanks for the advice

[nimble torrent]

I don't know why modifying a single animation would affect all the other ones unless you are constantly blending that animation into your character somewhere in your graph.

That's the only thing that makes sense to me.

So... maybe consider looking for a place where you might be doing that.

Oh! And also confirm that the other animations aren't actually being changed by your anomalous animation.

Like - are their key values being modified when you look in the anim sequence viewer, or are they the same?

[deep oak]

What is the way to make ragdoll animations? Like when the player falls it should feel like original like in gta games

ALS have that but i don't know how

[torpid prairie]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l27_nz7UYaY

Hey yall, I'm trying real hard to follow tutorials and documentation on how to get my Crab character into Unreal. I can import the .fbx to get the skeletal mesh, base color, roughness in there; made a material for it, went into the skeletal mesh to give it said material. Can swap the Mannequin out and get a static version in there. But I'm having a seriously hard time finalizing it by figuring out the BP and IK stuff to get it's animations working as a new character in the project

[nimble torrent]

You can create a simple ragdoll by creating a physics asset for your character, and activating it when you want the character to go limp.

To make semi-ragdoll reaction animations, like you see in GTA, is much harder. GTA uses an incredibly expensive middleware engine called 'Euphoria' to do that, which takes a large quantity of motion capture animation and blends physics over top of that.

[deep oak]

Yeah I know the simple ragdoll approach but i want some animational stuff

ALS also made that

like ragdoll falling didn't looks good

[nimble torrent]

Nobody click that.

[deep oak]

<@&213101288538374145>

[nimble torrent]

I haven't played around with the active ragdoll system much, but this is probably somewhere to start:

https://youtu.be/l4nfL9RHcA4

[agile horizon]

I'm guessing it has something to do with all the curves created after I altered the stock animation and keyed it in.
anything I can do to make the curves go away and save the animation? bake it somehow inside ue?

[nimble torrent]

If you load it into sequencer, bake it onto a control rig, then export it from sequencer as an anim sequence, that should remove the keys.

[nimble torrent]

That said, this doesn't make sense. Altering a single animation should not affect all animations. That's weird!

Have you confirmed that the individual animations are all affected on their own, in isolation?

Or does it just appear that way when you look at the full character with the complete animation BP?

[nimble torrent]

Ow!

[deep oak]

this looks simple

i want it to rolls hand legs. Try to save himself

[nimble torrent]

You'll need custom animations for that, and systems to detect the proximity of other objects, the relative state of the character.

It's going to be pretty complicated.

There's a reason most games don't do it. It's expensive and difficult, even for AAA studios with lots of money and people.

[agile horizon]

so I just imported base animation in another project, adjusted it there, and migrated it in the WIP one, worked as a charm. Still, weird

[nimble torrent]

Very weird!

[sudden sedge]

hey, I have an animation with a bone that I attach a socket to that was animated. This was fine in UE4, but in UE5 that bone isn't being animated

Any ideas why that might be the case? it's not weighted

[south badge]

ik its not the physics value cuz whenever i alter the state of the model it goes normal like you see in the video

its like there's wind acting on the ragdoll

but idk how to turn it off

[vernal echo]

Its weird because I have it in a different characters abp and it works like it is. I tries just directly plugging swimming instead in and ever other combination just doesn't want to work correctly

[nimble torrent]

Did you try the combination I suggested?

Also, when you print the two values, are they being set correctly?

[vernal echo]

No I haven't been to PC since reading

Yes

It works the same way I have it in a different abp

But not the manny

Not sure what's going on

Exact same abp

For a different character

[nimble torrent]

This doesn't make sense. I look forward to seeing what happens when you get back to your computer.

[vernal echo]

Yeah I'm as confused as you are

[nimble torrent]

When you say 'alter the state' and 'goes to normal' what do you mean?

[nimble torrent]

Do you mean the socket was animated, or you attached the socket to the bone, and the bone was animated?

[sudden sedge]

I found it was me being stupid

[nimble torrent]

Always the best kind of error!

[sudden sedge]

I had some outdated animation files in the project I was looking at

[nimble torrent]

Oh no!

[south badge]

so like if i mess with a property the ragdoll works fine but if i revert what i messed with it goes back to being messed up

and it happens with literally any property

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/221798806713401345/1264395325372764190/Unreal_Engine_5_2024.07.21_-_04.34.58.79.mp4?ex=669e6028&is=669d0ea8&hm=d331db49a076980b798a386e56d45bb6dc058c4704ffa879bac031a1dfce0483&

like in this video

[nimble torrent]

What happens if you animate the character?

[south badge]

its alr animated

[nimble torrent]

Interesting! The two videos you've linked have had the character being in a t-pose and not moving.

[south badge]

yeah it happens when its animated too

im using ue5 to render a video so i can't really fix the issue "live"

[nimble torrent]

Hmm

Well, I definitely still think it's something to do with your constraints setup.

What does it look like if you show the physics volumes?

[south badge]

hold on let me load up ue5

[south badge]

how do i make them visible?

[torpid prairie]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l27_nz7UYaY

Hey yall, I'm trying real hard to follow tutorials and documentation on how to get my Crab character into Unreal. I can import the .fbx to get the skeletal mesh, base color, roughness in there; made a material for it, went into the skeletal mesh to give it said material. Can swap the Mannequin out and get a static version in there. But I'm having a seriously hard time finalizing it by figuring out the BP and IK stuff to get it's animations working as a new character in the project

[sudden sedge]

oh now it broke again when I reopened the project

oh, the subtraction behavior is acting whack

[sudden sedge]

animation is pretty heavily defined in code

[torpid prairie]

I managed to get the idle working but now I'm trying to decipher the ABP information to swap out the mannequin with my mesh to then call all it's animations once they jump or walk

Just need to figure out why this won't let me swap out Manny for my skeletal mesh

[whole lava]

Any modern guidance on translating old cycles to 60fps? Maybe I'm over thinking it, but how long should a run cycle be frames / pose wise?

[lusty venture]

animating at 60 😵 it will vary depending on the style and look you’re wanting to go for!

[whole lava]

I was under the impression I should be in 60 for unreal

I mean I guess I could do it all ion 30 / 24 and scale it with a dope sheet

it wasn't a thing to think about back when I was learning it all so I was mostly wondering if I should keep anything special in mind

[drifting citrus]

Hi! Here comes a beginner question, but I very often run into an issue where I am not allowed to update my keyframe values in sequencer. I select my keyframe, change the value and update it, but when I move the playhead, it just pop right back to it's previous value. Any ideas why this is?

[lucid shale]

Hey, I'm kinda new to animations, is there a tutorial someone can point me to on how you can play certain animations when an AI moves from going from straight to left/right and it transitions smoothly?

[sage sierra]

@nimble torrent you were right, the scale was -0.01 on the fbx, fixed it and now it seems to work good! 🙂

[nimble torrent]

Nice! Glad that worked!!

[sage sierra]

thanks for your service btw, i see u answering alot of peoples questions

[plush swift]

Can anyone recommend a free marketplace asset to use to learn about using animations with characters? I guess i'm looking for something with a Skeletal Mesh and different Animations?
Also, I see there's "Animation retargeting", is this valuable? Do I just need to learn how to use Anim BPs?

[sage sierra]

the animations need to be tailored to the mesh its animating(even the skin matters), animation retargeting lets you with rather ease bridge the gaps between two different skeletons, allowing u to transform animations between 2 animations but its not perfect, ever.
anim bp is where u create the animation logic, you have alot of tools there that u can integrate in order to make comprehensive animation logic

you can blend, make state machines, have montages play, Create IK Rigs integrate control rigs which are a topic of its own, and u can also make things with linked anim graphs which are a different stracture to basically use multiple anim bps in one

[plush swift]

So AnimBP is where I do the transitions between anim states, and retargeting just lets you reuse anims for other characters (with caveats)? Roger that!

[sage sierra]

regarding an asset i dont really have anythig to suggest personally but i heard good things of this as its a modular mesh that uses the ue5 skeleton

but i never tried it

[sage sierra]

basically

ik retargeting takes two ik rigs for two different skeletons and it bridges the gap between them, that way when u take an animation and retarget it using an IK Retageter u get an aproximate animation that fits the new skeleton, it never works perfectly

[brittle pier]

Hey in my first person game I've got a shovel and some other few items and when you use them I want them just to move or rotate a certain way to show that they are being used, I don't use hands or sockets tho. Is this an animation thing or should I do it elsewise ?

[sage sierra]

start looking into state machines, montages & animation slots, and blending itll give u a good start

[plush swift]

I've got a basic understanding of the state machine, i'll tackle the rest next, thankyou for your assistance!!

[sage sierra]

and this is for basic animations, theyre not the best but if ure not an animator its good enough for learning, just dont get frusturated, things wont work 100%

ull have to retarget them to ue5 skeleton

[plush swift]

Oh sick! I'll grab that now 😄

[sage sierra]

im using it for my project, u can make it work

[plush swift]

Just trying to learn it all, but get stuck not knowing where to start sometimes. Thankyou again! 🙂

[sage sierra]

how do i attach to a gun 2 hands, and attach the gun to the shoulder? that way theres 3 contact points?

socket @ shoulder and then 2 IK Functions, one for each hand?

[deep oak]

The mesh always falls left side IDK why it's happening

Physical animation

[deep oak]

@nimble torrent How it is ?

[nimble torrent]

Hehehehe!

Nice job!

[deep oak]

It's looks better then yesterday one😆

[simple crystal]

is there someone who can help edit animation can offer $ in return

[deep oak]

check on fiverr there are a lot

[simple crystal]

cant find anyone andthe one guy said it was out of hisscope

it just a hurt animation but want the sequence also go 4 steps back

its really amezing how these animation works so nice, but cant even make to go 4 steps back

[deep oak]

what you wanna make?

[simple crystal]

it's a hurt animation, but want it also to move 4 steps back

like the character gets hurt in the face, but also need to move a little bit back

tried to move the calf then the thigh also the pelvis

but it's not near simple

[thorn turret]

Quick question about animations. There are a lot of unreal animations, and Mixamo has a lot. Whereas CC4/iClone aren't really compatible with Mixamo, and there doesn't seem to be the same volume of animations already out there. Is it better to just use unreal animations and re-target to my CC4 model when in unreal with IK rig etc, or is there a library with lots of individual cc4/iclone animations etc any advice is appreciated! Plus Mixamo imports really badly into CC4, the character is badly bent and deformed!

I just don't want to get down a rabbit hole for something that turns out not to be the better way of doing it 😂

This is what Mixamo and unreal animations do when imported to CC4.

[deep oak]

I have added default slot but still montage is not playing?

ignore ik trace

[brazen wharf]

is the montage set to play in that slot?

[scarlet moth]

can someone help me fix this issue? when zooming away the clothing glitches, otherwise it's fine. some kind of lod issue? this is a Metahuman and I'm using live retargeting in 5.4.3

[calm gust]

Does anyone here know a good tutorial to make animations for UE5 in blender or something like that? Like for example, if I want to replace some of the motion matching sets for something I made.
Or add original sets like for weapons and stuff?

[calm gust]

I think your character's clothes are unloading their animations when you zoom out, if you have dynamic culling, you should look into that

[sage sierra]

what could be the issue?

[scarlet moth]

I have no idea where I would find that. The dress was working on an older metahuman without live retargeting, maybe it's related to that but not sure. Although the default Metahuman clothes work fine, so it's more likely that it's some issue on the dress?

[deep oak]

After ragdoll recover my character is moving but the animation not working. Is it because of my animation blueprint?

I just have a simple 2 animations blendspace till now

<<<<Update I have found the solution, I was using Animation sequence instead of montages, When i replaced the animations with montages it worked properly>>>>

[dapper juniper]

Hey does anyone know why mouse x and y input values coming directly from enhanced input action are different in standalone and editor?

In editor the values are around 50% higher.

[lucid shale]

Hey, I'm kinda new to animations, is there a tutorial someone can point me to on how you can play certain animations when an AI moves from going from straight to left/right and it transitions smoothly?

[naive mountain]

How to IK retarget between 2 humans of different height?

Ue5 manny to Metahuman.

Wrists are cocked inward hard. Going to try to get a taller metahuman for retargeting use

[rose mural]

Is it possible to use pose assets in a blend space?

[compact igloo]

hey i could use some help trouble shooting this.
i duplicated my blueprint and the character is now stuck in idle animation. i can freely duplicate the anim bp no problem, or the game mode, or it seems like anything else. but when i duplicate the bp, it gets stuck in idle. why the heck would that be the case??
im using GASP+ALS, if anyone is familiar with that.

[kindred wedge]

It seems my footIK feet positions are set to some kind of default position rather than where the animation suggests they should go. What am I missing here? Google and chatgpt can't help me (though I don't know what to search/prompt for). 😦

This does not seem to be an issue with the movement animations, just specifically this one. 🤔

[spare kiln]

are there any good first person bow/archery animations?

[frigid totem]

What's the correct way to blend between a walk and a run animation? I put them in my blend space and end up with this:

[sage sierra]

i think it might be because the animations have different paces? i use state blending and its perfect

i just set a curve and a blend time and its perfect

[frigid totem]

Yeah that's why. I'm just not sure what to do about it

[sage sierra]

use blending

that works for me

though seems like it looks weird cus u let it stall on a transition

did u try using it in a state machine?

[scarlet moth]

What's the proper way of creating a new animation starting from the last frame (with that character position) of another animation?
Also making it easy to adapt the second one after adjusting the first one later on. I'm using Level Sequencer and bake to control rig.

1. Character sitting down
2. Character putting legs on stool

Later I might adjust the sitting position in (1), how do I then copy/paste this position into (2) for example?
I tried copy and pasting keyframes but I'm not getting it right.

[tight basin]

How much of a performance gain is the new property access and thread safe update BP features on AnimBPs?

I have a level with a lot of NPCs with very simple AnimBPs, not sure how much of a performance gain it is

[steady karma]

Hello!
I have a problem with the animation blueprint in Unreal Engine 5.3.2 and I don't know what else to do,

I have my skeletal Mesh and a bunch of animations I made
I can play this animations as assets on the skeletal and everything works fine, but If I try to put them in a Animation BP it just doesn't do anything, even in the preview window,

Anyone has encountered this problem before? This works fine in other characters is this the only one that fails
Thanks in advance!!

[sage sierra]

when doing left hand ik, would it be responsible for both the location (on the gun) of the left hand and the rotation of the palm of the hand? or would the rotation be the creation of some animatior sitting and animating the fingers? im asking this because it seems that my ik does set my hand in the right place, but the holding animation seems to be going through the gun

[inland ember]

How do I derive the wall speed from a walk cycle animation?

[bold flame]

Does anyone know if there's a way to constrain geometry to simulated cloth on a skeletal mesh? I wanna put some small, non-flexible metal pieces on a coat, and... Yeah

[steady karma]

Do you mean how to get the walk speed to affect the walk cycle animation?

[inland ember]

I mean the perfect walk speed to match the animation so it doesn't feel weird when walking.

I was using root motion originally but I don't know how to use root motion with animation warping.

[steady karma]

So, you can touch the play rate on the animation asset itself to make it match your walking at full speed and the use an Animation Blend beetween the IDLE and the Walk speed to match your speed when the character is moving slower

[inland ember]

Yes, but how much is the walk speed and animation needs to be to match. Its not like if I set walk speed to 300, I can just know which rate scale will match it.😥

[steady karma]

I just play around with it, I'm sure there is another way to get a more exact measure, but it all depends on the animation and your character walking speed in unreal

[inland ember]

Playing around..... Someone else said that I can calculate it by checking a complete full walk cycle and compare the distance it covers with root motion.

I guess I'll try out some ways.

Also it would be better if Its possible to make root motion work with animation warping. Is it possible?

[steady karma]

Yeah, but that only if your animation has root motion

[inland ember]

It does have root motion.

Animation warping doesn't work otherwise

[steady karma]

I don't know, I barely touched animation warping, maybe somebody else can help you with this

[inland ember]

Its just that I could hardly find any tutorial related to animation warping. And I don't wanna go through the docs. The wording of description don't always make things clear for me.

I guess I'll wait.

[wanton ridge]

I have a dummy question I could use a little help with. My character needs to equip a weapon (a boulder in my case) and right now that's just a static mesh I turned into a skeleton mesh and I'm attaching to their right hand. The object ended up being way too big, and I'm trying to figure out how to shrink it to a size that makes sense.

How does one accomplish that with a skeletal mesh short of re-converting the static mesh into a skeletal mesh a second time, starting with a smaller static mesh? There's got to be a way for me to transform the scale of this weapon somehow, or am I out of luck? All of the resources I found suggest that when working with skeletal meshes the only way to resize them is to change them in Blender and then re-import them in UE.

[steady karma]

You are attaching the weapon in the blueprint?
If you are doing so, you should be able to change the size of the skeletal mesh as you will with any component/Actor

[wanton ridge]

Indeed I am. We're using a template from the marketplace which does this internally when a weapon is equipped. Sounds like I can apply a transformation before the attachment and call it a day?

[steady karma]

Yes, so this blueprint attachs the weapon mesh component to the player skeleton component and binds it to the hand socket (So it's attached to the hand bone), it's attaching with "Keep Relative" so you should be able to change the wapon component local size after the attach

[wanton ridge]

Perfect, thank you. It looks like Set Relative Scale 3D & co do the trick, post or pre-attachment, which is great.

[steady karma]

Happy to hear it worked!

[wanton ridge]

Out of curiosity, is it possible to attach something to two bones at the same time? E.g. say I want to carry the object with two hands rather than the more traditional "here's a pistol in your right hand" situation. Would that work at all? Or is the expectation that you'll only ever have one parent when it comes to skeletal attachments?

[steady karma]

I think you can only attach to one bone at a time, I don't know if you can maybe parent two bones to two bones, but I don't know

[analog cape]

A bone cannot have more than one parent. I looked up solutions to your issue, and I can find a few alternative ways to go, and I'm not sure which way is best. Constraints, extra bones, IK rigs...

[lethal blaze]

hi all - i'm a bit lost on some animation blueprint fun:

i have two livelink sources - a VR headset and a mocap suit. I want the VR headset to control the root and head, and the mocap suit to control the rest. how would i go about filtering this?

[twilit turret]

i was trying to do nvidia omniverse audio2face to animate my metahuman's face. but for some miserable reason reason there just is no option to import usd animation when i right click in content browser. the entire omniverse category in the right click is missing. obviously i have the ace plugin enabled. i can live link perfectly fine.

i couldn't find any help online on this matter so i resorted to recording it as live link performance. but it just overrode the entire body animation throughout the sequence as well and destroyed my animation i had worked on for the last 10 days. it did this eventhough i didnt pick the live link thing as the body subject in the metahuman details. it was only set for the face. my pain is iimmeasurable so if there is anyway to recover my animation, let me know of that as well. i immediately tried undoing but it crashed unreal so. yea. checked autosaves and they're too old.

[wanton ridge]

On a related note, do 3d artists typically try to nail the correct final size of a 3d model like a weapon so that you don't need to worry about scaling it later in-engine, assuming there is no expectation of the same asset having multiple sizes in game? Intuitively it would seem like the answer is yes, as that reduces additional steps that might be necessary to correctly display that mesh in game.

E.g. say you have a game with humanoids of the same size, and rifles. It might not make sense to make incorrectly-sized rifles if ultimately you're going to have to adjust their size in the engine once they're attached to a standard sized humanoid.

[frigid totem]

Is there an updated version of the animation starter pack somewhere? Something that's easier to implement into a project than Lyra

[cloud lodge]

is it possible to push the arm out without reauthoring animations so the gun is more to the right?

(im not an animator lol)

[lusty venture]

yes this is correct! in our team we use the mannequin and a 1x1x1 cube to check sizing for props and assets

[analog cape]

If the arms are IK-animated and it's the gun that 'drags' the arms around, then it should be possible to add some sort of an offset to the gun's position, to modify the animation.

[analog cape]

Yes, definitely, that's the way to go for art production. But, don't be too hung up on getting it exactly right the first time, because sometimes you want things a little bigger or smaller than real life, in a game engine.

I think by default, the lens crushes things directly ahead, a little bit

[wanton ridge]

Sounds great. Right now each weapon BP comes with a scale multiplier vector variabe which I apply to the mesh if some of those fine-tunings are necessary. But yeah, at some point I will have to overcome my programmer terror of Blender and at least learn how to resize and export things 🙂

[analog cape]

I can sympathise, having an artist terror of Blender

which is probably why I use bforartists

Anyway, I have a question. Something that has puzzled me.

The highlighted object with the red circle icon. I don't know what kind of object it is, and how it seems to be located at 0,0,0 even though it is at the location where the wheel goes. If I'm making a similar rig of my own, how do I make something similar to this particular object?

[steady karma]

Of course! but maybe you are interested in making some scale changes for gameplay reasons or so

[naive mountain]

Retargeted Manny 3PP animBP to Metahuman with good results. anyway to improve the IK foot placement?

[scarlet moth]

is there any way to get some kind of hand ik on a sit animation like this? (I'm just playing it with an animation montage right now)

[nimble torrent]

Yep! You can use a raycast from the previous-frame's hand position to the ground to get a translation you can IK the hands to.

[nimble torrent]

If you're using the automatic retargeting from 5.3, then not really - you'd have to translate the character up the height of the shoes (which you can do with an animation modifier).

If you're using the IKRig / IKRetargeter system, you could apply the offset in the alignment pose.

[scarlet moth]

can you give me some more details where to implement this and maybe where to find an example? I'm quite new to all the animation stuff 🙂
I'd guess I somehow need to do in the ABP and then trigger it from the character BP when the montage finishes?

[nimble torrent]

Hmm, I haven't seen anyone doing any tutorials on this unfortunately. It's a combination of several things, and it's definitely not cheap.

Raycasts tend to be quite expensive, and one of the things you tend to need to optimize.

So here's the documentation page on traces / raycasts:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/InteractiveExperiences/Tracing/

So the basic technique would be:

• identify that you are in an animation state where you need to run this kind of process (you do not want to be doing this all the time)
• get the location of the shoulders and the hand bones
• raycast from the shoulders to the hands
• if you collide with the floor, get the hit position (the point at which the line drawn from the shoulders to the hands hits the floor) and store that
• use that stored value as the effect position (probably with an offset based on the height of your hands) for a two-bone IK system in your animation blueprint

It's not too elaborate, but it's not plug-and-play.

[scarlet moth]

Thanks a lot! I’ll give that a shot

[nimble torrent]

You can probably get away with only doing one raycast to get the relative height of the shoulders to the floor. You probably do not need to do it every frame.

Unless the character is rolling around or something.

[lethal blaze]

hi all - i'm a bit lost on some animation blueprint fun:

i have two livelink sources - a VR headset and a mocap suit. I want the VR headset to control the root and head, and the mocap suit to control the rest. how would i go about filtering this?

this is what my general skeleton tree looks like

i've been trying layered blend per bone but don't think im using it correctly / unsure if that's even the right node for this

[royal vault]

hey, im trying to do a modular rig and i cant find a fix to this problem:

all of the sockets except for the spine are at the bottom for some reason
and when i add my own they go in the wrong position

they're all at the top instead of being attached to the rig, i cant drag them to the right places. this is making no sense and all i wanna do is animate this guy for movement animations and stuff.

[frigid totem]

Is it possible for a blueprint such as a weapon actor to provide an animation or animation blueprint that it wants its owner to play while it's active?

[naive mountain]

I'm using the default metahuman retargeter With some custom offsets for the upper body. I'll try some manual offsets with the feet and see if it's an issue with the boot mesh or if they're truly is a discrepancy.

[nimble torrent]

Yeah, though this is probably not how you want to do it.

Look up Linked Anim Layers - that's the more flexible way of handling the idea of an item defining a chunk of a characters animation sets.

[frigid totem]

hmm

I'll give it a look

[nimble torrent]

They're basically a way of inserting one animation BP into another, so you can do things like sheath and unsheath weapons, blend in and out of different combat stances, etc.

[nimble torrent]

That's an interesting one. The modular rig tends to not work, but this particular problem is unusual. I haven't seen that before.

[royal vault]

i can try a control rig but that seems like itd take a while

also my rig is really weird

is there a way to just use the rig from blender and use that in unreal?

i have it rigged there

[nimble torrent]

No, unfortunately. They don't agree about what a constraint is or anything.

Wish I could help you figure out what's up with the modular rig, but it has so many issues I haven't really bothered to learn that much about it.

There are several really good youtube tutorial series about the non-modular control rig though.

[royal vault]

ok ill try that

ty

[vernal echo]

whats the best way to do directional movement without having the blendspace blend horribly

[fervent minnow]

I am currently working on the AI for my game and whenever my AI enters its "chase" phase it will lock onto the player's camera or stare at you while they chase you. It works fine except for whenever my AI first starts to look at the player. It does this weird jitter motion and I have no clue how to fix it. There is nothing online and I have tried different approaches that either break the head turning entirely, or yield the same result.

I would really love a solution to this so I can polish up the head turning and move onto the next thing for my AI.

I'm sure someone is going to point out that my code isn't optimal and I'd also like feedback on how I can optimize it. Granted I have no performance issues despite my weird way of coding, so it should be fine.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/221798778208780288/1265349212782985246/2024-07-23_11-43-45.mov?ex=66a12fc9&is=669fde49&hm=65bd012b2023e8aae96847ede990b958371112f2e62413ebdb3245172c699736&

[nimble torrent]

You can get pretty far with turning the character into the direction of movement, and not using a 2D blendspace. So rather than strafing, they just turn to face the direction they're going.

This has the added benefit of being how people normally move.

[nimble torrent]

Why do you have three look-at nodes stacked like that? Is it for the head and neck bones?

[fervent minnow]

For some reason when bringing over the rig to unreal the parenting for certain bones got messed up and as a current bandaid fix I am having to do. I couldn't find a way to do multiple bones on a single node so that is what I came up with for now.

1. the head
2. the eyes and lower jaw (includes bottom part of the mouth as well)
3. the upper jaw

The model present in the video isn't the final model and has unfinished textures, animations, and small rigging issues as stated above which will all be fixed before release.

[nimble torrent]

Oh no!

[fervent minnow]

But yeah that is my reasoning for doing the look at node 3x. I'm hoping there is a cleaner way I can do it.

[nimble torrent]

Yeah, you definitely want to fix the hierarchy issues.

The eyes and jaws should be children of the head.

[fervent minnow]

How would I go about keeping them aligned with the head?? In Blender the hierarchy works fine since they're children of the head they all follow it. So I assumed Unreal would allow me to do that here.

[nimble torrent]

If they're actually children of the head, they should follow the head if you move the head.

Just like in Blender.

The only reason they might act differently in Unreal and Blender, as far as a hierarchy goes, is if you have a non-uniform scale on one of them.

Blender and Unreal disagree about how non-uniform scale values work.

But if the jaw is the child of the head, and you rotate the head, the jaw should rotate with the head.

[fervent minnow]

Yeah, that is what is confusing me.

[nimble torrent]

When you test that in the skeleton viewer - do the jaws and eyes rotate correctly?

[fervent minnow]

Because the animations I imported from blender follow the head just fine, but when I do any form of animation adjustments in Unreal the other parts of the head just simply won't follow the head unless I do that.

[fervent minnow]

No, what happened before I added the other 2 look at nodes is the upper half of the head looked leaving her mouth, jaw, and eyes behind.

[nimble torrent]

OK, but that's not testing in the skeleton viewer.

That's using the animation blueprint.

What about the skeleton viewer?

[fervent minnow]

Oh my bad

[nimble torrent]

That's what opens when you double click on the skeleton.

[fervent minnow]

let me see real quick

[nimble torrent]

In the content browser.

[fervent minnow]

i missread i thought you meant the abp

[nimble torrent]

All cool!

[fervent minnow]

yeah 😭 that isn't right

im wondering if its because i used the rigify addon in blender.

is there by chance an addon i need to enable in unreal to get compatibility if that is the issue?

[nimble torrent]

Well

So, unfortunately - rigify tends to add a bunch of additional bones to the armature in blender. There's a big difference between a skeleton (which is a collection of bones that a mesh is attached to) and a rig (a collection of controls that allow an animator to manipulate a skeleton).

In Blender, often the rig and the skeleton are kind of smooshed together into a single armature, which when exported into Unreal, tends to create a lot of extraneous bones that don't do what they used to do in Blender.

In my experience, I have often needed to keep the 'animation rig' and the 'export skeleton' separate in Maya and/or blender, so that I can export 'clean' versions of the skeleton, mesh, and animations.

[fervent minnow]

i see, so how should i go about rigging and animating in my workflow from blender to UE5? any like pointers to forums, videos, etc would be appreciated.

on another note I still need to figure out why when the AI first starts looking at the player that she does a weird twitch.

[nimble torrent]

My guess would be a single frame of a bad value in the Camera Location. Try printing that value and see if on the frame where the glitch happens, you have a weird or bad value in there.

[fervent minnow]

alright, thanks i'll do that real quick.

[nimble torrent]

That's a tricky question. There are a lot of different ways to do it.

There's a blender addon called 'Game Rig Tools' which I haven't used, but might be useful for you.

They have both a pay-what-you-want plugin and a youtube series that might help.

Again - haven't used them myself, but when I went looking, they appear to have good reviews.

[fervent minnow]

This is my first time trying to import a full on rig to a game engine so I am bound to mess up somewhere.

[nimble torrent]

https://toshicg.gumroad.com/l/game_rig_tools

[fervent minnow]

I'll check it out

thanks

[nimble torrent]

Like, for me - I created just a skeleton in Blender, and then animate in Control Rig inside Unreal.

But if I was working with people who wanted to animate in Blender, then I'd create a skeleton armature, that just consists of deformation bones, and then I'd duplicate that, and create an animation rig over top of one of the copies, then I'd constrain the skeleton armature to the animation rig, and I'd bake onto the skeleton armature to export my animations.

[fervent minnow]

Bit confusing, I'll have to figure out what most of that means.

[nimble torrent]

It is, unfortunately, a bit confusing.

[fervent minnow]

so, as i was already thinking what is happening is that when the LookAt node is called for some reason the camera's position isn't be accounted for until a frame or two later where it then quickly snaps and corrects itself.

[nimble torrent]

What value does 'Look Alpha' start at?

Does it start at 0?

[fervent minnow]

yes

[nimble torrent]

Hmm

[fervent minnow]

i tried messing around with some lerping to get it to transition between 0 and 1 which just

causes her to not look at me at all

[fervent minnow]

the thing is i already tried accounting for this by delaying the look at nodes to happen after 0.1-0.2 seconds. presumably this is after retrieving the camera coordinates.

[nimble torrent]

Look up the FInterp functions for this.

[nimble torrent]

Using time for this is probably bad. You probably want to figure up why the alpha value is being set to 1.0, while the camera values are bad.

You could pad against bad camera values by testing to see if the camera location isn't at 0,0,0.

Like, it's Length is at least 0.5.

That would avoid the problem, but doesn't fully answer the question as to why the camera isn't providing good values right away.

[fervent minnow]

I can try but I think the reason why her head is snapping is because she is looking at 0, 0, 0 world coordinates (which is her feet basically), then the engine quickly corrects itself causing the jitter.

[fervent minnow]

May be because I'm casting which isn't optimal, i'll try messing around with getting the player's camera a different way rq.

[nimble torrent]

No, it's not that. The 'don't use casting' advice is reasonable in certain optimization conditions, but Unreal is fast. You have one character. That is not the problem.

[fervent minnow]

Perhaps, I still want to see if retrieving the camera in a different way is faster and will allow it to work.

[nimble torrent]

No, I mean - for certain optimization due to casting one character one time is not the cause.

[fervent minnow]

I was wrong 😭

[nimble torrent]

That said, sure - go ahead. It's possible that other ways of accessing the camera may avoid the first few bad values.

[fervent minnow]

Let me try doing the Finterp thing you suggested.

[nimble torrent]

It will still probably display some kind of error. If you want to get rid of the problem without understanding it, testing the length of the camera location is probably your best bet.

Just don't set the alpha to 1.0 if the length of the camera location is less then a small number.

[fervent minnow]

alright i'll test that as well.

[fervent minnow]

ignore the messy lines i'm just quickly throwing this together. this is what you meant right?

[nimble torrent]

Yeah.

[fervent minnow]

whenever i do this her head still twitches so im gonna try the Finterp thing now.

[nimble torrent]

Interesting. It shouldn't.

[fervent minnow]

let me record it and slow it down to see if i can see anything weird

[nimble torrent]

I might also try printing the 'Look Alpha' value.

[fervent minnow]

i have it set to print out the length of the camera

[nimble torrent]

Just to see if the look alpha is on when it should be off for some reason.

Because if you see the issue and the look alpha is off then something else weird is going on.

[distant trout]

For animation retargeting, my friend is offering to do it but through blender, just wanna confirm that it should be fine?

Just sending him the animation and the mesh I want it in and importing that to Unreal works just as well as making an IK Rig re-targeter?

[nimble torrent]

It might! It will depend on their process!

And you will probably have to reimport everything. Meshes, skeletons, animations, etc.

If they're changing the skeleton.

[fervent minnow]

@nimble torrent

Any ideas on what could be happening?

huuuuuh???

[nimble torrent]

That's very strange.

[fervent minnow]

why does her head snap when the look alpha is at 0?

here, maybe i'm doing something wrong in the blueprint.

[nimble torrent]

Not sure. OK, so... what happens if you disconnect all of the head lookat stuff?

Like, you don't delete it, you just fully bypass it in the animation BP.

She should stop looking at the player.

[fervent minnow]

let me check

[nimble torrent]

But I am interested if there is still that error.

[fervent minnow]

i think she just looks straight ahead without any twitching if i remember correctly

yeah

no twitching

its being caused by the look at nodes possibly?

[nimble torrent]

It seems like it must be, though it's very odd that they would be active with an alpha value of zero.

They should be inactive. They should be being fully bypassed.

[fervent minnow]

let me show the details panel of each look at node

that way you can see if i did something wrong

[nimble torrent]

Unfortunately, I have to go! Best of luck!

[fervent minnow]

alright, thanks for your help.

[sweet oak]

Can anyone give me a quick overview of how to make a bone on my character stretch?

I have tried a bunch of things like giving the stretch bone a child bone and transforming it's position in ABP, and giving the stretch bone it's own ik full body chain with stretch enabled in its own ik rig (but couldnt find a way to position the ikgoal in ABP) etc etc

Any ideas? 🤔

[fervent minnow]

[fervent minnow]

So this is what worked for me.

1. I set the Look Alpha to a boolean value.
2. Inside of the details panel I set the blend in and out time to 4.0
3. Set the curve.
4. Then boom its fixed.

I am really unsure as to why it wasn't working before, maybe an engine bug or I was doing something wrong but this seems to work great for me. Plus I get more of a natural control over the transition with a curve which I don't get with the float value.

[fervent minnow]

I wish I could help but I am quite new to this animation stuff for unreal. If it was just solely blender I could help out.

[nimble torrent]

Neat! Glad you got it working!

[nimble torrent]

Unreal handles non-uniform scale very weirdly, and in a way that basically no other 3D tool does. It makes scaling bones in the skeleton a really dubious proposition. Technically you can but the results are likely to be exceedingly weird.

If you want a character to stretch part of their body, your best bet is to translate them, possibly with several additional bones spread out along the length of the stretching part to provide greater control.

[serene steppe]

Has anybody here worked with the copy motion node? I'm trying to wrap my head around the hand and elbow IK noted in the brief description of its setup.

https://eoshelp.epicgames.com/s/article/Using-Copy-Motion-node-for-layering-with-Motion-Matching?language=en_US

[sweet oak]

Yeh I'm starting to notice that 😅
I had some luck since posting and found out how to move a stretch enabled (full body) ik goal to the right spot but then all manner of demonic deformation happened with the character, a from the full body ik moving other goals and b from the annoying point that the start bone of my stretch ik is a child of some bone and the position I want to move its goal to is a a bone that's child to some other bone, so of course the local positions don't match 😅😥

I wanted to make procedural stretch bones instead of corrective bones for joints, but I can definitely see now why everyone just uses the corrective bones/poses etc

[nimble torrent]

Yeah, of all of Epic's decisions in creating Unreal, the scale one is truly bizarre.

[nimble torrent]

Is that in the engine now?

[serene steppe]

It doesn't sound like it'll get added -- the linked post indicates they've copy/pasted it out of Fortnite and don't plan to support it.

But they've provided the source files for it, and I've got a project set up using them, but there are a lot of variables to configure. I'm having trouble deciphering what does what

[nimble torrent]

Ah! Oki! I only vaaaaaguely remember seeing something about it in one of their videos a while ago.

[serene steppe]

Yeah! I just watched some of the GDC 2024 presentations which got me started down this path

Honestly, with how pleased they seem to be with the Game Animation Sample, I'm guessing 5.5 will have its own native solution for item handling. It'll be nice to play around with something now though 🙂

[nimble torrent]

We then apply that additive to hand and elbow IK effectors via the Leg IK node.

This... doesn't make sense.

Based on their graph, it looks like Copy Motion is setting the hand and elbow ik effectors, that are then used in the Leg IK node to position the limb.

But the way they have that written, it sounds like the Leg IK node is applying the additive to the IK effectors?

And that's very clearly not what's happening.

[serene steppe]

I think that their setup prior to copy motion is setting up the IK effectors, then copy motion is doing some blending between the current pose, the historical pose, and the ik effectors

[nimble torrent]

Possibly!

[serene steppe]

This is the copy motion node. And it's another thing I'm confused about -- it uses a single bone as the base. Maybe we're supposed to use the weapon hand?

[nimble torrent]

Hard to say!

No idea I'm afraid. If you figure it out, I'd love to hear how it works, but I think you're probably on your own with that one.

[serene steppe]

Yeah! It feels like I'm close to something, but I'm just a turtle that's wandered into a library. There's lots of knowledge there but I can't make heads nor tails of it!

Yeah, if I figure it out I'll make a video on the setup at least

[serene steppe]

Oh and one of the first comments in the source indicates that it might get replaced with Control Rig 🙂

// Highly experimental plugin. There's a strong chance that this gets replaced with Control Rig functionality after initial exploration.

[stable hill]

I am seriously struggling with the modular control rig. I re-rigged my character to try and fix the knees bending inward. And now when I use the modular control rig, it brings the feet up into the thigh...
I have double checked all the orientations, scales, etc, and everything looks correct to me

[scarlet moth]

I got it working 90%, wasn't that hard actually 🙂
The only issue I have is joint target location, I don't completely understand what to set this to.
So my effector location is the location of the trace hit in world space, that seems to be fine, as the hands are positioned correctly.
I experimented with joint location, lowerarm, upperarm, etc., but nothing works for both hands.
The description says "the location used to orient the joint bone". Is the joint bone the next bone in the hierarchy?
So hand_l's joint bone would be lowerarm_l?
In that case, the lower arms should be targetting outwards, like the arrows in the picture? But how do I get a location/direction like that?

aaaah, now it clicked in my head...
I can just use a local bone location, which I can figure out by looking at the skeleton!

[nimble torrent]

There you go!

Nice job!

I was going to say 'it's the middle joint, the elbow!'

[scarlet moth]

Hmm, now I found an issue, the hand placement doesn't work on different angles.
On the screenshot above I added too much offset and on a more gentle angle they're now floating.
Without offset it looks like this. The trace hit location is correct, but it looks like it's not placing the hand exactly there, but lower? 🤔
Is it correct to set IKbone to hand and effector location space to world space with the trace hit as location?

[rain osprey]

Are there any really good courses on making existing character mesh's work with the UE5 manny?

I have mesh's i want to get to work nicely but theres some problems like the arms moving too far etc, i think maybe someof it can be fixed with weight painting but im not sure

Im happy to pay for good courses

[steady karma]

So answering for this in case someone in the future encounters the same problem, this character was rigged with autorig pro in Blender and exported using it too, seems that there was a problem with the exporter that was making a kind of broken unreal rig, my solution was to export an ANIMATION instead of the rig file, and somehow that didn't include the definition to the Unreal rig that was breaking in Unreal, there surely is a better solution but it works now

[crimson turtle]

Hello, i'm not an expert into animation but i was wondering. If we make an animation with the default rigged character. But we would like to have an animated weapon. as well. Can we animated the weapon on the the default modele and attache that animation to the default model. knowing that default doesn't have any weapon. so there is no rig between the weapon and the body. so if i animated a weapon base on rig of the weapon + body. how can i attach that animation to the animation of the body.

[naive mountain]

I'm late to the party, but can we see your IK node settings

there are variables for preferred angles & max angles

[naive mountain]

google search various arrangements of the terms "unreal engine attach gun animation bones" and you can find some good leads

[harsh oyster]

Hello there ladies and gentlemen!

Please i would like to humbly ask for an advice regarding animation retargeting from Epic's Game Animation Sample project (the new motion matching template).
As you can see in the image when the character is performing it's climb animation the hand is not perfectly placed over the edge like the sample model, yet the Hand IK seems to be placed exactly as the model... there is a small difference in the model scale
between the models but overall animations are looking great, just those who need to place the hand over some obstacle are not perfect yet.

Any suggestion is very appreciated, thank you!

[naive mountain]

This is IK animation retargeting, correct?

[harsh oyster]

Yes it is! I'm using the new auto retargeting from this Sample

[naive mountain]

You are correct, it is because of scale difference.

I just solved this myself last night lol. But it was easy becuase I simple imported a tall metahuman that matches the scale of the ue5 Manny. Retargeted. And then used the same animations on my medium height metahumans.

Does your target skeleton come with any compatible counterparts? like a female soldier that might be shorter

if not - you can do some manual tweaks per-animation (yes you would need to tweak retargeter settings > retarget individual animation > test results > repeat if needed)

but if you're lucky, you may be able to apply your custom tweaks to the entire animation pack, or certain types.

step 1. dont use auto retarget

[harsh oyster]

Ahh i see ! thank you i will have a look at it

[naive mountain]

step 2. Inside retargeter, ensure both IKRig assets have properly set up chains & whatnot

step 3. inside retargeter, select IK goal in Chain Mapping window, play with settings to fine tune hand and feet.

leave blend to source at 1 or the IK will be gradually disabled

step 4. click Asset Settings at top right to move preview models, I recommend setting Target Mesh Offset to 0/0/0 so you can see the characters overlapping, while fine tuning, during animation playback.
fyi Target Mesh Scale does not effect end result. Recommend leaving this at 1 as to not fool yourself into getting different results.

finally: this does not produce the quality of results that would come from 2 models being similar & of same scale. When retargeting more than 1 animation at a time after applying IK goal offsets, only retarget groups of similar animations. Different retargeter assets for different types of actions of locomotion states.
For example, I IK retargeted some sprinting animations after applying static IK goal offsets. But using the same static offsets for the crouching/sneaking animations produced an undesireable result.

[harsh oyster]

@naive mountain thank you very much!

[naive mountain]

You're very welcome. Unreal retargeting still has plenty of work to do. The "auto" retarget option is a joke!

[rose mural]

Is it possible to implement custom rig graph functions in c++?

[serene steppe]

I've found that checking "Enable IK" in the retargeter asset will get the hand position pretty close. You can also play around with locking in the IK X and Z locations, to keep the hands at an appropriate width if you prefer that.

That does affect the running animation, so you'd also want to figure out how to toggle on and off IK depending on the animation. I haven't done anything with that yet, but it looks like you should be able to set it on the IKRetargeter with a Set Global Settings in Retarget Profile node.

[harsh oyster]

Interesting! thank you for letting me know 👍

[serene steppe]

No problem! I'm no animator, so I like to use the animation tools with as few tweaks as I can get away with 🙂

[nimble torrent]

Yep! Though doing so is a bit fussy, because you have to define the graph node and the actual graph logic in separate classes. I've only done it with animBP nodes, but I imagine that Control Rig nodes work similarly.

[scarlet moth]

sure 🙂 is anything else modifying the effector location?

[spare pulsar]

Hello. Can someone guide me how to update this blueprint? I migrated it from 5.1 to 5.4 and some things are missing. When I look up for those variables that I need, they do not exist

[reef hare]

I have scene components on the steering wheel of my car (see the white spheres), and I'm using FABRIK ik and the world transform of the scene component to get the character's hand on the wheel. But when the car moves the IK starts lagging back and I can't figure out why. The effector transform gets updated every tick and the tick interval is 0.0 for the car and player.

[rose mural]

how did you do this?

[serene steppe]

I've got the node doing something! The motion copied location (pink) is now separated from the base (purple). I think once I figure out how to control the elbows it'll start to look recognizable.

[spare pulsar]

could anyone help please ? 🙂 :/

[stable hill]

Okay, so I finally figured out what issues I was having with the modular control rig.

When adding the legs, it procedurally creates two ik ctrl leg_*_pv_ik_ctrl and these by default go to the root, which cause the legs to twist all terrible, but manually moving them out away from the mesh fixes the FK.

Since it is procedurally generated there isn't a way to default it away, afaik. but manually moving it fixes my issue

[opal hazel]

Anyone knows what is the advantage of using an Animation Blueprint Template rather than regular ABP inheritance?
Both can be inherited from and the child of a regular ABP can override it's parent skeleton and variables.

For example, I have a ABP_Bicycle which inherits from a ABP_Rider because they both need to use the same state machine, but their anims and skeleton are different. No templates involved.

It was a few week backs, but in the end we were able to sync two animation graphs by making them share a single state machine using inheritance and asset override to change the animation variable and the skeleton.

There were some part of the anim graph that needed to be overriden, and for that we used Linked Anim Layers since you cannot override the anim graph when inheriting from an ABP.

[nimble torrent]

Neat! Nice job!

[serene steppe]

Thanks for sharing! I've run into that leg issue as well and wasn't sure how to fix it

[opal hazel]

Wrong reply I think 😛

[serene steppe]

Oops! Yeah I was shooting for one message higher

[nimble torrent]

Templates feel really undercooked honestly. I don't think they're a feature that should be considered production ready. I haven't used them in a large project, but the times I've played around with them, they feel like just a less well supported kind of inheritance.

[nimble torrent]

You make a plugin, then you define the two classes. You're going to need to know C++ pretty well to do it, and be careful with Unreal's templates, as they're a little confusing the first time you use them - but if you look at how Unreal made their own nodes, it's not too hard to figure out.

[nimble torrent]

This is a ticking order problem. You're trying to read a value and use it before it is updated for this current frame.

So you're getting the last frame's coordinates, which is why the error increases when you move faster.

There are functions that let you control the tick order. They're called 'Add Tick Prerequisite Actor' and 'Add Tick Prerequisite Component'. If you make your car the prerequisite of your character, this should solve the problem.

[drifting citrus]

Hey! I am working on a product animation where I am using some additive animation tracks. When I render out my test render with only 1x1 samples everything animates correctly, but as soon as I add samples my animations gets skewed. Is there an obvious reason and hopefullty workaround for this?

It works again correctly when I disable the additive tracks..

[reef hare]

Even after adding the car as a prerequisite actor to my character (or vice versa) I'm getting the same result unfortunately

[nimble torrent]

Hmm - are you reading the cars position or a bone position?

Because I think it's possible that the car actor is updating before the car skeletal mesh?

Have you tried setting the skeletal mesh as the prerequisite?

[reef hare]

I'll try now, I have a scene component on the steering wheel, and I read it's world transform

Fixed! Thank you so much!

Had to add it on the skeletal mesh of my character

[nimble torrent]

Hurrah!!

[naive mountain]

I wouldn't worry about the variables you're putting in.I would click on the node.Look on details and see if there's clamp settings or something of the sort relating to angles

[fast dew]

question for you guys- is there a way with an animation blueprint to transform a bone (and all its children) to the location of a bone on the parent's skeletal mesh?

kind of like a copy pose from mesh, but for a single bone? lol

i have 6 different body types in my prototype and like 30 different heads (that all have different proportions/skeletons), so rather than making 180 skeletal meshes I'm hoping I can just offset the heads to the correct positions

[fast dew]

or like- the Copy Bone node, but with the ability to specify a source bone on the parent mesh...

[fast dew]

hrm.... i might have figured something out but i dunno how hacky it is. i'm using the event graph to grab the transform of the parent mesh's bone in the Animation Update event, and then using Modify Bone in the anim graph

[storm oar]

Curious if anyone is using morph targets and cloth simulation on the same skeletal mesh. There is a deformer which seems to support this, but I haven't had luck getting it to work, and saw others struggling with it going back to at least May. I tested in the latest 5.4 release.

The deformer I'm referencing is: DG_LinearBlendSkin_Morph_Cloth

[nimble torrent]

You can parent things to bones. So you could parent your heads to the spine / neck.

[scarlet moth]

The node settings are in the screenshot as well 🙂
Here's a better visualization, it's placing the hands lower than the trace hit.
Depending on the angle I can't set the same offset

[cobalt skiff]

Hello folks I've been stuck on a problem for quite some time now: essentially I am trying to make my character run and shoot at the same time, and I followed the official UE5 documentation on this. However, my animation montage is acting weird in two ways:
1, it keeps looping even though the loop option is checked off
2, it gets interrupted every time and I don't know what's causing the interruption.
Does anyone know what could be the problem? Any help would be appreciated!

here's my animation graph

[silent trail]

Anyone that's taken a deep dive into ALS, what's this for? I know it's a Curve on the actual skeleton model but where is it used and what does it do exactly?

[timber summit]

Does anyone have any tips in regards to handling different types of item holding items? For example, if the character is holding a rifle, it'll be a two handed, if it's a pistol it might be just a single hand.

I have a rifle holding anim which looks ok but using the same method for a one handed item looks stiff so I thought I'd seek some possible suggestions.

[nimble torrent]

How are you playing the montage?

[nimble torrent]

This is one of the scenarios where a Linked Anim Layer isn't a terrible idea.

Otherwise, you can separate the left and right hands using Layered Blend Per Bone's, and specify that the pistol only overwrites one hand. It does add complexity, but that's what happens when your design gets more complex.

[nimble torrent]

Generally speaking, IK setups have limits on how much they can correct an animation before you start needing a new animation or pose. Typically this is ~10% for it to look good, and 20% if you're OK with some jank.

[timber summit]

Yea I was thinking about separating out using the Layered Blend Per Bone but not sure on the best way to denote when an anim should only play on a specific bone or all off them.

[nimble torrent]

That's going to depend on how and where you're storing the animation setups per item.

Generally speaking, if you're mapping some amount of Things to another set of Things - I always recommend putting that into a third Thing.

So rather than having a list of animations in the Anim BP for weapons, or having a list of animations on the weapon - I recommend making a Data Asset that references the weapon and the animations.

This tends to be cleaner as you add more of both things during development.

[cobalt skiff]

I am using a Montage_Play node in the ABP's event graph. Before the node I called Is_Montage_Playing to check if the montage is still active, but the montage gets interrupted everytime so Is_Montage_Playing always returns true.

[nimble torrent]

In that data asset, you could add variables that control if they go into the left or right hand, or both.

[nimble torrent]

What kind of montage is this? To be clear, it's weird, and there's no obvious reason I can see why it would be displaying this behavior.

I would check first if I were somehow calling Montage_Play too often. That seems like the first place to check.

[timber summit]

I currently have an item object that defines a multitude of data for the item which when equipped is used to set anim sequences in the animBP. (I might switch this to a data asset specific for anim related stuff at a later date) Currently just an holding idle, aiming and then a montage for when said item is being used.

So at the moment, I can define the holding anim, just need a good way to denote at which bone it should blend from. At the moment it's just an upper body blend which of course isn't great for all items.

[cobalt skiff]

It's an animation montage derived from a animation sequence from the anim_starter pack. Even if Montage_Play is called too often shouldn't Is_Montage_Playing return true for the majority of time?

That's why I am so confused

[nimble torrent]

Yeah, on most real projects I've seen, most of the time, you end up having a left arm, right arm, and upper body split.

[timber summit]

Yea, a left, right and upper body split makes sense. Any ideas on the best way/place to denote this? On the anim itself with a curve perhaps or just a variables somewhere?

[nimble torrent]

I would still check. Right now, you have an undesirable and inexplicable behavior. The first thing I would do to debug that kind of thing is to confirm that I can deactivate the behavior in the way that I expect.

That's why the first place I would check is 'How am I this, and is it being called the way I expect?' and 'Can I stop it from being called?'

That's the first place I would look.

[spare pulsar]

has anyone worked with the AnimToTexture Plugin?

[nimble torrent]

You could use an animation metadata on the animation, but typically I would expect that for a particular object, you are likely going to have similar behaviors. So a pistol will always go onto one arm, for example.

[cobalt skiff]

Got it. Thank you for your help!

[timber summit]

Ahh ok, so I could create 3 meta data objects for each of the splits and then just define in the animation? How would I get access to the data from the animBP?

[nimble torrent]

Hypothetically? I would probably not do it that way. You can read the metadata from a sequence (or, I think, a montage) if you have a reference to it.

So if you're holding your animation references on your item, it would be possible to get the anim metadata from the sequence.

Also - you wouldn't need to create three metadata classes, you could instead create an Enum, and have one metadata with an enum property that's like 'Override Type' and have three options 'Upperbody, LeftArm, and RightArm'.

[rain osprey]

Does the default third person Manny control rig have IK controls for its hands etc?

Im watching some tutorials but mine doesnt seem to have them

[nimble torrent]

I don't think it has IK controls, because controls only exist in Control Rigs.

It does have IK bones setup though.

So if one wanted to use them, they are available.

[scarlet moth]

Mmmhkay 😦 Thought I was almost there.

[nimble torrent]

That said, the behavior you see in your last two screenshots seems to imply that your IK system is deactivated.

If the wrists were being set to the height of the ground, I would expect the character to look bizarre, but not for the arms to go through the ground.

[timber summit]

Ok, I think I've got an idea of how to proceed. So I currently have a function that gets called when a new item is equiped where I can get the relevant data so I assume it's just the 'Find Meta Data By Class' node, cast and then get the relevant data (not forgetting to handle if no meta data is found)

[nimble torrent]

I believe, for animations, the function is 'GetAnimMetadata' because Unreal never does something once if it can do it many different ways to maximize confusion.

[scarlet moth]

Uuuh, just figured it out! It's the control rig at the end of ABP Manny, if I bypass that it works. Although that's just foot ik, so it shouldn't interfere?

[nimble torrent]

Not sure. That's depends on how you setup your control rig.

[scarlet moth]

Ok, at least I can continue now 🙂

One other thing, in the sequencer in control rig I can move an arm like this, but when playing the baked sequence it looks different (realistic), which makes sense
Is there a way to forbid a movement like this in the sequencer?
The problem is that my animation always looks different later because I'm probably moving the hand in a wrong way

[nimble torrent]

It's possible to do that, but you have to do it during your construction of the control rig.

Right now, you're translating an FK rig, which is generally not a good idea, and I don't know why Epic didn't lock down that behavior in the default Manny rig.

[rain osprey]

Yeah sorry i was asking about the control rig

[nimble torrent]

Yes, there are IK controls on the default manny control rig. They are hidden by default. Look for a boolean value called 'fk arm switch' or something to switch from FK to IK.

[rain osprey]

brilliant thank you i will look now

[scarlet moth]

Hmm ok, this is Metahuman_ControlRig btw. But for lowerarm and hand for example I only see fk's, how would I move them?

[nimble torrent]

Same as what I just told XeLaD, you should look for a boolean value called 'fk switch' or similar.

That said, preventing you from translating the FK arm would require you to edit the control rig and lock the FK translation tracks.

[rain osprey]

Would i be looking for that in the control rig asset or inside like sequencer?

[nimble torrent]

Either, though if you're animating in sequencer, it should be in the list of tracks.

[nimble torrent]

Those are the ones, yes.

[scarlet moth]

Ok, this gives me these, but when selecting them I don't get a transform to move them? 🤔

[rain osprey]

yeah same lol

i didnt check in sequencer

but the controls dont appear in control rig when i set them to visible

[scarlet moth]

for the foot it's the other way around, transform there on IK, not on FK

but hand is different

[nimble torrent]

That has not been my experience.

The IK controls of the hand look like a box.

[scarlet moth]

they do on the foot yea, but the hand ones don't appear 😒

[nimble torrent]

That has not been my experience.

[rain osprey]

same here

this is fresh stuff too

Maybe UE bugs

[scarlet moth]

omg

I found it

then they appear

[nimble torrent]

Yeah, those are the ones I meant.

[scarlet moth]

also works with the booleans in control rig set to false

holy shit man, so much stuff to learn

you're my life saver @nimble torrent

[nimble torrent]

👍

[rain osprey]

@scarlet mothWhere are those tick boxes?

[nimble torrent]

They should be under 'global_ctrl'.

[scarlet moth]

They are not there in an additive layer, cooommeee on lol

they are generally not there in any section I add

[nimble torrent]

They're not meant to be animated I don't think. Switching the ik/fk switch is meant to change viewport interaction.

[scarlet moth]

but how would you then animate the hand?

[nimble torrent]

The hand is meant to be animated, the switch is not.

At least, I don't believe they intended it to be.

I'm not an expert on their control rig decision making.

[scarlet moth]

oh god

you just tick them in the first section

then they are automatically there in the other sections

it's kind of unintuitive

[naive mountain]

The full body Ik node has more functionality and customization. You might have success with that. I believe there's clamp angles hidden in c.Plus plus for this simple type mode that you're using.

[scarlet moth]

or my brain is smushed after all the fiddling

[naive mountain]

Yeah, your brain is most certainly going to be mushed after diving into all of the things you have been.

Just understand that we are on the forefront of this technology, and it's really up to us to figure it out.

[scarlet moth]

yea, need a break soon and just work on something I have experience in for relaxation

[naive mountain]

You are the main character

https://youtu.be/I7gxfe0h4TY

[scarlet moth]

now of course activating these checkboxes breaks my existing animation, you need to rebake to control rig first
hope I can save my additive layers

[mint granite]

hi guys, what is the Additive Identity Pose for

[misty dagger]

Do you guys have any recommendations for full body custom rigs with facial bones and finger bones tutorials?

I can only find people using the default ue mannequim and I have no idea how do you mix that with custom rigs with facial bones and fingers.

[patent gull]

I feel like there's a dumb reason I'm overlooking. I'm following a pattern I got from a Yarrawah's characters which adds child skeletal meshes to the main character mesh. The main mesh is the default Manny or Quinn. The child meshes are the skeletal meshes for the character. Yarrawah then sets the main mesh visible to false.

In my attempt to replicate this pattern, the child meshes animate just fine, unless I toggle visibile off for the parent mesh (highlighted in the screenshot). At that point, the child meshes all stop animating and drop down about 10 units in the Y axis. It's very strange.

I've checked all the settings for the parent mesh and body mesh between the Yarrawah example and my implementation. They are the same.

Is there an obvious answer for this?

I've attached screenshots of the Yarrawah example pattern and my shorter implementation of it. Also, screenshots with and without rendering on

[regal mulch]

Hello, I have two montages, one playing on upperslot and one on default slot. Im trying to use layer blend per bone to play them at the same time. The problem is that the second montage always interrupts the first one, even though the slots are different? So the first one will never get played. Has anyone else dealt with this?

[halcyon garden]

How do i write a formula like this FInterp(Clamp on animation nodes?

[naive mountain]

Are there any unintended consequences of changing the bones used in the default 3rd person default Manny IK to use the foot bones instead of the Ik bones? (for easily using this on Metahuman skeleton) here i changed it on the right foot and it seems to be perfect. worried about tech debt if i dont add ik bones to metahuman

[terse warren]

Hi guys today I noticed that when my two character walk away from each other the other player see this like the player glitches but when coming near him the glitches stops why? Can someone help pls?

[naive mountain]

This breaks everything. I'm just going to add virtual bones to make ik work without fussing with it

[halcyon garden]

Do anyone knows?

[naive mountain]

im working on o-warping rn ill chime in later if i figure it out

following this tut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjuR3XVZr9Q

[scarlet moth]

Blend in and Blend out on Transform (Modify) Bone doesn't work for me. On other nodes it does? 🤔

[fast dew]

wait a sec.. you can do this at a skeleton level?? that would be amazing.. how is this done? the thing i'm trying to do is actually a bit more complex than just fitting heads onto a bone, i'm also trying to fit beards onto arbitrary faces, etc.. being able to parent a bone to another skeleton's bone would be a game changer for me!

[naive mountain]

copy pose from mesh?

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/modular-characters-in-unreal-engine

[fast dew]

Copy pose from mesh doesn't seem to work the way I would expect- when I change the parent skeletal mesh, the child just shifts down

[dapper glen]

I create custom clothes - with skinned mesh and generated LOD in Unreal Engine.
It uses metahuman_base_skel skeleton.
If I assign it to Metahuman — it not work.
How to fix this bug?

[fast dew]

like- in this example I've got two head meshes that share the same skeleton but have different proportions. the eyebrow mesh is identical in both- I would expect that the arrangement of the eyebrow bones would match the head when the parent changed, but that doesn't happen

[nimble torrent]

So you can parent to a socket. You do that by parenting to the skeletal mesh component, then specifying the socket in options.

This is probably not the best way of doing it, but it is technically possible.

[fast dew]

ah I see, yeah in my situation ive got multiple bones that need to be matched precisely to their counterparts.. im now wondering if maybe im just using Copy Pose From Mesh incorrectly

like for example, my eyebrow skeletal mesh only has eyebrow bones, which the head mesh also contains of course. but now I'm wondering if maybe the eyebrow mesh needs all of the bones, whether they're weighted or not?

[nimble torrent]

Not all of them, but if you have the ones that your modified bones (in this case the eyebrow bones) are parented to, and the ones those are parented to, in a chain, down to the root - that will work.

This is often how clothing is done.

So like:

• eyebrows
• head
• neck
• spine
• pelvis
• root

If you have those, and you use Copy Pose From Mesh - it should do what you want.

[fast dew]

oooh ill try that then' the eyebrow mesh doesn't have the head bone in it, that could be causing my misery!

[nimble torrent]

You need all of them, down to the root.

[gritty gust]

Hey everyone! Not sure where to post this, but I've made a blender addon (with animating for unreal engine in particular) that makes editing multiple animations on multiple rigs alot simpler. It also has a 1 click batch export button, along with several other quality of life features. Enjoy!

https://dstn.gumroad.com/l/animtools

[topaz badger]

Ok i have a weird problem while importing my animation with checked bone tracks. After importing its getting like white skin and can do nothing with that, without that option my mesh is ok but without animation. Im exporting it as gltb from blender

ive uploaded to the engine 2 more anims and they works

but that one does not

[fast dew]

ok so I've got my head bone in the hierarchy now and still seeing the same behavior- but I noticed some peculiar behavior- copy pose from mesh only seems to copy the first bone in the hierarchy that is weighted to the skeleton- it ignores all of the children! so in my case, I have brow_root with two brow bones to control the endpoints, copy pose from mesh is only transforming the brow_root bone. is this expected behavior? is there any way to force it to copy all of the children as well?

[nimble torrent]

Could you show the skeleton hierarchy you have there?

[fast dew]

yep! here are all three:

[nimble torrent]

OK. So when I said 'you have to have the whole skeleton down to the root', I meant 'you have to have the whole skeleton down to the root'.

You need the pelvis, and spine, and neck bones.

[fast dew]

there isn't a spine or pelvis though..

the head is the root

[nimble torrent]

Your character doesn't have a body?

Is it like... a california raisin?

[fast dew]

not this one, nope

[nimble torrent]

Weird choice.

[fast dew]

i mean.. god of war did it. sometimes there's a reason y'know 😄

[nimble torrent]

OK.

That said, I don't understand your issues, why you have three different skeletons you're comparing, why your sk_eyebrows skeleton has a bunch of extraneous bones for the lips, or why you seem to think that skeleton has two brow bones when it actually has six.

So... not sure what's going on at all there.

[fast dew]

i added all those bones back in to see if it would help, normally its just the head and eyebrow bones

when i said it has two brow bones and a brow root im talking about one eyebrow. yes, there are two eyebrows

sorry, i been testing multiple configurations of this skeletal mesh to try and get results that i would expect. I can't even find any information on whether or not copy pose from mesh is supposed to copy every bone or not, I can't get a working example

[nimble torrent]

It will copy bones that match the names and hierarchy of bones in the target mesh.

It is intended to do that, and does.

It is also widely used, so it does not have any errors or bugs. If there is an issue with what is happening, if must be in your data.

[fast dew]

oh im certain there's an issue with my setup, just haven't been able to find it lol

[floral tundra]

can motion warp be used in an animation sequence?

[nimble torrent]

What do you mean by 'in an animation sequence'?

Motion warping is designed to work with montages. The notify ranges are not available in sequences I don't think. Let me check.

Oh! No, it totally works with just normal sequences.

My bad.

Good to know!

[floral tundra]

But does it actually work? Because even though I can add the Motion Warping notify it won't actually turn my character

unless I'm doing something wrong, but I have the same setup in a montage and it works

[nimble torrent]

Hmm - I wouldn't be surprised if those motion warping notifies only work if they're played as a montage.

Now you can use a function to play a sequence as a montage.

It's called "Play Anim Sequence As Dynamic Montage".

My guess would be, the notifies would work for the sequence if you do that.

But I don't have a motion warping test project setup, so I'm not in a position to test it at the moment.

[floral tundra]

Good to know, thanks! The thing is I wanted the motion warping in a sequence because I'm using it in the Animation Blueprint, may I ask you if there is a better way of making a character face a certain way through the Anim BP?

[nimble torrent]

That's really going to depend on what you're trying to do. Generally, it's better to use the Character Movement Component to change the direction of the character, rather than the animation BP - but I'm kind of intense about the idea of pawns controlling their own movement and avoiding root motion.

[warm pebble]

using the mirror data table to mirror a specific animation, i want it to be mirrored to the Y axis but it does this thing to the bone rotations , any way to fix this?

X axis works fine but Y and Z makes the bones rotate in this way

[scarlet moth]

Hey guys, I'm still struggling with this hand placement issue, even though I'm using the IK controls now.
For some reason when playing the animation the hand is not placed at the same location as in the sequencer.
In the sequencer you can see it's at the book, clipping with the dress.
When I play the animation it's not at that position. What am I missing?

just noticed it's not just that, the character is also sitting a little further ahead... but why is the hand further back then... 😕
how do you make sure an animation from the sequencer looks the same when played in the level?

the feet are placed perfectly though

[crimson turtle]

hi i'm learning animation. What do i need to learn to be able to create a combo? I have 2 animation, and i would like when i press action the first animation start.
But if i do the combo i would like to start the second animation at a time of the first animation can link to the second.
How do i manually set those time to link animation?

[gentle urchin]

anyone have experience with the Animation Budget Allocater?

[gentle urchin]

my skeletal meshes hardly ever interpolate when there tick rate is reduced

[quaint anchor]

How is simple animation handled in unreal? By simple animation i mean translation/scale/rotation of a simple non deforming mesh. My target goal is a "float around" animation exported from blender that I can attach to any actor with a static mesh.
Do all my actors need to have at least one bone and thereby be skeletal meshes or is it possible to do with static meshes?

[gentle urchin]

and its always on high

[naive mountain]

Yuup. Easy and breezy.

[gentle urchin]

any idea why it almost never interpolates anims when tick rate is reduced

[naive mountain]

My first thought is, you only have 1 skel mesh ticking

And im not remember what the difference is between interpolating anims VS reducing tick rate

Does setting ms budget change the debug graph?

[gentle urchin]

yes it just drops the tick rate of the mesh/anims

still hardly interp maybe is my testing conditions 20fps ish 😪

[naive mountain]

What do you mean interp

What do you want to happen?

[naive mountain]

So you want the animations to interp between ticks, instead of being all choppy

a.Budget.InterpolationFalloffAggression

Check out docs @ https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-budget-allocator-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.4

I guess ive got to figure out how to get that working on mine as well lol. I think its supposed to make a compromise between anim tick throttling & visual fidelity loss

[nimble torrent]

Unreal doesn't do non-skeletal-mesh animations very well. I believe you can animate static meshes in Sequencer, but it's not easy to transfer those between objects, and I don't think it's possible to import animations for those (though you'd have to double check that).

Generally, if you want to be able to use an animation for gameplay purposes, you need a skeleton.

[nimble torrent]

One of the many ways of doing this would be to create a custom animation notify state. You can use that animation notify state to define the period of time you can link to the second move by changing a variable on your pawn, or on your animation BP, or emitting events.

[analog cape]

You seem like the sort of person who knows what you're doing. I am absolutely stumped by what should be a very simple control rig aim control. Do you mind if I show you images of the problem?

[nimble torrent]

Sure! I might not be able to help, but I'll take a look!

[analog cape]

In blender, here's the skeleton. The video shows a highlighted bone called 'HUB_B_L"

The still image shows a highlighted bone called "UpperControlArmEnd_B_L"

I have a control rig consisting (for test reasons) only of this.

HUB_B_L aims at UpperControlArmEnd_B_L.

But for some reason, whichever axis I try to use...

[nimble torrent]

Hmm, OK?

[analog cape]

the results are very wrong.

[nimble torrent]

We didn't see the mesh before, so it's hard to interpret what 'wrong' means in this context.

[analog cape]

Ah

Fair

[nimble torrent]

That said, have you tried putting the position of the bone into the 'target' slot, and not manipulated the target space?

[analog cape]

Oh I see. Writing in numerical values which might change on this or similar rigs would not be desirable if I could avoid it.

[nimble torrent]

Not numerical values.

If you right click and type 'get bone' you'll get that bone's transform value.

You can then get the translation value from that.

[analog cape]

OK, I'll have a look.

Source and target pin types not compatible. Output is orange.

[nimble torrent]

That's because the source is a transform not a translation.

[analog cape]

Ah

[nimble torrent]

If you right click on the transform and 'break' it, you should get a translation pin.

[analog cape]

Yeah, done

I'll fiddle about with this for a second

Onto 'Target', it gives exactly the same messed-up orientation as before.

[nimble torrent]

OK, not entirely unexpected.

Have you confirmed that the axis of your bones is matching between the two packages?

[analog cape]

I've confirmed that the imported skeletal mesh has its X axis value identical

[warm pebble]

anyone who has tried mirroring anims, could you let me know a fix for this if there is any?

[nimble torrent]

I would check the bones.

[analog cape]

I'd like to check them in engine

How do I do that?

[nimble torrent]

You can do that by opening the skeletal mesh and clicking on the bones in the hierarchy view.

I think you can also see them in the Control Rig view as well.

[analog cape]

Oh I see, in the right hand panel

[nimble torrent]

Your issue is probably related to a combination of the primary and secondary axis values. Do you know what they mean?

[analog cape]

OK that's weird. Their values match in Blender but not here.

[analog cape]

Well, I thought I did. I know that I have exports set with Y primary, X secondary, and that's also how it appears in Blender.

[nimble torrent]

In this case though, the secondary axis is the secondary axis of the aim node.

So it's the 'up' axis.

[analog cape]

Yeah, on the front wheels, the X axis corresponded to the correct aiming axis.

Eh, go ahead

I was trying to think aloud

[nimble torrent]

All good.

So, an aim node is creating a transform from two vectors, and using the cross product to generate the third.

That's what the 'primary' and 'secondary' axis are, they're generating the two vectors necessary to create the rotation.

[analog cape]

What does 'weight' mean in this context?

Primary and secondary weight, that is

[nimble torrent]

Not sure! I've never played around with those.

It might control which of the two axis they use for skew correction?

[analog cape]

Well

I set secondary to 0, and then it sprung into the correct orientation...

[nimble torrent]

That means that you were probably putting in a bad value for the secondary.

[analog cape]

I will quickly check my original rig parameters

[nimble torrent]

I doubt having it at zero weight will work once things start moving.

[analog cape]

Well, I'll just have a gander and get back to you in a moment.

@nimble torrent success. I'm not sure how, but through a good deal of meddling, somehow it seems to be settled. As for 'weight 0 on secondary may be a bad idea', I'm working from an engine example template which has such a parameter set.

[nimble torrent]

Hey, the most important thing is for it to work.

[analog cape]

Yeah. Thank goodness it did get resolved by random fiddling, because I was otherwise looking at how the bone transform values are very different from the blender bone transform values reported

Angles and things rather than bone head and tail positions

[nimble torrent]

If you notice popping or weirdness as the aim target moves, you might need to dig into figuring out the secondary axis, but if it works it works.

[analog cape]

Hopefully. Fingers crossed. Will be able to test when it's set up, but I believe it will be a matter of figuring out what I'm not doing that the template is doing.

Sorry to be a pain. I find it difficult to learn things except by diving in to existing things and then tweaking them.

[boreal iris]

FPS weapon animators, how you usually do weapon shake when character is walking? Dedicate animation to it or some camera shake, something else? Idk what best approach.

[analog cape]

For weapon sway? It will be less time-consuming to compose an animation for it rather than writing an algorithm for it, since players expectations of what weapon sway looks like will be more specific than camera shake. Of course, you could still use an algorithm to magnify or otherwise alter the animation in simple ways, for different weapons, running speed, etc.

[meager coral]

Can someone help me with an animation blending issue I'm having?

I'm using an animation offset to let this boss character lean forward and back, and it works fine for the most part, except when it gets to the arm gun part there, where it's ignoring it

it looks fine when shooting normally, it's like it's not inheriting the pitch correctly on that specific bone

this is my hierarchy, which I think might be a culprit

[balmy plover]

I'm looking for some help with attack animations, I have an attack animation with a loop to hold the attack, but not sure how to fire it off when released, so I just fire the End section when input is released?

Is that the best way to implement it?

[quaint anchor]

So is physical "animation" the way to go? Im close to having that working by using a curve to add force to the mesh.

[nimble torrent]

That's an 'it depends' question I'm afraid. Really depends on what you're doing exactly.

[quaint anchor]

Just trying to get a bunch of meshes to float up and down slowly. Them having physics is fine for my use case.

[nimble torrent]

Then you will probably have a better time using a Timeline node in blueprint.

Then using forces.

[quaint anchor]

Problem is Im trying to make it as a component i can attach to different actors and timelines arent available in components

[nimble torrent]

That's true. You could use delta-time and a sine-wave.

[quaint anchor]

I tried this but It only seems to float downwards.

Im probably using the wrong "in time"

[nimble torrent]

It's also possible that gravity may be a factor.

[quaint anchor]

its disabled for the actor

[nimble torrent]

OK. I definitely would not do things this way.

Good luck!

[quaint anchor]

Not very reassuring xD

Ill drop it and do a different approach

Looking at it I also now realize giving it a alternating force like this is only able to accelerate it and stop it because the force is equal in both directions -.-

[naive mountain]

The angels are singing

The bells are ringing

No WAY you can get better ik retargeting from manny to metahuman than this! :D

Why... I retargeted to metahuman tall. and when using the animation on metahuman medium height - the thumbs break

this hard seam doesnt exist on the tall mh

[naive mountain]

Are there any marketplace anim retargeting options that are better than unreal?

[lethal blaze]

there's no way to multiply all curves from a livelink source by x value without doing each one individually, is there?

[velvet horizon]

Is there a way to import animated custom properties on bones from Blender as part of animation sequences/actions?
I have a character with 2D textures for the face, and I want to be able to animate the material parameters for it this way.
When I import the FBX, there's no attribute/curve data imported.

[solar totem]

Is there a way to make animations for camera that you can play just like anim montage?

[viral belfry]

Hi someone can help me pls ? I use cinematic car rig and my left wheels is bigger than the right one

its not bigger but I think it's not symmetrical

[bitter vault]

would a vault system based on motion warping be smoother and fluid or a transition target based system where in the character snaps to transition target location and then root motion is applied?

Does motion warping has any trouble being replicated?

[naive mountain]

Are you refering to Orientation Warping or Motion Matching?

[bitter vault]

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/motion-warping-in-unreal-engine

[scarlet moth]

So, now I'm trying with Quinn to rule out retargeting issues.
Animation in sequencer: Thumb is directly on page. Character in sequencer is always at 0,0,0, right?
Then playing in level, Quinn is at 0,0,0, Thumb is not at page. Why? It's driving me nuts.
How are you supposed to create precise animations?

Please someone point me in the right direction, I can't find any information about this online

[worthy sentinel]

Hello,
first of all, I'm not someone who is super familiar with animation. Currently, I'm developing a small Project and would like to know if the following approach is at least partially on the right way.

I want to create a character which has a human body with wings and a tail and would like to leverage the existing animation from Quinn/Manny. So my idea was to add two additional skeletal meshes to the standard base character, animate them separately
and use slots to make full character animations. Is that a valid way or would I encounter huge issues?

[naive mountain]

Discard your frustration for we are on the metaphorical beach of normandy.

What are you retargeting to and from

[naive mountain]

You've got the right idea! you're going to want to look up modular, skeletal, mesh documentation.

[naive mountain]

Start by opening the retargetor asset. Go to the preview settings and um, make sure that both skeletal meshes are overlapping each other 0,0,0. Then observe the hand placement. You may see that there's tiny differences in your hands

Under the chain's menu, select your Ik targets. Add offsets Until the fingers are perfectly overlapping each other

This is the method I am using to retarget. Ik for specific animation types. Eg I have one retargetor for my standing locomotion.Another for my crouching locomotion.

[scarlet moth]

Gonna check that. But for Quinn, it’s just the default mesh, nothing retargeted, why doesn’t it match here as well?

[naive mountain]

To confirm you are using the same animation. But with a different skeletal mesh, quinn?

If you want finger precise IK goals, animation must be mesh specific. A hard truth I swallowed today as well.

Even if it's going from manny to quinn. They have minor proportional differences.

[scarlet moth]

No, I redid the animation for Quinn

[naive mountain]

Do you wanna hop in chat? I have a few minutes and it would be much more productive than typing LOL.

[scarlet moth]

Not at the computer right now, are you available later?

[naive mountain]

Yeah im free in about 4-5 hours

What was retarget source to quinn

[scarlet moth]

Cool, that would be awesome

Can’t remember, will check, it’s a pack from the marketplace

[naive mountain]

Ok. They have a unique source skeleton

No issue, you'll solve the issue with some fine tuning.

Here is what I was referring to

You overlap the preview skeletal meshes in the retargetor asset. And this is the end product of adding rotation offsets ( 10° x / 10° y / 5° z ) to both hand IK goals. From UE5 Manny > Tall MetaHuman

(My current issue is metahuman specific. I must retarget for each MetaHuman by height, 3)

[scarlet moth]

Ok, I haven’t used that retargetor asset yet. Sent you a DM 👍

[rich prairie]

hi someone please help

when i apply leg module fk/ik default option creating problem

this happning after 5.4.3 release