animation

[velvet jasper]

How do you trigger the montage?

[velvet jasper]

Does your montage have the correct slot assigned?

And can you confirm that the function returns the valid value?

[vapid flower]

yup

[velvet jasper]

You can bind to delegates OnMontageStarted and OnMontageEnded in your ABP and debug if it even gets triggered and if it gets interrupted.

[vapid flower]

ohk

[unborn star]

im struggling to see the issue and why it wont retarget correctly

[velvet jasper]

I’d highly suggest to open the documentation on the retargeting in Unreal and check your assets if they’re assembled correctly.
Automation may give the broken results so it’s important to know what’s happening under the hood.

The way you explain your issue is currently kinda vague and the warnings that UE gives is pretty self explanatory.
Check your IK rigs for both the source and the target mesh, see if they’re set correctly.
After that, check the retargeting asset and how’s the Op Stack is set.

[unborn star]

Yeah I have retargetted stuff many times before, but these bone errors make me think its a chain thing but the chains are fine

[velvet jasper]

How’s the chain mapping looks?
And what’s the skeleton hierarchy in your meshes?

[velvet jasper]

Could you extend the retargeter log window so the full messages could be seen?

[unborn star]

Any idea mate

[velvet jasper]

Check your Op Stack, go through the operations and check for any mismatches.
For some reason, it’s trying to find the joints that’s not existing in your target mesh.

[unborn star]

well they seem fine

[unborn star]

ah now it works

but i still have these errors

[velvet jasper]

I’ve removed my previous message as I wasn’t sure if it’s actually the correct way.

[velvet jasper]

If you reopen the asset, do they still appear?

Have you switched the IK asset in both IK and FK Ops?

[unborn star]

fixed more but still got this one

[velvet jasper]

You technically don’t need the “Root” chain as you have the Root Motion op solver that takes care of the root motion if any.

[unborn star]

so remove the root from both IK's?

[velvet jasper]

Yup.

It logically makes no sense for Full Body IK.

[unborn star]

so what about the fact my IK lines are outside the mesh and stuff?

also some animations appear not to be working right on the hips

I appear to have 2 hips bones, not sure what to do with the bones in the retargeter for it

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, the setup is broken, hard for me to remotely say what exactly is wrong, as there’s multiple issues that might be there.
Probably a good idea would be to start from a scratch.

I’ve noticed on one of the previous screenshots that the models have a very different scaling,
If that’s correct, it shouldn’t be that way, if it’s a technical error.
If one mesh has the root joint scaled to 1 and other scaled to 100, it won’t work properly.

[hidden grove]

not sure if this helps, but one thing i can say is a way to run into his issue is to import a mixamo anim uncorrected and start trying to fix it inside unreal, when you retarget the imported anim with the RIG included: eg the Asset mode of retargeting you defo will encounter the chains to short thing being reported in the rig provided.

I am wondering if he generates a rig then corrects the issue there and then re-importing the anim using that corrected rig might be what he needs

[unborn star]

they both have a scale of one, I could vc and show u the stuff?

[misty dagger]

Hi! i am very new to this! i come to ask on how to make this shark animated! i imported one fbx file that contain mesh, animation and skeleton, what should i do next to make it wiggle?

[hidden grove]

I have to wonder.... if your new.. why you are using what looks to be prity old version of unreal?

[misty dagger]

oh im working in conan devkit! its something like UE 4.1.5 with some not ordinary stuff in it >.>

[hidden grove]

gotcha just checking 😄

can we see mr shark in the animation sequence wiggling?

[misty dagger]

idk how to make a vid for it xD

[hidden grove]

to make him animated in the world, you will most likely need to turn it into a montage and play it via his blueprint

he will need to be a pawn, which has his mesh/skeleton

ah yeah just looking at what they provided you so .. it will need a animation blueprint to run its animation seq by the looks of it ..

shark locomotion == wiggle anim lol

seeing as this is from 4.x
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7WG-Vr3iCY

also this look worthy of a watch for all generally

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLVWvxFi9vg

[misty dagger]

Ohhh sorry for the delay reply! thank you so much, i have a bit of language barrier but i'll try to copy what they do!

[velvet jasper]

Unfortunately that something I can’t do.

[misty dagger]

is this right?

[unborn star]

ah well any idea then im not too sure what to change with it

[misty dagger]

it doesn't move at all qwq

[hidden grove]

now it probably wants a idle state

and make sure its looping

[velvet jasper]

Just to be sure, here’s the documentation about the animation system in UE.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-blueprints?application_version=4.27

[velvet jasper]

Have you compiled it?

[hidden grove]

dan i am just thinking with out a locomotion state it wont animate

unless its looped

but yep never confirmed it actually even animating in the anim sequence viewer

[velvet jasper]

No, you don’t need a state machine for looping animation.

[hidden grove]

yeah i duno does mr shark need a locomotion is what i am graplling here with

[velvet jasper]

This is design question.
OP asks about playing the single existing anim asset. Sequence Player node is enough.

[unborn star]

any idea about mine? I posted the video up chat

[misty dagger]

Ohhh it worked now!! thank u! i forgot about it

[hidden grove]

i honestly think you just need to handle the skeletel differences between the source and the target some how @unborn star ... and yeah if you got a corrupted skeleton just make it again

[velvet jasper]

I’ll get back to you in couple of hours.

[unborn star]

thanks ill be on

[velvet jasper]

I still suggest to get through the documentation/learning materials on the retargeting system.

[unborn star]

Yeah, just unsure on all of it

[hidden grove]

when you see bone names like HIPS and such you know its not retargeted to the correct sekeleton

that is how a legit UE skeleton is structured

[hidden grove]

graaaaah

why do they always do this

you cant have fing timelines in functions and what ever

[half loom]

hi everyone
I'm having issues with the Mixamo converter plugin for Blender, when trying to use root motion on any Mixamo anims
I'm using Blender 3.0 / 3.1 and following the usual steps, but when I enable Root Motion on the final imported animation, it's still physically moving in space and then teleporting back, rather than remaining "stationary" on the editor or carrying the motion forward on the level

are there any well known issues that I could try troubleshooting?
I'm on UE 5.6

[hidden grove]

with a couple of the mixamo anims i just needed to force the root lock

if you made a montage for example then yep if put the root motion enabled it will start moving to that motion if that makes sense .. but yep locking the root should make it still move with the animation and not snap back

basically boil down to if there in place or in motion

[half loom]

I need to use motion warping though, via montages, will that work correctly with force root lock enabled?
enabling that without disabling root motion is still showing the same behavior though
only when I force root lock and disable root motion does the mesh actually stay in-place during the anim preview

[last pulsar]

Hello, I have a question.
I’m an animator working in Maya, and I only recently started using Unreal Engine. Since I’m still a beginner, there are many things I don’t fully understand, and I’m having some trouble.

In Unreal Engine, animations seem to play based on the position of the Root.
When creating a forward-moving attack animation, if I move the Root forward, the IK on the feet starts to slide. So if possible, I would prefer to create the animation without moving the Root.
How do most animators solve this issue?

[near moth]

Does anyone know why I do not see the spaces window here?

Basically this

[rotund sparrow]

Hey everyone, I was wondering if anyone had experience animating someone taking down hood from his head ? 🤔

We simulate the hoodie, but I wonder if for that one shot we should do it differently ? 🤔 Like skin the cape just for this 1-2 shots and hand key animate the cape ? 🤔

Blendshapes maybe ?

im somehow giving the answers but I have no clue if this stuffs would work so I was hoping anyone with experience doing this could help please ? 🙏

[runic peak]

Is there a way I can do something like make a state machine a variable? I'm trying to maske it that changing a weapon changes state machines for one part of a blueprint

[near moth]

You can cache the poses from two state machines

And then blend by bool

But the better option is link anim layers (though thats a bit complicated)

[runic peak]

Right. But I mean swapping sequences out at runtime, through variables

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/using-sub-anim-instances-in-unreal-engine I cant finw how to add the subinstance, here

Why isn't it showing when I right click?

Really, it's a mystery.

[velvet jasper]

Alright, so about the retargeting.
There are a couple of things you have to be sure that are set correctly.

• Root chain, that's being added automatically, is redundant, as Root Motion Op takes care of the root bone animation. You can ignore any warnings related to that or** remove** that chain from both IK Rig assets.
• For both FK and IK Ops, make sure that you have your Target mesh's IK Rig assigned.
• Make sure that your Pelvis Motion Op actually have correctly assigned Pelvis bones.

[velvet jasper]

I'm not sure what you mean under "position of the Root".
Your rig setup ideally should have:

• A separate individual controller for the root bone for manual root motion animation or constrained to Pelvis's XZ translation.
• IK limb joints constrained to the FK limbs (ik_hand_l follows hand_l and etc.)

[velvet jasper]

Because there's a separate tab now for spaces and constaints:

[velvet jasper]

Well, if it works for you, gives a good result and doesn't tank the performance, it's fine.
If it's linear cinematic, you can do an offline high-fidelity simulation in your DCC and export the cloth as an Alembic cache.
As for the actual way of animating it, that's up to you. For the in-game animation, that would be either bone or blendspace solution, as Alembic caches couldn't have the skinning applied.

[rotund sparrow]

Problem is I have no clue how would I approach this.

Since its just linear cinematic, I dont mind tanking performance.

But I never had any good results just simulating the clothes. It never take it down correctly 😭

[velvet jasper]

Unfortunately, I don't know any learning materials about the offline cloth simulation.
As it's the cinematic, it kinda gives you a bit more of freedom as you can just bake stuff.

It's the situation where you have to pick your poison, I guess 🙂

[unborn star]

Thanks, yeah I had the right pelvis bone selected however still had those weird movements with the animations

[velvet jasper]

Turn off all the Ops and turn them one by one to see which breaks the setup.

[velvet jasper]

This is a deprecated way of layering the stuff, the screenshots are from UE4. For some reason, Epics still keep this page even in 5.7 documentation.

I'd advise you to look into the Animation Layers and Interfaces.

[velvet jasper]

Turn off **all **of the Ops and go one by one.

[unborn star]

yeah trying to, just really unsure rip

[rotund sparrow]

Yeah the fact I can bake and just use it as alembic is making it much easier, but the initial body animation and cloth sim to get decent hood removal from the head is just pain in the ass I have no clue how to resolve 😅

Im self taught hobbyist and I didnt find anything at least bit similar to my specific needs 🫠

[velvet jasper]

You can freely experiment until you find a method that works for you.

Maybe a good idea to start with something you know more.
If it's the joint animation, do the joint rig and animate that way.
Or go with the blendshape route and sculpt the cloth for each needed frame.

[misty dagger]

Hello, is there a way to combine many many animations into one?

[atomic lintel]

im trying to animate some models from kitbash but anytime i move them into my sequencer and try to transform their location they default to XYZ: 0,0,0 do you guys have any fix?

[runic peak]

Alright, thanks.

[runic peak]

Where can I find documentation on animation interfaces?

[near moth]

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-blueprint-linking-in-unreal-engine

https://youtu.be/pcDOpYXCQyU?si=vX6GEX24VuCQl3NB

This video helped me understand much better

[runic peak]

Oh it's linking, I was already reading that.

I hope I can set blueprint variables in the linked graph, through the parent one.

For a linked graph, can I set the animation instance/class I want to play, using a variable in the parent blueprint?

[bitter breach]

can anyone help me as to why my animation is perfectly fine in maya but as soon as i import it into unreal it starts bugging out like so? exact same rig in both programs nothing has changed between

[near moth]

Yes

We usually do it by calling the skeletal mesh

[velvet jasper]

Looks like baking issue, could you check the curves in Maya?

[runic peak]

How do I set it here?

[near moth]

Put weapon state machine in a different anim bp

And link them in your character bp

Atleast for testing

[runic peak]

I'm trying to figure how I can change what instance linked anim graph uses, at runtime, so I can set it as the weapon used changes.

[bitter breach]

it must have been an export setting in maya, i quickly threw it into blender and re exported and arent having that weird bug anymore

[misty dagger]

hi, this there a way to combine anim ?

[velvet jasper]

If you need to technically stitch them together, you can do that in the anim composite or montage (in case you want to trigger it through code) asset.

Just drag and drop the anim sequence to the anim track.

[velvet jasper]

Again, what kind of result you want to achieve?

[runic peak]

I just want to change animations when a weapon changes. I think I found a work around, though.

[summer jewel]

Anyone experienced with modifying animations in blender and exporting back to UE metahuman?

[misty dagger]

oh i want to play it all in the same time together

it that possible?

[velvet jasper]

Hm, do you mean that you have some sort of object/character that has a separate animation for it’s each part?
Could you give more context on that?

[dull bridge]

I was wondering if someone could explain what is happening with these two aim offsets. So I have a base pose animation "AS_MannyBasePose" which is just the default a-frame. I have two aim offsets "AO_Unarmed" and "AO_RifleHip" with all the associated animations set to mesh space additive with the "AS_MannyBasePose".

The aim offsets work fine but I don't understand why if I go into the unarmed and replace say the center-right animation with the RifleHip center right animation it causes the mesh to dip into the ground and then come back up. What is happening here? It is only the unarmed animations which cause this if I do this with my RifleAim AimOffset it's fine so I assume it has to do with the root bone in the unarmed animations but I can't figure out how to fix it.

Edit: I used control rig to recreate all the unarmed AO animations and everything is working how I thought it should. I am still curious about how I would fix the original aim offset animations if anyone has any ideas.

[velvet jasper]

Dip into the ground when the blendspace value is between the anim elements?
That sounds like a root bone orientation mismatch.
The fix would be to edit the animation sequences, correct the root orientation while preserving the pelvis transforms.

[soft sorrel]

I’m Matthew, an animator. I create smooth 2D/3D animations, character moves, and motion graphics. I’m currently open for commissions and animation jobs—DM me if you need clean, fast, and professional work.

[misty dagger]

yes, the animation control each stuff like orb 1, orb 2 and hands and etc x.x

[velvet jasper]

Hm, I see that you have 6 arms, so technically it would be 6 animations for each limb with the auxiliary stuff.
You sure you need that much animations?

[narrow ingot]

Has anyone tryied Retarget Component in 5.7 wth tahumans? Cant make it work if I want to use 2 differnet live link sources (one for body one for face)

[rocky light]

I think, export was wrong

[long bane]

hi

I'm a solo game developer, and I'm very new to character animation, and even more so to Unreal Engine. Can anyone help me or teach me how to animate something so I can get a head start?

[misty dagger]

I recommend to check youtube and the unreal learning library. There's enough stuff for many hours, at start.

projprod is one of my favourites when it comes to control rigs for animation, on youtube.

**Are there any known problems with Animation blueprints in the movie render queue? ** Animation Mode "Custom Mode" and "Use Animation blueprint" (see screenshot), look the same in the viewport. But in MRQ, the "Use animation blueprint" version, is different... its a) not looping anymore b) it seems to be 1 inch lower than the custom mode render.

I only play 1 animation, and it is DefaultSlot, I did not change anything else in the sequencer besides the Animation blueprint/custom mode.

[spare kiln]

If I have a set of locomotion animations and I want to to create some animations for guns, how would you guys go about it?
I'm just thinking of taking the idle and jog animations and then bringing the arms into position and alter the animations for the upper body and then blend it for all the other locomotion animations.
Maybe I'm to naive here, just interested about the approaches I could take here 🙂

[near moth]

Animation layers (Not the ALI one)

The one in sequencer

Its the same in Maya

In Blender its called NLA editor I believe

[velvet jasper]

Yes, you can create the blend mask and then override the animation for the upper half of the character’s body.
In the Layered Blend node, you can also turn on mesh space rotation blending, that way your joint orientation from the upper body poses would be preserved.

[deft ravine]

I’m Josh , an animator. I create high-quality 2D/3D animations, character motions, and motion graphics. I’m currently open for commissions and animation jobs.
Here’s my portfolio:
👉
DM me if you need smooth, fast, and professional work.

I will send portfolio in DM

[acoustic marlin]

Hello everyone. I´m currently banging my head against the Motion Matching feature in UE 5.7.
I have bought an asset-pack with several creatures, which i now want to make controllable. I thought i could use Motion Matching for this to make things easier, but i can´t get the forward and backward animations to work.
In the screenshot i provided you can see, that the forward and backward trajectories are pointing to the side and are very short.
The strafe anims show a long trajectory and they work fine when i play the character.
All the anims have root motion and also root motion and force root lock is ticked as you can see in the second screenshot.
What i think could be the problem is the wrong orientation of the root bone, as it´s y axis is pointing down and z points forward.
I think y should be forward and z up, like in the mannequin example, but how do i fix this?
I tried to edit skeleton in Unreal and re-orient the root bone (screenshot 2), which lead to rotated animations.
I then tried to fix the animations root bone rotation via ReOrientRootBoneModifier, which also does not quite work.

Please note that the settings in the screenshots are not the ones i tried, i´ve reverted all of them because everything got messed up and the anims look good again in the editor and i can start over again.

I really hope anyone in here has some genious tips for me to make this work, have agreat day everyone! ❤️
Please DM me to notifiy my for an answer and please put the answer here in this chat so everyone benefits from it. 🙂

[velvet jasper]

Isn't this character a part of Unity asset pack?
It's available for both, found a Fab page.

[near moth]

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/explore-the-updates-to-the-game-animation-sample-project-in-ue-5-7

[spare kiln]

Do you think it would be a viable thing to do, or do you think it's hard and a lot to do?

[velvet jasper]

That's a standard way of doing that.
Hard or viable is a subjective thing 🙂

[spare kiln]

But regarding the animations?
I'm thinking of having one animation for standing, one for walk and one for run, that might be enough right? 😅

and maybe create some blendspaces

I'm just asking so naively, because I never really created animations and I'm wondering if I'll create the animation for holding the gun and then i realize I won't really be able to do it for whatever reason.
^^

[velvet jasper]

You create the animations that would cover your game design needs.
If you're not sure about the implementation setup for your own stuff, try playing around with the existing ones.
Lyra animations, Paragon Characters or even rusty Animation Starter pack might be a good asset compilation for experimenting with the technical stuff.

[radiant quail]

Is there an easy way for me to retarget something like this to a basic skeletal mesh like Quinns for example?
https://fab.com/s/730ecd787a6e

[velvet jasper]

Unreal has built-in auto-retargeter.

[radiant quail]

doesnt work for me

tried multiple tutorials no progress

[velvet jasper]

What's your mesh's skeleton hierarchy?

[radiant quail]

I am trying to retarget it to Quinn

Update: I found a solution. You have to retarget in 5.5 then bring it to 5.7 project.

Holy fuck it took me 8 hours

[radiant phoenix]

anyone know how to get slide to work on new GASP 5.7?

[velvet jasper]

Switch to Mover pawn.

[radiant phoenix]

yep got it, thanks much!

[dry gust]

hello, I have quite a big trobules with set leader component, other components animations sometimes dont match original, like they sometimes lag for a bit, expecially if I toggle lower fps

also I have multiiplecoponents (clothes on character) linked and they sometimes differ from each other

[dry gust]

thing is it works perfectly in editor, but in packaged builds it glitches and lags

[spare kiln]

Maybe I should take the lyra animations or something and try to merge the upper body with the locomotion i already have and then I could adjust them which might be easier.
Because I tried blending the upper body already but that didn't really work out.

[velvet jasper]

Does your sub-components have the same tick group assigned?

[spare kiln]

btw thanks @velvet jasper for all the help and guidance 🙂

[limpid kernel]

Hello everyone,
We are working on a combo system with my team. I'm the animator and I implement the animations and code the system.
But here's the problem.

The character needs to keep advancing during the combo itself but not by walking, but by the animation directly. To be more specific, we want the Hyrule Warriors combo system. When Link attacks, he moves forward and can be redirected from each hits so the player can maneuver freely.

But the problem is, our character gets back in place when he finish the combo, we would like him to stay where he finishs the combo. Do I have to animate the root itself or do I have to check something in Unreal ?

Oh and we are using a custom rig, not the Manny/Quinn one

[deft ravine]

I’m Josh , an animator. I create high-quality 2D/3D animations, character motions, and motion graphics. I’m currently open for commissions and animation jobs.
Here’s my portfolio:
👉
DM me if you need smooth, fast, and professional work.

I will send portfolio in DM

[velvet jasper]

Your animations need to have a root bone animation, and the anim sequences should have the root motion enabled.
Animations must be triggered through animation montages, unless you've changed the root motion extraction option in your anim instance.

[velvet jasper]

Since you're posting here more than once, could you share your reel here please?

[limpid kernel]

I think I'm having a trouble with the rig itself. I'm using Pierrick Picaut's rig, looks like the root of the skeleton is the not the root bone but the armature itself.
Is it an export problem or am I missing something ?

Of course I checked Root motion into my animation and I allowed root motions into my ABP but nothing seems to work

[velvet jasper]

It is the export problem.

When you exporting the stuff out of Blender the standard methods, your armature node has to be named "Armature".
UE would get rid of the Armature dummy during import.

Alternatively, look into the third-party plugins that offer better exporting options for Unreal.
For example, PolyHammer's Send2UE fork for Blender 4.2.

[cobalt onyx]

Hey ! You have good web reference for sword combat ? :3

[spare kiln]

I tried the blending before, it was not as good, but with the Mesh Space Rotation Blending it's half decent thanks again! 😁

[limpid kernel]

Thank you, I'll try

[modern moat]

Need some help whenever anybody would be up to assisting me

its related to root motion with metahumans. I have an animation sequence which plays an animation with root motion (shows in the prev player is moving) but when I play it in game the metahuman char just stays in place

this is my current hierarchy for my char

this is the knockback anim

clearly set to root motion

[velvet jasper]

How do you trigger the animation?

[modern moat]

through montage. Using a random key E

I figured the animation will work if I put my anim blueprint and skele mesh on (charactermesh which is shown in my first hierarchy img)

but it won't work if I use the skeleton mesh "body" which is default for the metahuman

[velvet jasper]

Is that the original component layout?

[modern moat]

I had changed it and moved things around to get it to work but yeah that's what it should look like

it will work ONLY with that charactermesh0 but not when I use "body" as my skeleton mesh that plays the montage

[velvet jasper]

I just don't remember that "Body" is nested under main "Mesh" in the generated MH BPs but yeah, the root motion comes from the top mesh component.

IIRC, "Mesh" is a dummy component that has the animation setup and rest of the components is only for visuals and copying the animation from the main one.

So, it's logical that the root motion only would work from there.

[modern moat]

so how should I set up the metahuman to get this root motion, since visually, all of my parts of the MH are in hair, body, hair, beard etc etc

[velvet jasper]

You just made it work, no?

[modern moat]

well it works but its a headless MH as shown in the anim sequence

Like is there a way to get the root motion with the body? Or should I just rearrange it so that head, eyes, brows should follow the "meshcharacter"

[velvet jasper]

Yes.

[modern moat]

alrighty, will try

thx for checking out the situation, will report back in a bit when I fire it up and try it

[narrow ingot]

I need help with Metahuman animation in 5.7. So for body I use retargeter to get animation from Rokoko, but for head I use Metahuman (Video) , so basicly getting data from webcam.
So what I cant figure out how to do is, to get head movement from webcam and body from Rokoko. So Head movement and face expresions are driven by webcam but body play animation from Rokoko.

1. In this Picture, with PP "Enable Head Movement IK" OFF for body but ON for Head, body receives animation from rokoko, and head receives from webcam, head movement works, and facial expressions work, but head is not attached to body, its in ground lol
2. So here in both PP "Enable Head Movement IK" is OFF, Now head is attached to body, I get facial expressions, but no head movement from Web cam, head movement driven by mocap from Rokoko.
3. Here in both PP "Enable Head Movement IK" is ON, head is attached to body but they both are weirdly located lol. and Head movement influences whole body lol.

Any ideas?

[velvet jasper]

What is "Enable Head Movement IK"?

[narrow ingot]

@velvet jasper

Its in both head and body PostProcess Bps in new MHs

[velvet jasper]

"only for animations created with MHA"

[narrow ingot]

Yes I can read, thank you. But similarly like when working with sequencer IK need to be off so head don't move body since they both have spine bones. I just don't get how in live situation I can layer head movement on top later (neck1,neck2 and head) .

[velvet jasper]

If we scratch all the post-processing shenanigans, the Head is technically a child of the main Body mesh. It just copies the animation from the parent.
Inside your Body's anim graph you would have two sources blended together with the Layered Blend node, where the base input would be your Rokoko source and the blend input would be your "webcam" motion.
By enabling, Mesh Space Rotation Blend option, you'd preserve the joint orientation from the blend input.

[narrow ingot]

@velvet jasper Thanks, that actually helped a lot, setup was easier than I thought lol.
Now just would appricate any suggestions how to blend next part better (make made allign better with body) so I dont have something like this 😄

[torn tundra]

Hi everyone , anyone ever encounter weird shadow/artifact/glitchy issues with cloth simulation like this? I can not figure this out for the life of me. Whenever I attempt to do a cloth sim (no matter how much i remesh or play with the settings) I get these weird jagged triangles that appear in the ripples of the cloth. Idk whats causing it or how to fix it. When I open the content examples project from Epic the cloths look fine so it has to be a settings thing right?

[wide cove]

Where did you download it? I can't find it

[near moth]

https://www.fab.com/listings/880e319a-a59e-4ed2-b268-b32dac7fa016

[narrow ingot]

Yea no matter what I do my neck keeps looking like this 😡

Maybe will try to use transform from live live link face and see if I can do somethign with that

[tropic marsh]

Trying procedural animation, but struggling on this thing.
How do I understand what those directions are? i tried different things but cant seem to get it right

also, its suppose to say thigh, did not see my spelling error before now

[velvet jasper]

It would be easier for you if you turn on translation gizmo.

Primary axis is the forward vector of the joint, secondary is the up vector.
The [-1; 0; 1] value is incorrect, it could be only one axis.

As for the pole vector, to make it work it’d be visually easier to create a control at the knee level and plug it’s location to the input.

[tropic marsh]

Does this mean it should be -1Y since its the oposite direction of y?

i moved on to try and use full body IK instead but im still stuck

[tropic marsh]

Ive gotten here now, but cant figure out why it twists

rest of the leg is fine

i went back to the basic IK and followed what you said as best as i could

[velvet jasper]

Looks like the effector doesn’t match the original foot rotation.

[tropic marsh]

seems the nails gets put into the same area

[velvet jasper]

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see here.

[tropic marsh]

same as the picture above but closer on the heel, its like it collapses all the toes into one point

ill go back and restart the guide im following and see if something comes up, thanks for the help so far ^^

[quaint abyss]

Can anyone point me in the right direction please with the following:

I am trying to have a character that has a unreal Manny skeleton and baked shape keys for the face from blender. I've done that in blender and imported into unreal but it's imported two different skeletons (the body and the shape key baked head) which I can't combine into one character

I can combine them in a new blueprint character but as soon as I attach the head to the head bone it is impossible to line the head up to the body. I think it's also shrinking the head a little at well

What do I need to do to have a working character with a head aligned properly?

[eternal tendon]

Has anyone here actually worked with GASP’s Mover?

It still feels like GASP’s Mover is pretty buggy. As shown in the video, there’s a bug where the trajectory behaves strangely around slopes.
Even outside of that specific case, CMC detects uneven ground or edges and bends the trajectory downward accordingly, but Mover seems to treat everything like a perfectly flat plane—the trajectory stays completely level with the horizon.
Of course, it might simply be that the Mover settings in GASP aren’t fully tuned yet.

[velvet jasper]

Do the skeletons actually differ or same?
UE usually imports multiple meshes if it detects multiple root joints which usually means multiple skeletons.

[quaint abyss]

I don't know what I did differently but I started from the beginning and it imported the character fully now

Unreal Manny skeleton with baked shape keys

Which is great but now I can't figure out how to animate it without an iPhone or Snapdragon cpu android

I thought we could animate the shape keys via offline video or webcam now but all the tuts are for metahuman

Would you know a way at all?

[near moth]

imma be honest

I tried very hard to simulate this with mover

just could not

[eternal tendon]

The bug isn’t consistently reproducible, so it’s a bit tricky to trigger. But if you rub the character around the top edge of the slope in the GASP project, you’ll eventually see the character flip over. And it’s not some ultra-rare edge case either.

More importantly, as you can see in the second and third GIFs, Mover’s trajectory fails to detect cliffs, which is a pretty critical issue. This is also very likely the main cause of the character-flipping bug.

I dug into it a bit more, and it seems the root cause is that the Mover-specific trajectory generation function—
UPoseSearchTrajectoryLibrary::PoseSearchGenerateTransformTrajectoryWithPredictor—
does not use the controller’s yaw input as part of the trajectory context, whereas CMC version fuction —UPoseSearchTrajectoryLibrary::PoseSearchGenerateTransformTrajectory— does.
(It even has a TODO comment, so it looks like this has been postponed since UE 5.6.)

I also looked into the UMoverTrajectoryPredictor::Predict logic, but it goes way too deep, so I stopped there.

[near moth]

Nice

Probably should put out a bug request

[eternal tendon]

I did submit a bug report, but chances are Epic is already aware of the issue—there’s a TODO comment sitting right there, after all. It was probably just pushed back due to internal scheduling.
My recommendation would be: don’t use Mover and Motion Matching together in production yet. That combination simply isn’t fully implemented at this point.
It’ll probably get resolved within a year or so.

[grave badger]

Hey! I’m running into an issue with Auto-Rig Pro in Blender.
I know this isn’t a server specifically for that addon, but I’m pretty sure the problem can be solved on the Unreal side.

I’m exporting an ARP animation (export settings shown in the image) using the Unreal Engine rig option. However, when I import it into Unreal (import settings also shown), several bones become deformed, as you can see in the screenshot. The animation itself comes very precise, so I’d prefer not to manually fix the spine, knees, etc.

Is there an automatic solution for this?
Something like preventing the bones from stretching or collapsing during import?

[fickle umbra]

Anyone have any resorces for how I can do some basic first person animations? Just basic stuff, like swinging and item, throwing an item, opening a door/chest etc. All tutorials online are just for shooters or way to overkill

Dont have to be complex with fingers and such, can even just be a floating item. No hands. But I dont know how to do the actual animations for first person

[velvet jasper]

Well, you animate your character from first person perspective, that's pretty much it.
Or do you ask about the implementation?

[unborn star]

Hi there, keep getting some weird issues when retargeting.

[young plover]

Hello, I'm trying out GASP and migrated the pawn and levelblock_traversable assets to my project, moving and animations work fine but I'm not able to traverse cubes as I would in the GASP example level, any idea why?

[velvet jasper]

Have you migrated trace channel as well?

[young plover]

That was the issue thanks, it's a Lyra project so the trace channel was already occupied, and I had to change the response to "Block" for the trace channel being used

[unborn star]

any idea about mine

[velvet jasper]

Can you drop me your assets in DM?
I’ll see what’s going on.

[unborn star]

thanks

will do

[hollow locust]

I have a button which is a blueprint subclass of a CommonUI WIdget.

It has a bunch of variables which then get applied to a material instance.

My issue:

I cannot figure out how to make these variables change.

For example I would like TImePressedValue
to LERP from 0 - 1 based on a time.

The thing is my variables are not keyframable for some reason, and I cannot figure out how to animate them with the sequencer.

The variables are Defined like so:

    UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere, BlueprintReadWrite, Category = "Material Params", meta = (ExposeOnSpawn = true))
    float TimeHoveredValue = 0.0f;

    UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere, BlueprintReadWrite, Category = "Material Params", meta = (ExposeOnSpawn = true))
    float TimePressedValue = 0.0f;

My class is:

class SILVERKEEPUI_API UAwlMaterialButton : public UCommonButtonBase

[velvet jasper]

I think this question would be a better fit for #umg or #slate channels.

[hidden dawn]

I spent over an hour trying to understand an ABP. The AI was insistent that "Upper Body" slots in anim montages ONLY affect upper body bones. The only logical way I could see the ABP working is if the slot included all the bones. After an hour it relented and said that "Upper Body" was a misnomer and that it was just a custom name which includes all the bones.. For a sanity check, I was looking for feedback on this. The ABP blends the upper body with the default jump animation (to get rid of the animation lifting itself in the air, which is the responsibility of the code). It does this if the player is in the air, otherwise it just uses the montage (for the landing finish, and if it's still playing, otherwise continuing with default animations). Is this explanation correct?

(also it's a jump attack, the name doesn't make that clear)

[velvet jasper]

I'm not sure what kind of explanation you want to check.
The example Third Person ABP, which I guess you used as a base, plays jump and landing animations as states.
Unless, you changed the logic yourself.

The blending logic is correct though.

[hidden dawn]

it's more the assertion that an "Upper Body Slot" only contains upper body bones.. Apparently it doesn't necessarily, though AI was breaking my brain by asserting it was the case.

[velvet jasper]

The montage slot itself is just a place that the montage can "occupy", it's just a name.
You define which bones should be controlled inside your anim graph setup.

[hidden dawn]

thanks. it took an hour arguing with AI to establish that!

using that blend node in the ABP, that's where the affected bones are controlled. it has nothing to do with the name of the montage slot. It could be named "Potato" and still work

[velvet jasper]

Correct.
I'd advise taking a look at the official documentation and learning materials first.
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-slots-in-unreal-engine

[cyan bridge]

It's been a minute since sequencer was changed in 5.6 anyone know a way or if it's even possible to use sockets in Level Sequence's?

Should i ask this question in #sequencer ?

[eternal tendon]

Additionally, I found something else while debugging: when the Mover character walks underneath a ceiling, it sometimes treats the top of the ceiling as part of the trajectory—just like in the video I attached.
(Assuming this isn’t just a bug in GASP’s trajectory-visualization debug tool.)

[near moth]

Is there a way to keep this docked down 😡

I want it always like this -

[signal marlin]

Hi guys, i'm creating the animations of my fps game and I want, for the 3 different pistols I have, to use the same walk movement animation, but keeping the hand pose created for the specific weapon. Is it possible to just add the walk movement to the base pose of the weapon, without creating 3 different walk animations?

I tried with layered blend, but the problem is that it overrides the movement "globally", so the hand is re-positioned to match the base walk animation position

I would need like a "local space" walk movement, so that the walk offset is applied to the base pose, is there a way to achieve that using animations?

[velvet jasper]

"Local Space" animation usually called additive 🙂

You can build your FP anim system around "base idlepose + additives" workflow, where you have a base pose for your weapon and most of the animations are additives from that. Since you're extracting the "delta" from your animation, you can apply that movement to other poses in your anim graph setup.

To make it work even better, your animation rig should have the IK support for the weapon and both hands, e.g. "ik_hand_gun" constrained to the weapon joint and "ik_hand_l" and "_r" constrained to FK joints.
If you pass your additives through the Layered Blend node and "filter out" the hand IKs, you'd preserve the hands position relative to the gun, but the gun movement would still be applied.

[signal marlin]

Thanks! I'll give it a try, i should already set up the IK, so that would be for free I hope

[signal marlin]

Hey just a quick question, is there a way to set hand ctrl curves to be world space and not whatever it is right now?
If I move the up vector, the ctrl moves diagonally...

[wide idol]

What do these redpoints represent in a blendspace?

[velvet jasper]

Do you want to have a gizmo in the world space?

[worn marlin]

Do you think its worth adding orientation warping, stride warping for ai on a horror game like zombies, single player game? Thanks

[radiant flax]

i guess its worth it. You move in the direction of the Pose Driven System (more control over the pose).
You have a single forward run cycle.
System stretches stride (stride warping) to match actual speed.
System rotates legs/hips (orientation warping) to match direction.

[native umbra]

I have, I haven't ran into the issues you're showing but I have noticed a ton lag issues that aren't present in a regular CMC setting

---

Does anybody know of any resources for leaning how to make additive animations at a more advanced level? I'm not just talking about simple overlays or simple 'rotations', but more advanced posing considerations and how they may interact with everything else going on

[native umbra]

fluctuating stride warping + play rate slightly can add a lot of variety semi-procedurally, for a horror it could be nice to make things look 'weird'

[signal marlin]

Kind of, I want that if I change the curve of Z axis, the hand actually goes up and down

[velvet jasper]

Apply space switching to world space?

[signal marlin]

Yeah but I would like to be able to handle the up/down movement directly using the sequencer curve (Z axis), in order to perform micro-adjustments.
But as you can see, if I move the Z axis, the hand moves diagonally

[glass musk]

Anyone else having their metahuman get distorted when applying the control rig in 5.6/5.7? I have a custom mesh, it looks fine until the control rig is applied, then the arms are shifted. The distortion is different between 5.6/5.7. I haven't seen anything addressing this specific issue, but I assume this must be pretty common.

[cyan bridge]

Light bump on this, anyone know if sockets are usable?

[velvet jasper]

Use for what?
They’re not animatable.

[cyan bridge]

Used as an attach point. I believe I have an idea what the problem is, it’s something to do with the older metahuman control rig

[rare falcon]

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[spare kiln]

there is no real way, of easily moving a character with the ue4 skeleton to the ue5 skeleton right?

[pale elk]

hello, I made an animation in Blender using the rigify addon. When I export it in Unreal, the face of the character is deformed, while it is not in Blender. Any Idea what is happening ?

[velvet jasper]

That was possible to do since UE4.

[velvet jasper]

Live Retargeting, or retargeting in general.

[cyan bridge]

yeah it's complicated, I have a ton of level sequences using the metarig from 5.3 or 5.4 where I had several weapon meshes attached with an "attach" track to the weapon socket I use for gameplay. I use the linked baking workflow to make my animations so when I updated to 5.6 and the socket no longer followed the bones I went to look for answers. I was told by several sources that sockets didn't work in level sequence anymore right after the release of 5.6 so I thought i would check again now that 5.7 is out and it looks like it might have just been my older metahuman rig the whole time

[somber briar]

Regarding the GASP - CMC recently(ish) added better support for custom gravity. It works pretty seemlessly with the GASP, but if I try the mover iteration (slightly different implementation) I get some weirder results with the character. They always try and rotate towards the world up even though I apply a new world up to my character + Gravity accel. One note is in my testing going backwards will properly flip the character mesh, but all other directional move anims have the character the wrong direction.

It's a big project, so any guesses where I should look to fix this for mover? My project will need replication so I wanted to try mover, but honestly it seems CMC's iteration may be simplier

[spare kiln]

I'm always wondering with live retargeting, what is the performance loss?
Because there are some ue4 models I like, but I'm unsure if it's worth the potential struggle.

[orchid wigeon]

Hi. I duplicated the sandbox character of GASP and trying to make motion matching work with my own metahuman. The Idle animations play but the other animations dont. and I cant move my mouse to look around. How can I solve this?

[covert parcel]

anyone know how to solve this? i cannot get my hand to extrude to the anim grab point (this used to work like 6 months ago before i updated my rig)

[velvet jasper]

Does the motion matching node receive the trajectory from character?
Does your ABP get needed references at all?

[velvet jasper]

Is the transform node connects to the layered blend node afterwards?

[ornate sluice]

This is a weird one, when I play in a level that doesn't have a directional light actor in it, the first person skeleton mesh will play a few frames and freeze 😐

[next python]

is it using shadow casting to determine if it's not occluded?

[ornate sluice]

idk

but it also doesnt work with other light sources

[next python]

is this using the new first person rendering feature?

[ornate sluice]

yes

its this setting right?
I'm setting it in cpp, tho I change it to none in the blueprint and it still has that issue

[ornate sluice]

    FirstPersonMeshComponent = CreateDefaultSubobject<USkeletalMeshComponent>(TEXT("FirstPersonMesh"));
    FirstPersonMeshComponent->SetupAttachment(GetMesh());
    FirstPersonMeshComponent->SetCollisionProfileName(FName("NoCollision"));
    FirstPersonMeshComponent->SetOnlyOwnerSee(true);
    FirstPersonMeshComponent->FirstPersonPrimitiveType = EFirstPersonPrimitiveType::FirstPerson;

    FirstPersonCameraComponent = CreateDefaultSubobject<UCameraComponent>(TEXT("FirstPersonCamera"));
    FirstPersonCameraComponent->SetupAttachment(FirstPersonMeshComponent);
    FirstPersonCameraComponent->bUsePawnControlRotation = true;
    FirstPersonCameraComponent->bEnableFirstPersonFieldOfView = true;
    FirstPersonCameraComponent->bEnableFirstPersonScale = true;
    FirstPersonCameraComponent->FirstPersonFieldOfView = 90.0f;
    FirstPersonCameraComponent->FirstPersonScale = 0.6f;

its basically the default UE character

its probably a bug in the engine...

[orchid wigeon]

Im using motion warping for the trajectory. Now that I set the references for the ABP it crouches when jump but thats all.

[velvet jasper]

If you increase the Bound Scale of the FP mesh to 3.0, would it work?

[orchid wigeon]

I think I solved the issue by modifying the references in the ABP

[visual abyss]

Hi folks, got some quick questions regarding Motion Matching. Been learning it using the Game Animation Sample, and I was trying to insert some new animations. But the trajectories appear very off from the standard (Image 1).

While investigating the animations and comparing it with Epic's, I noticed that the root bone rotation on those anims was "bobbing", rather than always pointing towards the motion (Image 2). I assume that is the reason for the messed up trajectories, as the Schema uses the velocity direction (i.e. root rotation) to determine the trajectory?

Finally, assuming that the above is true and the rotation is fixed, is it a huge problem that the root motion translation has a slight jitter (Image 3)? I assume that as long as it's roughly in the right direction then the motion matching logic will still pick it correct?

Any way to "clean" the root rotation in-engine (again, assuming that's actually the cause), preferably in bulk? I was looking into Anim Modifiers (predict rotation frame-by-frame by comparing root bone location) but my attempt to actually modify the bone failed (I guess it just reads but doesn't allow writing bone transforms?).

[velvet jasper]

It is possible to modify the animation keyframes through Anim Modifier.
I've written once a custom modifier that would transfer the Distance curve and the Turn Yaw curve to the root motion for Paragon characters.
The blueprints have this function exposed.

Of course, you'd have to modify not only the root bone but the pelvis as well, preserving its original transforms.

[misty dagger]

my geometry cache (fluid sim) looks perfect when i pause the sequence, but when I hit play sequence or mrq - the fluid seems to have gravity and disappear. when I pause, it is back to where it belongs at that frame.

but damping, gravity and physics sim is off for the geometry cache animation?! (imported from blender)

[covert parcel]

yep, blend poses by bool goes straight to layered blend, one pose below the idle animation

[misty dagger]

ok, this problem is still caused by my animation blueprint that, for some reason, lifts and shifts the character when i hit play.

[ornate sluice]

nope

[ornate sluice]

welp I haven't changed anything and freezing resumed even with a directional light actor in the level... (adding another one doesnt fix it xD)

[orchid wigeon]

Hi. Im copying the GASP motion matching and when I run side ways it slides weirdly. when I walk It doesnt happen. Im using the same animation notifys as the GASP sample but this happens. Does anyone know how to fix this while having a large num of animations the database to pick from?

[orchid wigeon]

I was able to solve it by using the rewind debugger

[velvet jasper]

“Freezing” animation usually means that the engine thinks the mesh is out of render range and stops ticking the animation update.

Try changing the animation tick mode to Always Tick Pose. Since it’s FP mesh, we do not care much about the update optimization.

[ornate sluice]

Visibility Based Anim Tick Option? it set to always

[ornate sluice]

I did change something, disabling Nanite always freeze the animation, enabling Nantie freeze the animation only when there is no directonal light

[dim basin]

Hey everyone, I've noticed that mannequin "weapon_r" bone rotation changes on sample animations but those animations doesn't have any related keyframe. But on my own animations, that bone keeps same rotation with skeleton. It causes rotation difference on attached objects. What am i missing?

[visual abyss]

Ah so that's how to set it properly, I had been using the Get/Set Bone Pose nodes. Thanks!
That custom modifier you mentioned, you made in Blueprint or c++? Because I'm a bit confused on how those bone track keys are storing time information, looks like the arrays only store the transforms but I don't see any reference to time/frame on the individual key. Is it a constant rate based on the frame rate property? Just wondering if the BP-side Animation Data Model is exposing everything or the link between key and time is c++ only.

[grand storm]

I updated ALS Refactored by replacing the old Blend Space system with Motion Matching and I’m sharing the entire plugin for FREE.

The video also includes a quick step-by-step setup tutorial so you can install it in minutes.
https://youtu.be/yIjTs7HtHkU?si=lp2ToneQLCof43F9

[velvet jasper]

In my case, that was C++ but I've done a draft with BPs first.
Yeah, each array element represents the frame in the animation sequence.

[visual abyss]

Got it, thanks!

[lone fractal]

anyone able to help im currently tryint to switch betwen control rigs while in prone so the character goes up and down slopes correctly but when i add in the rig for it it doesnt seem to work

[tacit sorrel]

I'm using curves on an animation to do fake root motion, but sometimes it just fails to retrieve the value for a frame (causing the character to glitch out). In the rewind debugger everything looks as it should, so I'm wondering if there are any performance checkboxes I should look for? Does anyone have any ideas? 😅
I could just smooth the values, but that seems like a pretty bad/stopgap solution..

[velvet jasper]

Could you give a bit more context here?
Like how does the logic look for driving the character.

[velvet jasper]

Do you mean you have multiple Control Rig nodes in your Anim Graph that you turn on and off, or just one node that you toggle?

[lone fractal]

i think so (im a bit of a noob when it comes to the blueprint stuff normally a modellers

so essentially i have this control rig specifically for proning

so the character doesnt you know go through the sloped earea model wise

i thought connecting the control rig into here would make it you start but it doesnt

thats the prone i thought it would go in there to but im having proper blanks

(i hope im making sense)

all because this annoys me

lol

and i just realised i havent fixed the camera for these positions too lol

[velvet jasper]

Well, adding control rig node directly to the state graph is fine.

[lone fractal]

it doesnt seem to work in there either which is odd unless im doing something wrong

[quaint berry]

yo can anyone help me with this i am making a game and whenever i try to force root lock on it gets stuck in the capsule and doesnt move and when i dont enable it my character moves but the capsule remains in the same spot so i tried to retarget the animation but it did this lmao someone please help me fix this

[velvet jasper]

Well, does it work at all? 🙂

Like the actual Control Rig?

[lone fractal]

thats something i have not actually tried lol

give me 2 ticks

nope defs doing something wrong

[velvet jasper]

If you add the control rig to the main anim graph, right before the main output, start the game, then switch to control rig editor window and then pick your PIE instance at the upper right drop down list, you’ll be able to live debug the CR graph.

Adding the debug stuff to the CR graph would help as well.

[lone fractal]

hmm seems the math aint calculating

[velvet jasper]

So, you have an animation asset that has a root motion and you want to drive your character capsule with it, right?
Why does just enabling root motion and triggering the animation through montage not work for you?

[worthy isle]

Is there a standard approach for handling multiple animation asset packs that by default import their own copy of the UE Mannequin skeleton? The animations are linked to the asset pack version so I can't mix them with previous anim BPs/montages.

[quaint berry]

Idk why brother it happens for every single one of my projects

Idk if there is an extension or something

But i can show you my character mesh as well as soon as i get back

I can send you the animation as well because i want to fix this problem asap

Its been a pain in the ass for evey project nos

[velvet jasper]

You can select your assets and reassign the skeleton to the correct one.

[velvet jasper]

Showing a screen recording of your animation playing with opened Skeleton Tree tab and root bone selected would be enough.

[quaint berry]

alr

[tacit sorrel]

Sorry for the late reply, just went home. The implementation is something like this (with root motion extracted to curves using modifiers in the original animation) - it's entirely possible it's a result of implementation jank somewhere else in the graph, I just wanted to check if there were any quick fixes I could try out 🙂

[worthy isle]

Thank you! Do you know if it's possible to replace the skeletons en masse if the assets are spread across a ton of folders?

[quaint berry]

if u still dont understand i can send u the mesh as well

[lone fractal]

yeah looks like its not being called

[quaint berry]

yo dan did u check the screen recording?

[velvet jasper]

Unfortunately, the character and animations you’re using have an incorrect rigging for game engine - the rig has no actual root bone rather the pelvis joint is at the top of hierarchy.

The idea from the top of my head - use UE built in skeletal editor and retargeting’s root motion op.
Duplicate the mesh without the animations, create a new skeleton asset for new mesh, modify this skeleton to have an actual root bone, do the retargeting where you would just copy pelvis motion and FK chains, and generate root motion from pelvis.

[velvet jasper]

Well, yeah, you can apply a search filter and batch select all the animation sequences, then right click and reassign skeleton

[lone fractal]

@velvet jasper figured it out had the wronf add part on the anim graph

[quaint berry]

😭 idk how to do this any video recommendations?

[quaint berry]

Do i retarget with the mannequin rig?

[velvet jasper]

Why would you need to have this setup at all though?
There might be a conflict between CMC and Anim Instance.

[tacit sorrel]

Well, that's exactly why - it's just a regular actor without character movement 😛

[velvet jasper]

Hm, I’ll do a quick test on my side.

[tacit sorrel]

I will add that triggering it has been very inconsistent - I didn't experience it at all in the start, then had a while where it triggered constantly, and after that, maybe once a minute. That's why I was thinking it could be optimization related

[near moth]

I'm doing something similar to drive the character

I never had this happen

It gets the correct value every frame

Only issueis during transitions, it blends

[quaint berry]

btw i do have like the ue4 and 5 mannequins int the project as well so should i just replace the skeleton with that one? if so can i do it without fing up the entire project and having to replace skeleton in each of the used animations

[near moth]

Does it happen after a while of playing?

[tacit sorrel]

Yeah I ended up adding a delay between animations to avoid this (it's a frog that hops around, so it makes sense to just give it downtime between each jump) and it worked perfectly fine at first, but at some point it just.. stopped

After it got consistent I restarted the editor and it didn't fix it completely but it did make it happen less

[quaint berry]

can u help me as well brother

[tacit sorrel]

For now I've just skipped setting the transform if it couldn't find the value and it definitely makes it less jarring (you barely notice it) but it bothers me that it happens

[near moth]

It could be the visibility based tick options

Is it set to "Always Tick pose and refresh bones"

And for transitions

You can use inertialization node

and filter out the curves, so that it doesn't blend

[tacit sorrel]

Did not know that, thanks for the tip 😄

[near moth]

Yeah I love inertialization

[velvet jasper]

Good info, thanks for sharing.

[velvet jasper]

I'm not sure what you're talking about.
The character you've shown has a non-standard rig that doesn't match the Epic's mannequins.

[quaint berry]

no what i mean is if it doesnt work for ue5 i have other skeleton meshes as well such as the ue4 mannequin

is there a way to replace the broken skeleton mesh with this one without trying to retarget all of the animation

such as this one

[tacit sorrel]

Just checked on my home PC and it is set to this, but in 5 minutes of stress testing I only got it to glitch once so I think I'll just leave it as is (and avoid updating the actor location if it couldn't find any curves)

[velvet jasper]

You have a pack that contains a skeletal mesh and the animations made for this mesh.
Animations are using the data provided from that mesh.
You can't just "replace" something, you'd have to re-iterate the data itself. For example, through the retargeting using the same mesh.
Retargeting to the completely different mesh would require an additional fine-tuning, if you're aiming for the precision. If not, feel free to try.

Speaking the same terminology, it's not just the mesh is broken, it's the whole pack.

[quaint berry]

alr brother ill try with the other mesh then for now

[tacit sorrel]

I did manage to snap a video of it happening (but I don't think this can be used for debugging it)

(forgot to include the curves, just to show that they're as expected)

[native umbra]

I'm looking for some advice regarding the inclusion of spin states while using orientation warping. I am not sure about the logic and coverage needed. Should the spin happen from foot contact to foot contact, or something else?

I'm thinking that no matter what, the coverage has to be a leg cross animation. But I'm hoping someone else knows of a 'neat trick' to do the spin more appropriately, or something...

[orchid wigeon]

Hi. Im copying GASP and when I try to traversal it fails to cast to AnimMontage and fails to find a montage. What is the problem here?

[worn marlin]

Is there a new tech now in unreal engine where you can let the baked speed of the animation force the blend space animation? Without opting for rootmotion anims?

Or at least a plugin to do detect the speed of anims by cm/s so we can set it on the blend space? Thanks

[velvet jasper]

I’m not sure I understand what you mean in the first part, but there’s an analysis settings in blend spaces that could rearrange the samples based on the velocity, for example.

[velvet jasper]

Do you get the correct motion match results there?

[orchid wigeon]

Thank you for the reply. Yes, the motion matching is fine. I think its failing to pick a montage due to the chooser settings but not sure.

[severe sage]

Hiya, I'm trying to remake the GASP Mover setup on my character (so I can understand how it works) and I'm having trouble porting the Blendstack info, because the original Blendstack takes priority and complains

How can I get this state to be the active one instead of the original BlendStack in the bottom right?

[severe sage]

Disconnecting the Blendstack gives me this error, so i need to get the other Blendstack be recognized as the main one

[velvet jasper]

What do you mean "original Blendstack" ?
I can only see one node there.

[severe sage]

The Blendstack Input in the bottom right is the one from the CMC character, while the Blend Stack beneath the State Control has been pasted in from the Character_Mover graph. In the SandboxCharacter_Mover graph, all logic starts from the state tree and uses the bendstack there. I've attached a screenshot of how it looks in the graph provided by Epic. Notice where the logic starts moving from

[velvet jasper]

Under "logic starts moving from" do you mean the node connection bold lines?

[severe sage]

Yes

[severe sage]

Ty!

[lone fractal]

ookay so ive a bit of a strange one

so the animations are now working

aprt from going up on prone

also need to reset the cameras which ill figure out later

[lone fractal]

@velvet jasper hopefully your the hero i need since youve helped so far

[velvet jasper]

Well, what's your main question?

[lone fractal]

the prone mostly i can get it working fine on the down slope but up slope

it decides it wants to be come inbedded in to the ground

could be the capsule component again?

[velvet jasper]

Explain me the logic of your control rig.
How do you do the procedural adjustment?

[lone fractal]

so it calculates the difference in rotation in both the neck and the pelvis

then it calculates the angle it should be at

[velvet jasper]

But it doesn't take the actor rotation into account, right?

[lone fractal]

takes the root bones rotation in i think (still getting used to these blue printing states)

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, but the control rig by default works in Mesh/Component Space.

It doesn't know about the world.

[lone fractal]

im being a bit dumb so you mean it essentially knows it should be rotating but it doesnt know exactly how it should be

because it doesnt know your going up a slop just knows your on one

[velvet jasper]

If you debug your root bone rotation values, you'll see that they never rotate according to the **world **space.

Because you're currently getting the values by default in the component space.

[lone fractal]

Ahhh

now to sound even dumber how

[worthy isle]

I'm getting a bone snapping bug and I'm not sure where to start looking for the potential cause. The basic Anim BP setup is below with a layered blend per bone node that uses the default UpperBodyMask blend on the UE5 Mannequin. I've used this setup for a while now, and even if it didn't look great at times, I never had this kind of snapping. I assume it's related to the actual asset pack I just got, but I'm not sure how to debug that. Any potential leads would be greatly appreciated.

[velvet jasper]

There's a "To World" node that would acquire the given values in the world space.
"From World" node would do the opposite.

[lone fractal]

now to find that node

[lone fractal]

looks like your right the root doesnt stick to the world just where the default pose

is

[velvet jasper]

The root bone won't align to the ground in any case. It is following the capsule.

[lone fractal]

Ahhh

[velvet jasper]

So grabbing the X axis is pointless, as it won't get rotated that way.

[devout cape]

trying to setup a control rig of a skeletal mesh i've got so i can animate it properly but for some reason on the right leg its just inverting the normals, anyone got any ideas?
outside of the control rig the skm is fine

[velvet jasper]

Looks like some sort of joint orientation lock issue.
If you passthrough your upper body layer without the layered blend node, would it snap as well?

[lone fractal]

So its the y ans z rotatioln in the worls

[velvet jasper]

Why Y axis?

[lone fractal]

Just thinking out loud but wouldnt that get the height

[worthy isle]

It doesn't snap in that case. In fact, just changing the Blend Mode to a Branch Filter off spine_01 stops the snapping, though it doesn't look great.

[velvet jasper]

Could you show your Blend Mask values?

[worthy isle]

These right?

[velvet jasper]

Y axis rotation is a roll rotation, it has nothing to do with the height 🙂

[velvet jasper]

Try setting all the joint values starting from clavicles to 1.

In theory, the spine would still snap, but the arms would work fine.
These in-between values make the rotation jump between -180 and 180 rotation clamp due to the blending between the extreme values. There might be an issue with the animation assets.

[lone fractal]

Thats a fair point lol

[velvet jasper]

You can try to cast two traces from the chest and the pelvis, store the hit normal vectors, find the average between them, get the rotation from that average normal and apply the rotation offset to the root joint.

[lone fractal]

seee i have 2 traces one for the neck and one for the pelvic maybe ive hooked up the math wrong

i think i need to go rethink this contrl rig for the prone lol

[lone fractal]

yeah im completely lost what im missing lol

[pale leaf]

Anyone know where the "edit pose" button is in 5.7? Trying to retarget a skeleton, but can't for the life of me find how to edit UE's manequin from A to T pose

[velvet jasper]

In the Retargeter asset, you can change the Retargeting pose for both Source and Target.

[pale leaf]

Thank you! I just saw it and was about to post. Makes sense i suppose, but i wish they could update their documentation when they make changes like that 😖

[fleet sable]

@barren fiber
Hello.
I've started some work on my own AnimBlendspace 3D. I think I'll release it for free/for a modest fee of 5 bucks. I'm not sure how much time I'll spend on it, as I have a lot of other things to do.
Do you have any plans for yours?
I don't want to significantly disrupt your plans, if you have some commercial plan on it.

[devout cape]

i've fixed this issue since but now im running into a issue where its not keeping the parts connected
when i made the skeletal mesh it was just a bunch of meshes and i bound each individual bone to its corresponding part as its a robot

would anyone have any idea on how i can have it so they are still properly attached?

[orchid wigeon]

Does anyone have any idea why it fails to find the animmontage?

[hollow oracle]

Can't seem to find 3d animators in the freelance channel I'm creating a horror souls like in need of animators I have. Very limited budget prefer to pay per animation.

[vestal stream]

getting back into GASP with the new 5.7 version, currently trying to remove the animations i dont need / dont like

Starting with some of the more unrealistic looking vaulting animations, most of them got removed perfectly but one will continue to play and im not sure where its being called from

heres a video posted

[orchid wigeon]

Did you remove it from PSD_traversal?

[orchid wigeon]

The traversal action is weird since i changed the PSS_traversals bone to ik_foot_root. does anyone have anyidea why its glitching?

[barren fiber]

thats a good free :D, go ahead i have no interest in fab or commercial interest.

[barren fiber]

why would you do that?

[barren fiber]

also like don't base actions depending on what others think or will tell you, just do your thing and people will usually love it anyways. think of it that way, did anyone stop working on motion matching after Ubisoft did or did people try and invent their own adaptations. there is a high likelyhood yours could be better then mine, if you invest more time into it then me, you also might approach stuff differently. development is about exploring ideas and applying them to create solutions for which we don't have one yet. in this case publicly available and or try and create a better solution which others may be able to learn from.
so feelings aside, just create for the sake of creation i may learn a thing or 2. i wish you alot of luck with this project and hope it turns out the very best! keep me posted on the progress id love to see!

[orchid wigeon]

My skeleton doesn’t have a attach bone so for the alternative. If I don’t change it it doesn’t perform traversal completely

[barren fiber]

funny enough tho metahumans dont come with the ik bones aswell

unless you do edit the rig

heres a little tip then, activate the skeletal mesh editor open your main skeleton mesh and add all the bones needed for gameplay, all the ik bones you may choose to add a bone named attach or just regularly call it interaction. then when you retarget your all of the animation setup, you would want to configurate the retargeter asset to include all of those, fix up some of the poses and add new configs for bones to the retargetting chain.

crucial to do some clean up on the retarget assets, so create an auto retarget one and edit that to get you started.

there is also a couple settings in the OpStack you may want to adjust and fly over.

[pale elk]

hello, is it possible to use same animation blueprint for different skeleton ? If yes is it good practice ?

[barren fiber]

no most of the functionality will be broken, if you mean different meshes sharing a common rig, or similar rigs with the same naming conventions then yes

[pale elk]

Thank you 🙂
no I meant different rig and same anim bp.
Because right now I have a human rig, and a cat rig, but their anim BP are really the same, only the used animation and blend space are different. That’s why I was wondering

[quaint berry]

these are the traces for whenever my character attacks so can anyone help me fix these please

i made a child class of my BP_character and inserted this mesh

the skeletal mesh also looks the same as the animation playing

[barren fiber]

wow this looks pretty bad

seems like you got scaling issues either in your bp or the imported animations

i have never seen anything alike yet, so its speculative

[quaint berry]

and btw idk why but you can see the red and green big lines right I want these gone idk why they showed up on the screen but they dont show when i run the simulation but there is an issue that if i place something in the viewport it stays stuck there even if i try to move it

it just randomly started showing up half way through my project

and i am pretty sure its got something to do with the map

well i just removed it from my skeletal mesh and it fixed it

[velvet jasper]

AnimBPs are by default tied to the skeleton asset.
It is technically possible to assign the anim class to the mesh with different skeleton, but it would try to forcefully apply the anim logic with varying success. If the skeletons are completely different, it would fail completely.

If you plan to share the anim logic between different characters, you'd have to build it without connection to the existing skeleton and then just insert the needed animations per character.

Here's a link to UE docs related to the Template AnimBPs and Animation Layer Interfaces:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-blueprint-linking-in-unreal-engine#animationblueprinttemplates

[quaint berry]

yo i wanted to ask you something i am making a game where there are 5 characters with different traits so i have made a samurai character successfuly but for the others should i make child of that blueprint class or make then indidually

if i make the child class can u change the locomotion walk and other animaiton of that child class?

which method do any of you guys suggest?

i think that instead of the child one i should make the seperate one?

[velvet jasper]

So do you mean creating a child for your AnimBP or your main BP class?

I'd just prefer to stick to ABP discussions here 🙂

There's multiple ways you can change the animation assets, so I won't be able to explain you everything.
But yeah if you have your animations assigned directly to the Sequence/Blendspace Player/Evaluator nodes, you'll be able to change the assignments in the Child ABP.

[velvet jasper]

Very basic example on Template AnimBPs usage - I've created a template ABP with just the logic.
Then I've right-clicked on the asset and created a child ABP with the character's skeletons assigned.
Inside the child instances, I've assigned available animations.

Instead of overrides, that could be variables.
Instead of State Machine, that could be a Linked Anim Layer with separate logic ABP assigned.

[quaint berry]

i am asking which method is best

and do u have any videos showing how to do this

[velvet jasper]

Well, IMO, that's a subjective thing.
For the beginning, I'd start from something more straightforward, like my example above.
Usage of Animation Linking could be seen in Lyra project, there are probably a bunch of videos online covering what's been done there.

[pale elk]

Thank you !

[quaint berry]

Alright Thanks brother

[vestal rapids]

anyone know why this page "Supercharge your animation rigging skills! " , https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/news/rigging-in-ue-5-6-workshop-now-available-on-the-epic-developer-community , the start now button does nothing, is it not planned yet ? :))

I mean 'watch now' .

[lone fractal]

Srill canr figure out where ive gone wrong with this blue print

[unborn star]

Still having some retargetting issues rip

[vestal rapids]

5.x ? afaik 7 has the better updates for anim.

bug fixes etal

[regal pivot]

I would like to change the frame rate of GASP animations to 12 frames. I have set Interpolation=Step and Rate Scale = 0.4.
But the animations become slow. I want to keep the same playback duration, but with 12 frames.
Any ideas?

[velvet jasper]

Use Control Rig. Cache the incoming pose and apply it with the fixed interval.

[regal pivot]

good idea thank you

[lethal marsh]

Hello, anyone knows why, in game, my pistol idle animation doesn't match correctly with my base animation ?
The left arm is not in place, too far forward the right hand.. (i've just duplicate and edit a stater pack idle anim).
Any clue ? thx

[velvet jasper]

Well, what's your setup for Layered Blend node?

[lethal marsh]

this

Oh i think i found my mistake, just forgot to add new Keys for the left arms/hands... it seems to work well now

[spare kiln]

how bad is the overhead when doing live retargeting?

[orchid wigeon]

I already have retargeted assets. why do I have to do it again?

[native umbra]

There is no way to specifiy a specific node when linking an anim layer, is that right? It just links all anim layer interface nodes with whatever class I am using?

[barren fiber]

they are badly configured as you may be able to tell looking at the neck regions aswell as the hands

its a one time setup, give it some time, all other animations that will be retargeted afterwards will always turn out great.

[quaint berry]

yo can anyone help me make like a rage mode for my game where the attack speed and everything of my character increases

[barren fiber]

For peeps curious about UAF and working with the System: https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/98mz/unreal-engine-your-first-unofficial-60-minutes-inside-uaf

is this even working?

the link at all

[quaint berry]

yeh it is

[violet lotus]

Any advice, as my animation when looping is not having seamless transitions.

[quaint berry]

is the socket your weapon hand?

[violet lotus]

Yes

[quaint berry]

and are using niagra effect?

[violet lotus]

Yeah, ignore the direction. That's my next part

[quaint berry]

oh yeh i did some thing for my die animation

maybe it for for this as well

go to your animation montage

[violet lotus]

I didn't use that for my work.

[quaint berry]

what did u use

[violet lotus]

I used the variable, cast spell

the bottom left when that is referenced using the variable starts the animation order

[quaint berry]

hmm i guess the only thing making it like this is the animation itself

i dont have much experience tho

[violet lotus]

Even when I used loop you can still see the repeat animation frames not being seamless

Trying to make it seamless

[quaint berry]

try to loop it from a better timeline

😭 but i aint a professional and havent done yours before

[violet lotus]

Fairs

I did try this to make it look seamless lol, nealry got it but not yet.

[quaint berry]

make it lower lmao

maybe it will work or by increasing it

btw have you made a block system before

i mean when u press a button u go into defense stance

[violet lotus]

Yeah

Simple code for that

[quaint berry]

yeh imma need your help blud lmao

can i add you?

[violet lotus]

sure

[quaint berry]

Thx brother

[velvet jasper]

Well, is your anim asset actually loopable?

[violet lotus]

I have put loop as yes

[velvet jasper]

I mean, the actual animation.

Is it authored as loopable animation?

[violet lotus]

I have split 1 animation into 3 parts, begin, loop and end

[velvet jasper]

I see, so it was a one big anim that you split into parts.
Ideally, you'd have to actually modify the animation to make it loopable.

Alternatively, you can trigger the animations through the animation montages (and I'd say it's a better way to trigger such stuff in general).
In the first montage asset, you'd have your "begin" and "loop animations.
Hacky way in your case would be to duplicate the "loop" animation and set the playrate to -1.0 for new clip.
If you add the additional section to the clip timeline and in "Montage Sections" tab set it itself as a next section, you'd make it loopable.

The second montage asset would just contain your "end" animation.
Trigger these montages through your weapon logic.

[violet lotus]

Thanks

[velvet jasper]

Yes, it is possible to add the ending animation to the same montage as well.
You can give it it's own section and then call "Montage Jump to Section" function.
But it would just snap to this animation, without any blending. This is why I suggest to have two montages as they would blend together.

[velvet jasper]

You mean, is it possible to link separate ABPs per layer?
If this ABP doesn't contain the implementation for some layer, it won't be linked to that layer node.

Here I have a main ABP with two sub-ABPs linked.
One impements only the FullBody layer, other one - UpperBody layer.

There's no out-of-box function to modify the node directly.
It is possible to add a tag, and then get the node reference in the Event Graph but there's just getter functions available.

[native umbra]

Yes, in my use case I cant split by category like "upper body" and "full body". I'm trying to link two "full body", as an example.

I can't use separate layers named something else because they need to be able to go into any slot. I'm making a more advanced / scalable state machine.

It seems like the Linked Anim Graph is best, I guess.

[vivid roost]

Where can I find a starting tutorial for creating animation keyframes in Unreal Editor?

[vivid roost]

Not using Sequencer

[velvet jasper]

What's the alternative way you imagine?

[vivid roost]

I thought there was a way to make anim sequences from scratch in Unreal.

Or at least take an existing animation and animate the root bone.

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, by having a rig (not necessary a proper control rig, at least built-in FK rig option) applied to the character in the sequencer and baking the timeline to the AnimSequence.

Alternative, you can add the additive keys inside the AnimSequences itself.

[vivid roost]

Sounds like Additive Keys are what I'm after.

I need this for simulation/gameplay, rather than scripted scenes.

[quaint berry]

does anyone know where to find a seppuku or like rage mode enabler animation montage lmao

[velvet jasper]

That’s something you build yourself.
You have parameters such as animation play rate and character’s speed that you can change based on a condition.

[lone fractal]

Gahhh this is driving me nuts lol

now got both transforms on global space and its still going trhrough the ground when crawling up

[lone fractal]

asking for a friend with a tiny dagger?

[velvet jasper]

Is your trace length enough to hit the ramp when moving upwards?

[severe sage]

Hiya, still on the AnimGraph from GASP. The anim widget allows to use full motion match vs the state machine system. Now, my question is how do I remove all of the state machine options so I only have the motion matching system available in my graph?

Another question I would have is that in this screenshot, the Enbale Steering bool is referenced from the Blendstack, but I can't figure out where it's set up. I've checked the Blend Stack Input Struct, and it's no in there either

[velvet jasper]

Well, connect the MM node straight to the next node after the Blend by int node.

[severe sage]

It's clearly being referenced somewhere, so I though it might be in the animgraph

[velvet jasper]

If you click at the hyperlink, it’d point you to the error location.

Otherwise, just connect it back and remove the binding from the active index parameter.

[severe sage]

The hyperlink doesn't work, which is why I'm confused

[velvet jasper]

I’d advise to go to bp search and find all the references to this node tag.

[lone fractal]

Thats a point i think the radius is just 5

[worldly anvil]

Hello, is there any blend pose node that allows you to specify the current percentage of the blend? All of the nodes I see take in blend time, but I need to be able to tell what's the percentage of the blending at a given time. I have like a slider that I can drag to the left/right to show how the blend looks at different stages

[velvet jasper]

Two way blend node have an alpha exposed.

[worldly anvil]

Perfect, thank you

[severe sage]

Thanks, I managed to remove all mentions of it and get it working with only motion matching

[lone fractal]

https://tenor.com/view/nibbles-dunce-tom-and-jerry-gif-3253767392919141964

how i feel now after changing radius to 15 lol

[hidden dawn]

A tutorial I was following uses "Blend poses by enum".. but it's unavailable? I've been trying for 15 minutes, so I might just map the enum to ints because THAT is present

there is no "get enum value as int" either..

[velvet jasper]

That’s why debugging is important.
You’d probably have figured that out yourself if you would turn on Control Rig ingame debug functionality and draw the point at the trace hit location.

No pressure, just notifying you that there’s a helper tools.

[hidden dawn]

found it.. but there's a default pin with no option to remove so far..

meh, I'll just leave that pin there for now..

[lone fractal]

Yeah i keep forgetting about the debug drawer

Thanks for the help again much appreciates

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, it's technically not pretty, but that's just how it works - it's needed to have a fail-safe option in case the enum value might be incorrect.
To get rid of this note warning, you can either plug Local Space Ref Pose as a dummy or cache your logic and plug the caches instead, as you could have multiple cache nodes.

[hidden dawn]

I just copy pasted the unarmed blend space 🙂

[velvet jasper]

I'd still advise caching in that case, but if it works, then all good.

[hidden dawn]

maybe for the optimisation phase 😅

i was following a tutorial in which there is a spinning attack.. originally the spin was done in blueprint.. then suddenly he switched over to a montage incorporating spinning.. i tried all night to figure out how to do this in Blender and then downloaded Cascadeur..i don't know a good go-to tool for such animation; Cascadeur has a learning curve and is idiosyncratic about UE models.. Any pointers to a decent program?

[quaint berry]

Is that an insult

[hidden dawn]

maybe I'm impatient or unwilling to read a manual as thick as a phone book, but Blender seems as user-friendly as a cornered rat.

not sure if this is the right channel for this, but don't know which one is in that case..

[lone fractal]

Its very user friendly compared to zbrush and maya

And 3ds max

[hidden dawn]

I tried to get it to rotate, but the animation had root motion the displaces the character from the origin..I tried removing the offset a variety of ways and it ended up ripping the mesh off the bones, and not correcting the armature. I gave up after a long night of trying.

[lone fractal]

Anination is also a pain lol

You using your own rig or a prebuult?

[hidden dawn]

i am thinking of persevering with Cascadeur.. it looks like it can do this if I can decipher the interface.. It's a prebuilt.. A Mixamo one, that I imported to UE.. it added a root, but it's just a grouping not a bone.. that's where the fun started.

[hidden dawn]

issues surfaced again with root motion.. I have a sword combo attack that involves rotation and displacement.. If I let root animation happen, then it rotates and translates fine, but the character is seperated from their collision capsule and after the animation ends the character snaps back to their position before the combo as the game is running.. the other option is to turn root motion OFF but then the animation doesn't rotate or move and looks completely wrong...any pointers?

strangely, enabling root motion disables the movement

[velvet jasper]

It’d easier if you could show what you have.
Currently, I can assume that your character’s rig is incorrect and your root bone is the pelvis joint, instead of having correct root joint at zero coordinates.

[severe sage]

Back with more questions regarding the GASP Mover: Where is the Movement State updated? I looked everywhere, but don't know where to disable it (trying to disable it so I know where it's being changed). Movement State changes even if Update States function is disconnected, so it's definitely somewhere else that's driving it

[hidden dawn]

That's exactly right.. it's a mixamo animation, so I think it uses the hips.. I tried plugging it into Terriblis Mixamo converter, and that tool for Blender.. but they both choke on animations that involve translations

[hidden dawn]

I made a root bone before, but the animation doesn't run through it I don't think.. I made it to fix the foot IK, together with the VBs

[hidden dawn]

huzzah!

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, that won’t work this way. The root joint itself should have animation.
What’s wrong with Mixamo Converter?

[hidden dawn]

the Terriblis one now works fine.. I think I might have deleted some files in the IncomingFBX directory which was causing the error..

that is the result.. I turned off root motion and it animated in place as desired.

[velvet jasper]

Well, if you got the needed result - that's fine.

[velvet jasper]

Movement State Enum?
Only during update.
I've disconnected the execution of the update node - obviously it stopped updating.

[severe sage]

No, that's the issue. It's still updating, which means it's being updated somewhere else, and I don't know where

[velvet jasper]

When you see it's being updated?

[severe sage]

The sheer fact that the character changes from Idle to Moving is clear that it's updating. And I don't know where it is

[velvet jasper]

Ah, you're using Motion Matching only.

It constantly loops between the starting and stopping animations with MM.
So it is not updating, MM gets triggered by different logic in this case.

[severe sage]

Yeah, I'm only using MM, so I need to find where that os

[velvet jasper]

If you debug the related chooser, you'll see what's going on.

[severe sage]

That's how I found out the Movement Mode isn't updating on my character

[vestal aspen]

Is there a good free video to Mocap for UE5? Something that does face and body mocap.

[novel kindle]

How can I add My character to the (property access) list in the Animation Blueprint

oh nvm

[orchid wigeon]

Im copying GASP and the MotionMatching doesnt work(always idle animation) in packaged build. Does anyone know this issue? works in PIE

[late jasper]

I retargeted 521 animations, then used them all in code.
after I test, I noticed that the root bone was broken.
I fixed the issue in the RTG asset, but now I can't just do all the 521 again
Is there any way faster?

[velvet jasper]

Why you can’t? What’s the issue?

[late jasper]

I'll have to retarget again, replace the old ones with the new ones, each one individually in code

[velvet jasper]

If you overwrite the assets, they still would be referenced, no?

[late jasper]

yes, but how can I overwrite them? the RTG only allows me to create copies of the Animation Sample animations, in a new folder

[velvet jasper]

You select all of your animations, click Export, then pick the same folder where the original assets are. Apply the same naming changes, if any.
After that, the popup window would give you an option to overwrite the files.

[late jasper]

it won't work if I retargeted from (Animation sample animations) as it only shows their animations, and I want to edit the animations I already retargeted (which are new animations linked to UE5 Manny skeleton)

[velvet jasper]

Not sure that I'm understanding the issue.
You've done the retargeting once, it would be the same process.

[late jasper]

that's what I did, and now I'm using all the animations on the right.
but these animations (on the right) didn't copy root bone data

so if I want to copy the "root bone data", I need them from the animations on the left

overwrite will apply changes to the animations on the left, not right ones

I need a way to overwrite the "right" ones

with data from the left ones

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, you retarget **from UEFN Character to **UE5 Manny.

[late jasper]

it will create new ones, or overwrite the "left" ones. while the referencess are linked to the "right" ones

[velvet jasper]

Why it would overwrite the left ones?

[late jasper]

because I retarget from UEFN to Manny (UEFN uses the left ones)

[velvet jasper]

Yes, correct. When you export the animations and point the export path to the folder at the right, it would overwrite the assets in this specific folder.
Source assets would stay the same.

[late jasper]

that actually might work, but idk, trying now

[late jasper]

I understand what you mean now, I didn't know it means overwriting found ones (I though it means original ones)

but it didn't work, it just made a copy

but it changed references

-NoLoadStartupPackages

I'll try that

[velvet jasper]

Hm, are these animations like hard referenced somewhere outside the PSDs?

[late jasper]

just used in Pose Search Data Bases
all of the ones used in the Animation Sample

[velvet jasper]

Alright, try the command argument in this case.
Alternatively, do the retargeting to the temporary folder, then drag and replace the assets manually to the needed one.
Batch Exporter might having an issues with redirector stuff.

[orchid wigeon]

Help needed. Does anybody know this issue?

[glossy grail]

Is anyone still using the sendtounreal plugin? Are people using the joshquake version or another?

[wide hearth]

Hey, maybe that can interest somebody here, I've made few videos about new GASP in UE5.7 There's 2 videos about making Mover character and NPC (replicated) and 2 about new experimental ABP setup (with chooser, blend stack, logical state machine and motion matching).
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/x1dz/unreal-engine-exploring-game-animation-sample-project-gasp-in-ue5-7

[native umbra]

anybody do anything with the foot placement control rig node that is in the Mover version of the GASP ABP in UE5.7?

I'm trying to get it to work for my character but I'm having trouble, its like the controls never actually get updated so it kind of looks like he's skiing

[wide hearth]

you mean the "pinning" part? i started looking into, but there's so many things in this cr... i'm pretty sure it relies on contact curves in the anims, if you don't have those it will prob not work

[native umbra]

I do have those, still doesn't work

I agree though, I wonder why they did a lot of this stuff. I wish I could hear from the devs themselves why they took this approach, the livestream wasn't informative enough in this regard

but yeah the controls for the foot never rise into the air with my animation

its strange

[wide hearth]

"skiing" with ik usually means it puts the ik target at 0 instead of shifting it up or down.

[native umbra]

yee

when the foot is in contact, it pins appropriately, but outside of that it doesn't

[wide hearth]

probably it doesn't connect the controls with the actual bones, maybe something wrong with bone names

[native umbra]

it would be hilariously awful if UEFN Mannequin had different bone names than Manny

I can check

it looks the same

I mean the debug is working appropriately, like it can play the animation and adjust the plevis and everything, its just the foot control, hmm

[wide hearth]

those streams are always too short. too much time limit. people working on this stuff for literally years then they have like 3 hours to explain it. never understood that

[native umbra]

I may be unnecessarily bitter but I always feel they make things overly complicated as well, which is fair though given they're trying to make a generalized tool and generalized tools are always more complicated than ones with a specific purpose

ahh

I found the issue

the IK foot bones weren't animated on my animation 💀 noob mistake, rip

[wide hearth]

if i remember correctly they copy ik_foot from foot in their abp

[velvet jasper]

Foot Placement as the anim graph node is available since GASP 5.5.
They just rebuilt the same logic as the Control Rig asset.
So as this wasn't something particularly new, this might be a reason why it wasn't deeply explained as well.

[native umbra]

Does the Foot Placement node create flat collision 'skis' that the character stands on under the hood?

and then like, adjusts those according to the normals or what?

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, it creates the floor plane for each foot by default.
Then, it uses that plane to "pin" the feet and, if you have tracing enabled, would adjust those planes to the trace results.

[native umbra]

really? I had no idea that's what it was doing in C++ lol. I wonder why it does that as opposed to just tracing under the foot and adjusting that way, since it has to do tracing anyway.

[velvet jasper]

The tracing could be turned off, but the feet planting would still function.

[native umbra]

but it wouldn't adjust for slopes, so the feet would only be planted when on a flat surface, isn't that right?

[velvet jasper]

They have a TODO mark that if the tracing disabled, the ground normal should be used instead, but right now it would be just a flat straight plane.
Don't know if that got resolved in CR's iteration.

[native umbra]

hmm I see.

I appreciate your input! It has been very helpful.

[severe sage]

This sounds super useful, thank you! I'll go through them now, especially since breaking down GASP project seems to be more difficult than I expected

[jagged wing]

Hello. Thought to ask if anyone here knows if there is some way to scale skeletal mesh in UE5? I can't do the scaling in animation blueprint, so I am trying to find if there is some other way to scale skeletal mesh up.

[neat olive]

has anyone here had luck with retargetting the UEFN mannequin GASP (UE 5.7) animations to metahuman and getting the entire thing working?

I wanted to retarget to metahuman because I have over 500 other animations that use metahuman and all my playable characters will be metahuman, all of the retargetting went well, the previews look perfect, but my character just looks like they are ice skating when I move them, jump, traversal, and slide still works but is severally off

i'm about at the point that I'm looking to just pay someone to help me fix this

[distant stirrup]

I was searching Discord for messages and I saw your slide is also below the landscape, but only in a packaged build. I am only just starting to look into it, but we're not alone there. I can't speak to metahuman retargeting though.

[neat olive]

if you figure it out, definitely let me know. we can work something out, dm me if you want

[hidden dawn]

I've been looking into a desired mechanic in a project whereby a creature can shapechange into any other creature; a biped humanoid morphing into a horse or eagle for example. The process seems more difficult than I first thought, unless I just make a concealing "puff of smoke" between changing between creatures, but that seems like a cop-out. This might not be easily solvable, but if anyone is interested in having a look at this, I've summarised the steps so far and the remaining obstacles.

[solemn sundial]

I made a lipsynced animation using audio as a source with the automatic facial animation AI thing, added that animation to my metahuman but I want the eyes to look at the camera so I made my face control rig addative and then selected CTRL_C_eyesAim and added a look at constraint to my camera but it doesn't look at the camera and I really don't know what to do. I've tried to figure it out but I'm stuck, any help would be appreciated 🙂

[velvet jasper]

I’d advise to scale the whole actor, if your mesh is used in the character BP.
It’d handle the proper capsule collision and physics asset scale.
Otherwise, just scale the mesh component in your BP.

[jagged wing]

Unfortunately I can't scale my character in BP, because I can't convert BP into instance static mesh/ niagara character. I can only convert skeletal meshes and if they are inside BP, then UE5 does not recognize it as skeletal mesh for the conversion process.

I can scale bones in the preview window of the asset, but after dropping the skeletal mesh to some level the bone scales seem to not have applied.

[velvet jasper]

There should be a way to scale the instance actors, I guess.
But the hacky way I could suggest is to add a transform bone node in your anim graph and scale up the root bone.

Ah wait, ISMs uses it’s own states IIRC.

[jagged wing]

yeah I guess I have to look into that instance system. These are also not using anim graph, so I can't change scale with that. I basically have a big crowd of people and I am trying to see if I can introduce some height variation to the characters.

[velvet jasper]

I personally haven’t worked with the crowds, but I’d bet on the system that does the spawning etc.

[jagged wing]

yeah, its my first time playing with this

Can get a lot of characters on screen with it 😁

[velvet jasper]

There’s a parameter for enabling the eyes look at.
I don’t recall the correct controller name, but it’s the slider at the lower right corner of the main facial board.

[velvet jasper]

The question is - why do you want to retarget the assets to MH skeleton if the whole GASP system is build around UEFN character?
Its skeleton contains the helper joints and curve information used by anim logic.
That’s why the live retargeting is being showcased. UEFN acts as a driver for any kind of humanoid character, carrying all the logic shenanigans,

Alright, there’s an explanation in your message, my bad.

[neat olive]

well i'm definitely second guessing the idea at this point - i was hoping it was just easy to do because i want to just use the 500+ existing metahuman animations I have. but now i'm considering trying to figure out how to just retarget those metahuman animations to the uefn mannequin

[neat olive]

i was also thinking that i could avoid the slight overhead of live retargetting, which could be compounded a bit with multiplayer (my game supports 5 players total)

[neat olive]

in the context of 5 characters playing multiplayer - should i even care about this sort of performance hit for the live retargetting? first pic is the idle animation profiled using stat anim just using the UEFN mannequin with the new mover pawn + state machine / blend stack hybrid, the second image is the same exact setup but with a metahuman using live retargetting

[velvet jasper]

Well, that's for sure non satisfying numbers.
Try running network play, simulating 5 players joining the game.

[native umbra]

there is a plugin called 'Anim Tools' that can do this.

(I came across your post by searching for 'trajectory' because the mover trajectory is messing up)

[neat olive]

so turns out the performance hit is just from the metahumans in general, not the live retargetting. Best example to profile to show how performant live retargetting can be is the UE 4 Mannequin, I'm observing only maybe a 0.25ms increase in the inclusive averages in stat anim.

so it looks like I need to at the very least lower the LOD of my metahumans in multiplayer (single player may be ok) and if I want to use the GASP setup, I need to take all my animations that i have targetted to metahuman and instead get them all retargetted to the UEFN Mannequin instead and if I go this route it will make future updates to GASP a lot less painful and more straightforward

this is one of those moments where it's a relief to have been wrong about my earlier assumptions, haha

[velvet jasper]

Good profiling work, thanks for sharing your results.

[restive wedge]

I've been struggling with related things. I keep trying to use root motion animation with Mover, but for some reason the movement is far more pronounced than it's supposed to be.

Then studying GASP's new Mover implementation, I can't even locate the logic that activates root motion. I found the montage playback, but not the root motion.

I thought my initial problem was incompatible skeletons, but even switching it to a completely Manny-dedicated animation did the same thing.

[neat olive]

I'm still figuring out GASP too, I've just been chipping away and deleting files that I think I might not need and then attempting to play, just to try to get down to the absolute bare minimum files I need so I can understand the entire thing

[restive wedge]

I think my issue may be more fundamental to how I'm using montages, ABPs and animation slots. Might try another approach and see what happens.

When I switch it to the default slot, the root motion works fine but the rest of the animation doesn't play.

Just kinda levitates into place.

[neat olive]

yeah i've had that with Metahumans. i'm just going to try to stick with live tragetting with the UEFN mannequin I think

[restive wedge]

A big part of it as well might be that I'm trying to integrate it into Lyra as well, which has a hefty ABP.

[orchid wigeon]

Help needed. Hi. Im copying GASP and the MotionMatching doesnt work(always idle animation) in packaged build. Does anyone know this issue? works in PIE

[restive wedge]

Update on this, I just tried it with a fresh ABP, nothing but a single idle pose and a slot node. It's still borked. I know the animation itself doesn't look like it ought to in the preview, but I'm thinking maybe it's more of a Mover issue after all.

[velvet jasper]

Could you show what you mean under “borked”?

[restive wedge]

Just recorded this. What's especially strange is that this is even after I removed the root motion node from the traversal ability.
All the other animations ceased to use root motion, but not this one. For some reason the root motion still works on this specific animation.

Here's what I mean:

[restive wedge]

Also I tried using an alternate mantle animation that was specifically made with Manny in mind, and it still demonstrated this incorrect positioning behavior.

But I know my warp targets are correct because of the blue lines there. I also know that the original animation height is correct at 2 meters, but it's getting amplified during playback to over 4 meters. It's got to be something under the hood of Mover or something.

[velvet jasper]

In this case, there’s no root motion extraction at all.
Mover as a public topic is relatively new, so it’s hard to say from top of the head what’s going on as there’s just not enough information and experience.

I might take a look today what’s going on with Mover and Root Motion, seems interesting.

[velvet jasper]

Have you tried to debug your build?
If you make a development build, you’ll be able to access the console and bring up the debugging info e.g. MM query info.
Also, there might be more useful info in the logs.

[worldly anvil]

Hello, I'm trying to setup my combat animations, but due to blending hits are getting distorted. Attacks are straight relatively to the animation itself, but the pose is a bit rotated, which results into some issues when blending.

I don't see why it's a thing especially when I'm standing; the standing combat idle is the base pose the character is in on frame 1 when it starts to attack, but jabs result into going left/right instead of going forward. When crouching it's also not perfect, which I would expect considering that pelvis is straight, not rotated a little bit to the side, but I don't see why it wouldn't work in its native pose.

If I connect UpperBody slot at the very end of the ABP, it'll look correct, but obviously no blending for running/crouching etc.

Does anyone know what might be causing it?

Funnily enough, right after I posted that I tried looking at LayeredBlendPerBone settings, and tried enabling MeshSpaceRotationBlend, and it fixed it lol

idk whether it'll break anything else though

[orchid wigeon]

Thank you. Let me look into it.

[wide hearth]

Is that the same problem maybe? #animation message

[velvet jasper]

Mesh space rotation is a way to go here.
It’d preserve the joint orientation, making the final pose more matching the desired result.

[severe sage]

Heya. In folks' opinion, is full motion matching better than the state machine variant Epic showed off in GASP for parkour games? Since full MM is giving me such a headache, I'd like to hear the opinion of folks with more expertise than mine

[velvet jasper]

Epics currently favor the state machine approach.

[severe sage]

Is there any reason they mentioned? I'm guessing it might be more artist friendly?

[velvet jasper]

A bit better control over the final result.

[severe sage]

Thank you very much for your help!

[worldly anvil]

Hello, does anyone know whether it's possible to have some play rate curve along an animation sequence/ or maybe just a simple change of play rate of multiple frames?

Sometimes I want to speed up/slow down part of an animation within unreal without asking the animator to that in Maya themselves, but I would rather find a way to do that without leaving the engine and waiting the person to do that for me

[velvet jasper]

Animation Montages, TimeStretchCurve.

[worldly anvil]

Thank you very much

It's well hidden lol

[neat olive]

I think so! Also, I follow you on X and YouTube, thank you for your videos. Been very helpful in understanding GASP

So last night I did a packaged shipping build of the updated GASP default level, configured to use the state machine mover with the UEFN mover variant as the default pawn. I then set it up so an input event switches the pawn over to an unclothed LOD1 MetaHuman.

On my PC (RTX 4090, Ryzen 9), I’m averaging right around 200 FPS, and switching to the LOD1 MetaHuman has zero noticeable impact on performance.

I’m seeing the same thing on the Steam Deck as well, it's about 30-40 FPS, with no noticeable hit when switching.

Based on that, my opinion right now is that it’s probably not worth worrying about the performance impact of live retargeting.

[visual abyss]

Interesting, I'll check it out! 👍

[severe sage]

What am I doing wrong here? I am getting the positive result of finding the owning char BP, but it always fails on finding the mover, despite it clearly being there. I'm getting the same result with the setup from GASP (where it doesn't cast). I've also tried to getting the mover reference directly, and it's still failing to find it

[velvet jasper]

How do you call the init function?

[severe sage]

I've also tried longer delays or no delays, and the result is always the same

[velvet jasper]

If you list all the available component, what does it say?

[severe sage]

It says it can't find the mover component. But it's right there in the CBP's hierarchy

[barren fiber]

Mover has root extraction from montages, if properly used

[clear dune]

I've been retargeting sword anims from various asset packs on Fab. Some have a weapon bone, others use a socket attached to the hand. No problem. However, I recently encountered an animset which relies on ik_hand_gun, and I'm having trouble retargeting this to a "weapon" bone.

It seems like this should be possible, because both skeletons are otherwise identical (UE4 mannequin), so the world-space coordinates are exactly what I'd want. Maybe I can bake/copy the ik_hand_gun transforms into a weapon bone before or after the retarget? But so far, no luck. If anyone's able to help, I would greatly appreciate it 🙂

[restive wedge]

Gradually trying to get to the bottom of some root motion animation issues. I've got these animations retargeted for Manny, but he doesn't have an "attach" bone, but a center_of_mass bone instead, and it previews in the wrong position. I'm guessing this may be related to my general root motion issues.

I'm not an animator though, and I don't know all the inner workings of Unreal's animation system though, so I'm not sure whether this is something I can fix in-editor.

[velvet jasper]

Copy Bones Op in Retargeter Op Stack.
Alternatively, Copy Bones Anim Modifier for post changes.

[clear dune]

That sounds very promising, I will give it a shot!

[clear dune]

Yep, looks like it works! I guess it's called "Pin Bones" now, but yeah, this is it. It's there by default in the op stack, but needed some settings changed. I just set them up like so:

Many thanks!

[velvet jasper]

Well, I didn’t have any doubts regarding that 🙂

[fossil slate]

does anyone know why this might be happening? animations that work in the asset viewer do not work in anim bps. there is not even a playback bar on the sequence player. i have never had a similar issue on any other animation bp before

[random sorrel]

Hello everyone,
I’m a professional 3D artist specializing in character modeling, assets, and animation for games and interactive projects.

[wide hearth]

Attach bone is used in their motion warping setup to tell where the ledge is supposed to be in the animation; during gameplay they do some traces to find the actual real world ledge location and give that to the warping and then the warping will scale the animation so at the end of the jump the two are in the same place. If you retarget their attach bone to the center of mass bone then you need to replace replace the name "attach" by "center_of_mass" in the anim montages warping notify "Warp Point Anim Provider" property

[wide hearth]

do you animate bone translation? try to change retargetting property from skeleton to animation

[sand orbit]

Hey, everyone
Has anyone managed to retarget animation from unreal skeleton to mixamo skeleton?

[severe sage]

~~Any idea why my mover character is jittering while moving? It's happening even when there's no ABP attached to the actor, so it's in the mover or CBP. ~~It ended up being the network replication. But, since I am not interested in MP for this project, disabling it fixed my issue

[velvet jasper]

If the translation retargeting settings are changed, it would be visible in the asset viewer as well.

[velvet jasper]

Just checking - have you compiled the ABP?

[velvet jasper]

Why would you do that though?
Mixamo skeleton by default is not game-ready and requires modifications for correct work, e.g. have a root motion support and any procedural functionality related to that.

[cosmic zodiac]

My short sci-fi cinematic in UE5. Any Feedback ? 😅

[sand orbit]

Just wanted to give it try, but stuck with the root issues

[velvet jasper]

Root issues?

[sand orbit]

I'm not sure what to call that, but it feels like animation is missing motion from the pelvis
Maybe it's because mixamo skeleton doesn't separate root and pelvis?

[velvet jasper]

Well, that’s the thing.
Mixamo skeleton doesn’t have the root joint. The pelvis is a top of the hierarchy.

Thats why you’d prefer to retarget from Mixamo to Manny skeleton instead, where during that process the root motion could be generated from the pelvis motion.

[sand orbit]

Hmm, I see
That's a bummer

[opaque fern]

Why is this happening with my animation? Its not cuz of my code cuz the unreal template punching animations (I have been using those for testing) works fine.

It just plays the first millisecond or something. Im at a loss its my first animation so idk this stuff

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, because your animation is ~0.3 seconds long and your blend in and blend out timings equal 0.25 seconds.
It blends out as soon as it blends in.

[opaque fern]

Oh... Is there a way I can fix that?

Im not very knolageable on the animation side of things yet Ive tried google but no luck

[opaque fern]

What should I set them to?

[velvet jasper]

Let's do the math and draw imaginary fade in and fade out. Here's how it currently looks.

What would be logical in this case?

[opaque fern]

.06 on start?

[velvet jasper]

Try it out.

[opaque fern]

Looks like it works when I set .06 on both in and out but it snaps very fast

idk if thats fixable cuz of how fast the anim is

[velvet jasper]

But take into account that your animation is too short and quick, unfortunately it won't blend good in any case.

[opaque fern]

Oh

Unfortunate

If I made it longer can I speed it up in editor so that it looks like how it does now whilst keeping the good blending?

[velvet jasper]

Ideally, good blending would be only when the character have some follow through and return to the idle pose.
Right not it ends at the middle of the action.

[opaque fern]

Yeah fair

Issue with that though is there are multiple poses that you can do depending on things so I cant really do that. plus this anim is one of 3 for combo if the player wants to do that..

[restive wedge]

It's already set as such in the motion warping notify. Still, shouldn't they look the same in the animation preview? In the montage preview the character is entirely stationary, but in-game the root motion is more than doubled for some reason.

[velvet jasper]

Because you don't have any animation on your "center_of_mass" bone, there's no data the traversal warping logic can use.
During the retargeting, it is possible to copy motion from the source joint to the target one, using Pin Bones op in Op Stack.

[restive wedge]

I see, I might have missed that in the retargeting process, I'll try it soon.

[restive wedge]

You're a life saver, thank you so much! 😭

[quiet egret]

How can I fix root motion? I have Enable Root Motion on and Force Root Lock. I also set Root Motion Root Lock to Ref Pose but only the Pelvis has motion and not the root 🙁

[velvet jasper]

If that’s Mixamo animation, use the Mixamo converter tool.

https://terribilisstudio.fr/?section=MC

[safe pumice]

Hi, I have a root motion animation and I am trying to maintain the root motion behavior properly in sequencer. When I enable "Force custom mode" on the animation, the behavior works how I want it to work; the character mesh follows root motion. However, my anim BP contains hair physics etc that need to also be present in the sequence, so I can't use "force custom mode." When force custom mode is disabled, the character does not follow root motion and instead remains in place.

Any way to get root motion working without force custom mode?

In my anim BP I also set root motion mode to "Root motion from everything", however this did not work, the character still just remains in place in sequencer

[quiet egret]

unfortunately it's not :/

[velvet jasper]

Could you give a bit more context in this case?
Like is that your own model?
Do you need the mesh and the animation or just the animation on any character?

[quiet egret]

This is a model from a UE 5 marketplace kit. I'm simply just trying to copy the motion from the Pelvis XY to the Root XY and only the skeleton, mesh is fine

i might make an animation modifier

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, in that case it’d be better to just make the custom anim modifier and set the animation keys for the root and the pelvis yourself.

You can grab the Anin Data Interface from input Anim Sequence and call “Set Bone Keys” function.
Also, “Get Anim Pose” would allow you to get the pelvis anim information in the world space.

[velvet jasper]

Unfortunately, it’s absolutely inconvenient to work with root motion in the sequencer, when you controlling the character class, not just the mesh.

There’s two ways you can get your root motion to work, but they are not ideal. Option names are not precise, I’m writing them by memory.

1. If you right click on your animation track, there would be an option called “Swap Root Bone”.
   When it’s set to the “Swap Root Actor” mode, the root motion would try to apply to the actor transforms.

It won’t work if you don’t have a transform track for your binding.

The position and rotation of the root motion extraction is controlled through the Start Location/Rotation Offset in your anim section details.

2. You can right-click on your binding and choose “Import Root Motion”. It will ask to pick the animation asset.

That would create a transform track with the extracted root motion animation.

[spare adder]

Hi guys, would like someone to hold my hand on what to do.
Let's say you have a starter animation like MM_Pistol_Idle or MM_Pistol_Jog_Fwd

All I wanna do is keep the hands stable, instead of moving around as much as they do.

In the sequence editor I can move the bones all I want, but they still move within the new positioning. It's like there is some kind of forward or inverse kinematics going on.

So the question is, what do I do to edit this? Which is the best approach? I am aware of fullbody IK nodes and using the hands' target position as the anchor with which an IK would apply to the rest of the body, somewhere in some animation blueprint. But within for example the Lyra project, everything is so insanely complicated in the sense of loads of files, inheritance etc. that I get lost and I have no idea where I am. It's that lost at sea kind of feeling. Hours and hours just trying to figure out what the editor is doing or how the project works only to end up getting more confused and nothing done.

Anyway, so how do I manually keyframe when the sequencer isn't really donig what I intend to do
and how to do the same thing from the blueprint angle without getting lost and confused

Oh and a third option is layering per bone

[velvet jasper]

You can make a single frame idle pose animation from the idle anim, then apply it on top of your animations through Layered Blend node with enabled Mesh Space Blending.

If you want to like pin them relatively to the root bone, so they won’t move at all, that should be done through IK solution.

[weary frost]

Can someone explain why a retargeted root motion animaton would look like this as its causing some random rotational issues when playing the root motion animation ?
You can see the different root motion paths manny is the original, Any help is appreciated thanks!

I tried using Motion Warping but that doesnt seem to work for some reason.

[idle maple]

Is there a way to make a socket in Maya and it can be transferred to Unreal? I want pixel perfect accuracy of weapon placement in Maya Vs Unreal. If I get the weapon under the same mesh then the BPs of character classes will bloat with more weapons coming in. Does anyone have an idea about it?

[velvet jasper]

Well, in Maya instead of socket you can create just the new joint and attach there.

[idle maple]

Yes, I researched a bit and it says to use a locator. I think it would be same

[velvet jasper]

For Unreal it'd be just the bone, yeah. Just without any vertices assigned.

[idle maple]

got it! also, one more question :- if i need root motion from the animation then the animator needs to apply the motion to the root bone right?

[next python]

a new bone would result in an added bone in the final skeleton which even if unskinned is not ideal imo

[velvet jasper]

Yup.

[next python]

It seems like it's possible to have sockets come in from static meshes and I'm seeing mixed reports on this working well for skeletons...
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/fbx-static-mesh-pipeline?application_version=4.27#sockets

[velvet jasper]

Could you explain what you mean under "not ideal"?

[next python]

extra memory and work done for evaluating the final pose even if it might not really matter

but I think arguably you could kind of LOD it away

or just do some simple dual import setup where you have the "real" skeleton used ingame be one imported without the extra "helper" socket things

[idle maple]

Yep, AI suggested me the same

[next python]

one extra bone not doing anything is definitely not going to break the bank I guess so it might be just easier

[idle maple]

but still I think I would need to make different locators to place different weapons.

or joints if I am using them

[velvet jasper]

I don't think having an additional joint that's crucial for weapon placement would kill all your memory.
Things don't need to be overcomplicated here.

[next python]

yeah you are probably right

as for how to handle unique different weapons I think generally it's them being parented to a ik bone of some sort almost every time... I would say my dumb solution would be to have their origin just be the intended offset relative to the ik hand bone of the dominant hand of the grip

[idle maple]

do you think all kind of weapons would work with a single joint? I am doubtful that I would needs different joints for different weapons but not sure. I mean dual handed weapons like Gauntlets, I would I deal with them? It suggests me to make different joints for them

[idle maple]

ahhhh I need to see this

[velvet jasper]

You can change the locator transform for each weapon pose / animset.
So, basically, in Maya you attach your weapon's mesh root bone to the character's weapon attach locator as the visual preview, pose your weapon during animation, export the resulted animations to the engine.
Inside Unreal you do the same attachment setup and ideally it would look the same as in Maya scene.

[next python]

I think if you just move the IK_gun or right hand whatever as most setups do it won't matter

you kind of have to have something of an IK bone to be able to animate the gun or "held item" relative to the hand anyways

I'm sure you could just parent it to the right hand and never care for some games but most of the time you will want to move the weapon around relative to the character in an animation

[velvet jasper]

One weapon attachment joint for the right hand, Another for the left one.
For IK support, you parent constrain "ik_hand_gun" to the right weapon attach locator, "ik_hand_l" and "_r" constrained to the FK joints.

[next python]

I think Lyra might be a decent reference here

but I forget how they attach the guns in the animations... I like their montage setup at least

[idle maple]

I see! Would need to see how to setup the IK bones. I might be asking very basic question but would i need to get the animation data for the weapon along with the character? or it would just follow the parent hand and IK bones?

I mean when I get an Ideal animation or a running one for a two handed weapon like an axe. The IK_bone would be key to snap it to the non dominant hand?

[next python]

most default unreal skeletons should come with ik bones already (ue4 mannequin/manny and quin)

[idle maple]

mine is a custom one

[velvet jasper]

The main point is that your character's "weapon" joint would be the origin of your weapon and would move along when attached.
Additional animation data would needed for the actual's weapon animation if any.

[idle maple]

what would be an example of actual's weapon animation? Like fancy skin animation of guns in valorant?

[velvet jasper]

Pistol's hammer and slide moving during fire.

[next python]

the good news is IK bones are very simple to add but you might need to make them follow existing animations (actually fairly simple, you just need to copy their transform to the bone with a simple animation modifier that copies right hand to the ik right hand in-engine if you want)

[idle maple]

aighttt got it!

[velvet jasper]

This person uses Maya rig. No additional modifiers needed if the constrain setup is done inside Maya itself.

[next python]

yeah then they could just re-export I guess

I have had to use animation modifiers to fix a ton of marketplace assets that don't set the ik bones though

(perhaps my retargetting missed them)

which is a different problem I suppose

[idle maple]

righttt! I am trying it right now. I guess I would just require a single constraint to setup this two handed weapon

[idle maple]

heavy mess to deal with

[next python]

it's honestly not so bad as long as the IK follows an existing bone 99% of the time

[idle maple]

let's tryyy

[velvet jasper]

The root motion on the left seems broken.
Have you changed something in your Root Motion op inside the retargeter asset or it's pure auto-retargeting result?

[barren fiber]

Oh wow

[weary frost]

Thanks for the reply! I just chose retarget animations and used the auto retargeter should i create a retargetiung rig i think both skeletons are the same which is what confused me but will have to check that.

[velvet jasper]

I’d save the generated retargeting assets and see what’s going on inside the retargeter.

[near moth]

Hey @pseudo pawn

I got your plugin, but for some reason the picker just locks the pose

Sorry for the tag

It just does not allow me to change the pose

[worldly anvil]

Hello, I ran into a weird issue with Transform Bone node. I'm trying to move ik_hand_gun, but it would only move it in preview instance.

If I try to do that on my playing instance of the ABP, it only affects normal bones. I don't think I have anything overriding ik_hand_gun in my setup. It's quite simple, there's no multiple ABPs running or anything like that.

Is there anything that might prevent ik bones to be edited on runtime that I'm not aware of?

If I try to create a bare bones actor with just an SKM and give it a similar ABP with three nodes, it does the same thing. No ik movement in runtime instance specifically, only the head would move

It turns out the issue was related to my skeletal mesh. I'm running that ABP on my FP mesh, but I'm using TP mesh for previews because UE doesn't allow to easily use multiple meshes for the same skeleton based on ABP. My TP mesh has exported ik bones/drivers correctly, but the FP one didn't, making ABP fail modifying them or something like this

[kindred wedge]

I'm having a stupid issue with my movement blendspace. When the character changes from moving forwards to moving backwards, the animation snaps over with a visible jolt. This may be because I don't have any smoothing on the directional axis of my blendspace, but if I turn smoothing on, the animation tries to interpolate between a direction of -180 and 180, which results in a jittery rotation. I tried increasing the speed threshold to blend into the idle animation, but the direction switch is too fast still.

Surely this has to be a solved problem?

[velvet jasper]

Do you apply Axis Smoothing or Sample Smoothing?
Latter would give you the blending straight to the pose instead of value interpolation.

[kindred wedge]

There are two kinds of smoothing? 😮

Axis smoothing, I'm not aware of the other one...

[velvet jasper]

This is when you change Smoothing Time in your axis settings.

If you scroll below, there's Sample Smoothing section.

[kindred wedge]

Thank you! ❤️ That solved it! 🙂

bows

[worldly anvil]

Hello, is there any way to setup default camera position in an ABP? I have a first person ABP that I'd like to observe from FP perspective as well, preferably attaching the camera to head bone, but I don't see any way to do that

[velvet jasper]

No, unfortunately there's no built-in solutions to constrain the preview camera.

[worldly anvil]

I found out that you can setup an orbit bone, and select head as the target, but I think it's something I'll need to change every time 😔

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, i didn't mention that as it's useless for your purposes.

[fast blade]

when creating LODs for Skeletal Meshes:
what is crucial to configure aside from maybe bone reductions, in order to get very good performance?
I activated nanite: is it possibly better to use conventional LODs for NPCs etc., because you can configure the reduction more aggressively?

[sonic hatch]

I desperately need help. I cannot figure out for the life of me how to lineup weapons perfectly for my animations.

I want to use sockets in UE so I don't have to edit the skeleton in Blender (that is another nightmare situation). But when I attempt to copy the transforms the weapon is slightly off everytime.

[velvet jasper]

Do you mean, you already have animations and want to fit the meshes into hands or want to do actual animations with them?

[kind iris]

Does anyone have any idea why an aim offset would be behaving this way with the character mesh's arms?

[velvet jasper]

What's set in the Additive settings as a reference for the delta extraction in your animations?

[sonic hatch]

I want the weapon to be in the exact same spot in both software so what I'm animating is pixel perfect. I tried making an extra bone but my scaling and physics is a nightmare in UE if I do that.

And when I try to copy the local transforms from UE to Cascadeur that weapon is not in the same spot. Close but not identical so the animations I'm making won't be exact

[kind iris]

I'm not familiar with the term delta extraction in this context, but I have a relaxed Idle pose in the additive settings for the preview base pose.

The look poses are set in Mesh space for the additive settings on each offset look angle, that range from 90, 45 center, up down and left right

[velvet jasper]

Well, I'm not sure what kind of problems you're having the scaling and physics and how's this related to your issue.

Ideally, you'd have a children joint at your hand bone, where you would constrain your weapon mesh. You snap it to the target how it is - if it's Skeletal Mesh, you constrain by the root bone, if it's just Static Mesh - by the mesh pivot.
This joint would now act as an origin point for your weapon.
Then you'd pose that joint in your animation so it'd have the correct placement.
After you done animating, you'd export your animations and then the same weapon mesh would be constrained to the same "weapon" joint in-engine.

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, but what have you set for your directional animations as a Base Pose?

[kind iris]

They are set as skeleton reference pose. Should they be set to "Selected Animation Frame"?

[sonic hatch]

But am I not guessing it's placement then?

The reason I brought up the physics and scaling issue is because I just added a weapon bone with perfect location and rotation for exactly how I want the weapons to be placed and it was great. But it broke everything in Unreal. If I could just add a bone to the skeleton itself everything is perfect.

I'm going to need to look a lot more into this, thanks for the response

[velvet jasper]

Yeah, you have to provide from which pose the engine needs to find a difference and store it. Usually, that would be an idle pose, zero frame of your idle animation.

[velvet jasper]

If you don't want to mess with Blender, you can edit the skeleton directly in Unreal.
Then you can export your mesh to FBX with your new joints.

[sonic hatch]

hmm, very good idea. thank you

[velvet jasper]

So, out of interest, I poked around the engine to see if it's possible to make the viewport to lock to the joint/socket transforms and came up with this prototype.
Anim Asset Previewer also supported.
I'll see if I could make my code into actual plugin but yeah, that kind of functionality could be done. It's weird that it doesn't come out-of-box.

Ideally, it'd be better to have an option for following the bone here, but in that case the engine mod would be required.

[worldly anvil]

Oooh, interesting. Thank you very much for your effort. I have the engine source build, so if you've built it in for prototyping reasons, I'd be good with it regardless, I can cherry pick that

[worldly anvil]

One thing to mention to the tool -- it'd be great if you'd be able to at least add to offset on top of the socket transforms.

Ideally one would want to have a similar workflow to camera modifiers. The preview world already should have player camera manager, so it should be the matter of routing existing camera modifiers to some array to then apply anytime the FP preview is enabled or array is modified

[velvet jasper]

What kind of cam modifiers you’d apply to the preview viewport?

I’d even ask why would you do that? 🙂

[worldly anvil]

It's for FP only. In my case I'm modifying the height dynamically based on character standing and crouching height, so the head bone position isn't what actually dictates the FP camera position. The head is roughly where the camera would be, but there's a little bit of offset for different reasons.

However, it should be fine for me to apply that offset directly through the aforementioned offset to the socket transforms. I'm mentioning CMs in case there's something extra one has to the FP camera pipeline

[velvet jasper]

I’m just overriding viewport transforms, nothing special. Like instead of your mouse and keyboard controlling the camera, now it’s a specified bone transforms.

Adding an offset won’t be an issue, but I’m not sure about CamMods.

[worldly anvil]

That's fine, I think I can live with a simple offset

On the second thought, player camera manager most likely doesn't have the debug skeleton actor as the View Target, so CM wouldn't be plug-and-play either way, you'd need to get the actor out of the world context using GetActorOfClass

[velvet jasper]

My idealistic use case is when your character rig has a separate camera joint, that contains your camera animation as you’ve posed it in your DCC, so you could preview that view in-engine, without the need to go into PIE.

Basically, I’m replicating a FP preview mode from CryEngine’s Mannequin anim editor.

[worldly anvil]

I see. TBF initially I was mostly working without an animator, so I had to come up with some CMs to make up for the lack of animation (even the FP one), so I was interpolating the camera between standing and crouching without attaching it to anything. I think I'd be able to do simple interpolation between standing and crouched FP poses to make up for it without a CM

[velvet jasper]

CamModifiers are controlling the viewpoint, not the actual transformation of the component.
I wonder how do you control the mesh then?

Or you mean you just add a procedural camera animation that way?

[worldly anvil]

I know that they only control the viewport, but we're talking about FP. I actually forgot to mention that I also move the 1P arms to the current camera position after major modifications (e.g. this crouching correction, some others, but not camera shake).

I'm doing what Shooter Game (Epic sample) does, which is pretty a bit of math to transform 1P from previous camera position to the new one and keeps the pivot around the camera without any offset (to pivot).

Here's the actual implementation of the 1P arm correction if you're interested https://pastebin.com/VqCBrkEd

[worldly anvil]

I think that's how it's called, yes

[velvet jasper]

Never liked what they did for the new first person example, too much “programmer art”, looks kinda hacky and not pretty representing.

[worldly anvil]

It might, but that's what I found at the time to be working™

[acoustic flare]

Hey. What's the simplest way to mirror animations?

[velvet jasper]

Have you Iooked at this documentation?

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/mirroring-animation-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.7

[acoustic flare]

I found a good video in this moment . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPaProvPJ7c

but i will take a look into the doc too. thanks

[acoustic flare]

Does somebody knows a good animation assets? with strafe

3rd person

[velvet jasper]

You mean free or paid?

[acoustic flare]

Best free, but if theres a good paid one, i am open

[velvet jasper]

Well, I won’t point to the exact paid pack as I think it would be better if you would just scrub through the marketplace, look for available items and check their showcase videos.

As for free stuff, Mixamo animation library contains a lot of content, but the animation assets have to be processed with external UE converter tool.

[radiant phoenix]

do the retargetting characters no longer work in GASP 5.7?

nevermind, it's just setup different

[barren fiber]

🙁

[velvet jasper]

Is that a question for help or just emotion sharing?