Paying 30 Dollars for Resolution
I will pay 30 Dollars to the first person I can confirm to fix our pipeline issue in regards to importing into the UDK Mocap Root Motions. I have been messing around with this for weeks now and this is becoming a big hold up someone please help us I am willing to pay for a solution. I am going to post this in Both UE4 Forums and Blender Forums. I can pay with PayPal or mail a cashier’s check, I am not joking I will pay to fix this issue.
Defining our pipeline
IPI Motion Capture – Capture Motions – Clean them best as possible and export them as BVH
BVHacker – Remove T-Stance – Zero Hips to have character facing Forward – Align character best you can to the deck
Blender 2.70 – We have our Rig Setup – Import BVH and Remap animations to a our skeleton.
Take that same blender file and in pose mode finalize the animation – Line it up to the deck – Add the up and down / turn or rotation of the character etc
Export FBX & Import into UE4
Lets say we have a crouch animation, I guess I am stripping away root motion and alignment etc in BVH so we can get the character facing the correct way and not moving all around the area but staying in place. So if I play the animation instead of the character dropping down to the deck his feet just raise up off the ground that’s fine in BVH. So once the animation is transferred in Blender I re-add that motion back in, IE go frame by frame and keep his feet firmly planted on the deck, All looks great in blender.
Not sure if that is root motion or not exactly or what to call it. I import it in and right now and by default the editor doesn’t recognize it as an animation, it thinks it’s a Skeletal Mesh and if I select animation it says that asset doesn’t appear to be that type and might not import correctly. Either way it imports and seems fine but this could be the issue as well not sure, this wasn’t happening before either. However that root motion I gave the animation back is gone, so feet are coming back off the deck again.
I thought perhaps its a root motion issue so I created an animation montage checking root motion but that’s doesn’t seem to fix the problem - just seems to change the origin point of the animation start not the location on every frame. I can also have root motion if I just animate in blender but then we are not using our motion capture information. So the issue is definitely happening in our pipeline. Believe it occurring when I zero out everything in BVH then import it to blender. I am someone unable to re-add root motion back in. I am not a top notch animator so having mocap means we have decent looking animations.
I want to say this wasn’t happening before about 5 months ago when I did all our character movement animations with the same workflow in which I wrote everything down on our wiki so I wouldn’t have to remember how to do this. Now I am doing all action animations and this is being a pretty big problem because most action animations have a lot of root motion movement in them. When you strip this and the hips never move, or turn over or go up and down just looks awful. I am thinking also maybe it has something to do with the Blender FBX exporter or UE4 Importer
And I am a novice animator so I am not trying to lay blame anywhere perhaps I am doing something wrong, I am looking for some understanding to the issue and guidance on how to resolve it.
I made a quick down and dirty Zip file of the exact issue I am outlining above, you can download the zip file below:
http://www.filedropper.com/rootmotionissue
Pray_01 = is the Raw output file from our motion capture and ready for BVHacker
Pray_02 = is the tweaking of the file of zeroing out the root bone
Pray_03 = is just after import and retargeting of the BVH file in blender
Pray_04 = is the adding of root motion back into the skeleton & the FBX of that
This has the exact issue of the feet coming up rather than the body staying on the deck and going down. It also has the issue of it not recognizing the animation. In blender the animation looks fine but in UE4 the player hovers rather than dropping to the deck. Anim montage doesn’t change this either.
Please Help it’s been weeks stuck on this issue with me testing and getting no where I will pay for help.
Thanks In Advance!