Rigging in Blender to match UE4 character rig - possible?

Btw, if this project pulls through and offers animation tools similar to Blender, then there is no need to worry about animating Mannequin rig in Blender - just export rigged mesh and animate inside UE4:

http://alexallright.com/allrightrig/

That might have been me. I think I triple posted trying to get my posts to show up. :slight_smile:

Sorry about that.

–Kev

Kevin Vassey just made an account here so his post was postponed and I imagine some of you missed it.

Also, don’t miss his live streams here at Epic about Blender and Unreal! Kevin will have to tell you when the next one takes place.

Hey guys!

Yeah, I figured it out - apparently the post was a way up above the last post, so I posted before I found it. That’s why I edited mine with “never mind” later :wink:

Here is what I came up with:

Basically with that you can model your character, rig it with UE4 rig. Grab duplicate of the mesh and rig it with Blender’s rig. Number of bones, their approximate location and naming would have to be identical to UE4 rig.

Once weighting is done and it all works, simply transfer weights to character with UE4 rig. That would allow making custom characters in Blender that can use anims from the Marketplace.

I bet it’s possible to make control rig for UE4 rig using constraints, but that will take some trial and error to get angles match perfectly (I’ve done something similar in the past).

UPDATE:

Here is basic control rig with transforms for differently oriented bones:

Blend file: http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=43709

Now it’s just a matter of making all this for actual (stick figure) character and finding proper export settings so that Mannequin-like rig created from scratch in Blender would export fine and match original Mannequin rig in UE4.

If that works, maybe Epic could cook up some tool and guidelines for Blender (as you notice my test control rig has weird bone rolls for upper and lower leg, so transfer angles don’t quite match; there has to be consistency in the control rig bones so that rotation angles transfer make sense) :eyebrowlift:

That looks promising. I’l love to see it tested with the full rig.

Me too! :eyebrowlift:

Vblanco shared this incomplete UE4 rig with control rig a while back with me. It would be nice if Epic could use that and come up with something “official” (maybe for wiki if not truly official) for Blender artists to use (can easily use that rig with my weight transfer solution to have totally custom character compliant with Marketplace):

Hope this helps.

Any news regarding this?

So strange… I was just talking with someone here at work about finishing up my Epic Fridays project which I think you guys will like.

The truth is though, there is no reason to have an ART Tools rig in Blender anymore. The retargeting tools in UE4 work so well now that you should be able to get any animation you want onto your rig with a click of a button (after setup of course).

If you guys want, I can probably get an Epic live training session specific for retargeting onto a Blender rig.

How can you create animations in Blender and sell them on the marketplace though? If the retargeting tools are that great are animations mapped to a different (but retargetable) skeleton going to be accepted on the marketplace?

Right now the submission guidelines for animations state that “Humanoid character animations must be rigged to the Epic skeleton.” which to me might just as well have been “No thanks, Blender” and I think this is really sad.

They require that you retarget your animations to the standard humanoid skeleton… you can animate in anything you like.

Okay, I was under the wrong impression then, thanks.

I really like the fact that there was an official fix for the additional root bone issue, that way you can get root motion by animating the root bone in pose mode like you would expact. However right now it’s limited to an actual rig name of “armature” or “Armature” which is a bit awkward when you’ve got several characters since the rigs can’t have the same name in Blender.

I wrote a bug report for it here: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/599594/blender-specific-skeleton-extra-root-bone-fix-only.html but even now you can get around it if you’ve got some script that on export time temporarily renames the rig to “armature” before export and back to the original name after it was exported.

Check it out guys! I’ll be explaining some of this stuff live soon. Let Alexander know what you want us to cover in the stream.

Hooray, looks like it will be a very useful live stream:

Hello everyone!

I’m not sure if this is the proper place for this problem, but after importing skeleton made in Blender to UE4 bones hierarchy looks differently. I mean, it is the same, but its visual representation is different. Let’s say I created “shoulders” attached to the upper part of the “spine”. In UE4 the same shoulders are attached to the lower part of the spine instead. I’m not sure if the problem described in this topic is the same or only similar, but any help will be very appreciated. :slight_smile:

I’ve never heard of this happening before. Can you provide a Blend file for us to look at?

Pretty sure he’s talking about this:


Also the wrong bone seems to get highlighted (hard to see orange outline) in Persona.

That’s exactly the case Cyaoeu, thank you for the images (and sorry for bothering you both here and on the UE4 forum). Is it normal or a bug? I already posted this issue at UE4 AnswerHub, where I attached images comparing Blender and Maya skeletons in both programs and after importing to the editor:

https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/658517/skeleton-hierarchy-differences-blender-and-maya.html

I noticed strange thing happening with ue4 tools, the left shoulder was not at proper place, but with the retargeting options set to skeleton for those bones, it was alright. I thought maybe something is wrong with the blender skeleton, but then it seems it is an export/import problem…strange

Skeletons in UE4 have always looked like that for me. To me it doesn’t make sense but maybe it’s a Maya thing.

Do you have more information? I haven’t noticed this.

I just tested your 3 bone setup and it works fine. You are doing something wrong in either exporting or creating your rig.