Human IK Retargeting and Root Motion

#1

Hi All,

I am in the process of retargeting a bunch of Unreal 4 animations that have root motion (animation on the root joint) over to our game skeletion. The issue I’m having is that the root joint remains at the origin and all of the source animation translations are being mixed with the hips animations. While the animations match, the root is left behind. The problem with this is that the animations won’t behave properly in Unreal 4 since the root hasn’t received keys. I’ve selected the “root” of the skeleton on both the source and target as the “reference” node.

Anyone come across this?

Thanks!

#2

Why dont you parent constrain the targets root joint to the root joint of the source, and then bake the animation?

#3

Hey Antweiler,

Thanks for the suggestion, but the problem with adding a parent constraint is double transforms. For some reason HumanIK is taking the root animation that is on the source and placing it on the hips of the target. So the animations match 1:1, but the root of the target is being left behind. It’s almost like HumanIK wasn’t designed for animation to be on the root at all.

Thanks again!

#4

can you leave the root out of the HIK retargeting? Because i guess you want a one to one copy of the motion, which you can have with a constraint.

#5

Old Topic but found a way, first bake animation to the control rig, not the skeleton, then add a parent constraint from the source root bone to the target root bone, then keyframe the root bone, lastly bake from control rig to skeleton, and delete parent contraint