Importing to Blender
Firstly, thanks for creating this tool, it's amazing how easy it is to get professional quality results with it!
I've created a walking animation using a custom character for use in a game project. However, I need to edit it so that it's 'in-place' with no forward movement in order to be useable in Unreal Engine. The settings for removing root motion in UE4 don't seem to work for animations output by the Deepmotion app, at least with my custom character.
So my plan was to use Blender. But when importing into Blender the armature is ok, the mesh on the other hand is horribly deformed. I've tried the settings recommended in this post:
https://forum.deepmotion.com/t/60hm1mj/guidance-on-fbx-blender-settings
But it doesn't help. Any ideas or am I doomed?
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Hi Henrik Allen , do you mind providing your custom charatcer to us, so that we can take a look? You can send the model through email to support@deepmotion.com
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Thanks for the quick reply. I've emailed the character to you just now.
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Henrik Allen we premiered our UE-4 tutorial today, welcome to check it out:
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For anyone with similar problems, I thought I should post how I solved this issue. I ended up using the Blender 'Better FBX Importer & Exporter' plugin which costs $25 from Blender market.
https://blendermarket.com/products/better-fbx-importer--exporter
Using the default settings my animation imported perfectly first time with the plugin.
For anyone not wanting to shell out the $25, I also had a very helpful email exchange with Deepmotion support who suggested the following:
'We've tested with your model, and it seems to be loaded fine with other 3D programs like Maya and Unity. We came to a conclusion that this may be related to Blender's fbx animation import. We found that the transform of your model's mesh is not applied before rigging, and suspect that this is causing the issue.
We have some ideas to solve this issue. We suggest Option 1 as you don't need to spend more animation minutes to generate another animation.
Option 1: Load our fbx (include T pose), unbind the armature of the character, clear transform of the mesh, and re-rig the character.
1. Load the fbx, which includes T pose at the first frame, into Blender
2. Unbind the rig by removing the armature modifier.
3. Select the mesh, Alt P and Select 'Clear Parent and keep transform'. Make sure that the mesh is aligned with the armature.
4. Select the mesh, Ctrl A and Apply All Transforms.
5. Add back the armature modified and reparent to the <character's base model>.
6. Export this fbx into UE4.
You can export this character without animation as your base character for UE4 and for Animate 3D. If you want to create another motion with Animate3D, make sure you test this base character with a short video, and see if can be loaded into blender now.
Option 2: Use our default Animate 3D character for the animation, and retarget onto your character in UE4.
1. Run your animation with the default characters on Animate 3D, and download the result.
2. Make the animation in place in Blender.
3. In UE4, import your custom character, and then import the Animate 3D default character with motion which you have edited.
4. Retarget the animation to your custom character. You can take a look at this official UE4 tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy9aLbZLdeA Although it is a bit outdated, the process didn't change much.
We are also going to have a UE4 tutorial soon, which will show a clearer process of how to use our animation in UE4.
Option 3: Fix your character's rigging.
You may need to re-rig the character to be cleaner. We suggest that you don't have any scaling factor on anything, including the mesh, the armature, and the root node.'
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Thanks for sharing!