Retargeting MoCap Data in Unreal Engine
This is a short tutorial on how to retarget our UE animations inside Unreal Engine. This tutorial is for UE4.2 and later versions. You will find the process may have changed in later versions of the engine. In the latest UE versions (5.2 and above) the process is much more automated with the manny skeleton automatically being detected and configured.
This tutorial assumes that you have imported some of our (UE compatible) animations into Unreal Engine along with the Unreal Engine mannequin character and a destination character. If you do not have the mannequin already you should be able to get a copy from the UE marketplace.
Below is a short video with the steps explained below. This tutorial was put togther in UE 4.24 but it should work in later versions as well. The data used in this tutorial is our own data thats retargeted to the UE mannequin. It will not work with other random mocap in other formats or retargetted to other skeletons
UE (v4.24) MoCap Retargeting Video
Steps to import into unreal.
1. Drag one of the unreal fbx files from your purchased product folder into your unreal project.
2. On the window that pops up uncheck the 'import mesh' checkbox
( Unless you want to import our mannequin for some reason )
3. Now select the UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton from the drop down list. You will also need to make sure that the 'Convert Scene' checkbox is ticked so that unreal converts the scene settings from the animation file into unreals. If you do not do this the animation may not work as expected.
4. Before import you should also roll out the Animation tab and check the 'Use Default Sample Rate' checkbox. This will ensure the animation imports at the correct sample rate (30 fps for our unreal files) otherwise it will ignore this and import a huge file with many more frames than it should. I am not sure why it does this, but checking this appears to fix it.
5. Now wait a bit while unreal imports the model. This can take a bit of time if it’s a large file. You can also drag multiple files in together or include multiple takes in one file and Unreal Engine will import all of them. Sometimes it can take a while to import so you might want to make a cup of coffee.
6. Once imported you should see the animation in your project window. You can drag this into your scene if you like to check how it looks. As long as you did not import it with our model attached you will see the animation performed on the unreal mannequin. Note whilst the animation has been retargeted with root motion. By default when you import it this will be disabled. If you wish to use root motion you will need to activate this within your project.
