Week 4 - Converting UE4 Animations, Aim Offset for Rifle and Hand IK

In Week 4, trying to incorporate a Hand IK to make the left hand hold the handguard was very difficult because the player character would bug out or wouldn't move with the animation. I will discuss later on about Hand IK, but for now I will be talking about my progress through converting UE4 aiming animations.

In order to convert animations from the UE4 starter pack, I had to convert the existing player character model from Mixamo to UE4 starter player character. I had checked out a tutorial on YouTube on how to do this process and it was successful with only some minor issues in between the process.

Converting UE4 Starter Pack Animations For Aim Offset

I had to export the mannequin skeletal mesh and upload it to Mixamo to make the model pose in a T shaped pose to fit the player character pose. After that, I exported the animation of the T-pose and then I created a pose asset from the UE4 starter pack mannequin . Then I would need to open up the pose asset and add a new pose (Pose_1) and add the T-Pose animation. This is where I can select the pose asset and the T-pose in the retarget panel in the UE4 starter pack skeletal mesh. This allowed me to retarget correctly but was very tedious task to individually select each target to its source.

Finally I got to being able to retarget the UE4 starter pack animations to my player character. I had to do another tedious task of using the dedicated frames (the original source wasn't made by me but was used as a reference) to remove from the locomotion (aim_space_hip). I had to first duplicate 8 copies of the original to work off, one for each direction and using one frame of idle hip. I then selected all 9 aim animations and used the "Bulk edit via property matrix" option from the asset actions. With using the Idle aim animation with the additive settings applied. The animations will work with a demonstration. All I had to do is make a blend space and use the animations in the correction way. Here are some screenshots to help with the process

Hand IK

When talking about how I fixed the left hand to hold the handguard was a pain to fix as it had tried several times in different ways and nothing worked. Until I found the solution which was a simple fix but I will still show the process of this method Hand IK. In the second screenshot, from the cast to node (Weapon_Base), the target (Gun) from as weapon base was only connected to is valid node. This meant that the get socket transform scene component node was only targeting the cast to (Weapon_Base). This is what caused the hand to not move in the location that it was set in.