This is a project that I created to practice and demonstrate my understanding of:
- Importing Skeletal meshes and animations.
- Importing Skeletal meshes and animations.
- Modifying skeletons and skin weights inside Unreal Engine.
- Sequencer animation blending and keyframe animations.
- Control Rig and simulating secondary motion.
Importing and skinning:
I Imported the model from Mixamo, modified the skeleton by adding bones for the hair and adjusted the skin weights inside Unreal Engine.
Control Rig:
Custom Basic IK:
I faced what appears to be a bug with the built-in Basic IK node, that distorted the mesh in unexpected ways despite me using the correct axis settings. I fixed this issue by building my own Basic IK function that only applies the rotations from the IK solve and disregards the rest of the transforms. This now works correctly.
I faced what appears to be a bug with the built-in Basic IK node, that distorted the mesh in unexpected ways despite me using the correct axis settings. I fixed this issue by building my own Basic IK function that only applies the rotations from the IK solve and disregards the rest of the transforms. This now works correctly.
Limbs with custom Basic IK
Hair Jiggle:
Spring Interpolate
Maintain initial distance from parent with weights
I found the Spring Interpolate node to be the most suitable for the kind of secondary motion I wanted the hair to have. I further refined it by forcing the hair bones to maintain the initial distance from parent and weighed heavily in the Y axis.
Animation:
The animation is a combination of keyframe animation using the control rig, and the imported Mixamo animations that I modified and then blended together into a more seamless motion.
Throughout this process, I learned about retargeting, bone matching, and additive animation. As well as animation blueprints which I didn't find suitable to use in this particular demo project.
Thank you for taking the time to look over my project.
