Humanoid Animations Re-targeting Poorly

Unity Engine
1

Hey Everyone,

We have many different human characters in our game and we are attempting to use the humanoid system in mechanim so we can use the same animations across everyone. However, on our first animation we’re noticing a lot of weird, badly rotating joints that don’t appear in Maya:

2375685--161524--BrokenAnkle.PNG

In Maya, the animation works great on multiple models but in Unity we get this weird, broken ankle effect.
What I have tried already:

  • Baking animation in Maya and re-importing to Unity
  • Importing to Unity as .fbx and .ma files
  • I have set/unset dozens of potential import configurations

I am getting a number of import warnings in the editor that I feel are at least partially to blame. I haven’t been able to find anything that would explain how/why they occur or what I can tell our animators to avoid so it doesn’t happen:

2375685--161525--importMessages.PNG
2375685--161525--importMessages.PNG333×709 21.5 KB

The fact that ‘R_ankle_joint’ is mentioned specifically makes me suspicious that this is the culprit but I’m not sure if its just a red herring…

Nothing has worked so far, any help would be much appreciated!

2

My guess would be that the feet bones have a roll that was not set to zero when the skeleton was initially set up. I’m not a Maya user, but I have played with Maya, and things should be similar to Blender. In Blender, when setting up rigs, you need to zero their roll. If a bone has a roll of say 50% then it is not going to bend correctly compared to the previous bone in the hierarchy, as the 2 bones are not lined up perfectly.

If this is the case, how is it fixed? You could correct the roll in Maya, which means you’ll need to redo all the feet animation. You could eliminate the keyframes on the feet, and have no animation on them, and then reanimate them in Unity.

Again, I’m just guessing, so please don’t take what I’ve said as gospel.