Root motion question.

[destraudo]

Are there any example files for using cascadeur with animations that have root motion. Are there any changes to workflow from those shown in the tutorial files?

[Artem]

Tutorial with root motion animation will be very useful ! Who's got an sample?

[Polina]

Tutorial with root motion animation will be very useful ! Who's got an sample?

No tutorial for this at the moment. But usually the root motion is done with just an additional bone. Because there aren't any special controllers for the root motion if you just export the animation the "root motion" bone will just keep its position at (0,0,0). You can animate it directly in Cascadeur, though.

Eg you can copy the position of Center of Mass by X, Z coordinate and paste it on the root motion bone. This will give a good result for the position of the root motion bone. It's harder to do something automatic with the rotation though, but you can animate it by hands.

In the future it would be easier to have a special controller for root motion inside Cascadeur, which would automatically keep track of the character position/rotation and animate the root motion bone. But to tell the truth - this is something that needs further investigation from our side, as in Shadow Fight we had our own system that did not use root motion.

[Kiry]

I had some troubles setting up root motion for UE4 with Cascadeur and Exporting, for anyone who intereseted i will leave there some notes i made along the way. Skeleton i am using in topic is regular mannequin sekeleton with root bone located on floor under pelvis. I also exported skeleton directly from Unreal and removed annoying transform empty Cascadeur used to add every time(it makes some issues on importing back to UE4 treating it as another bone).
General notes:
- Root bone rotation does not seem effect animation initialy, but it does if you turn on "enable root motion" inside animation instance and can mess it up - so keep it straight it seems (90, 180,-180) for global rotation work just right.
- Root motion itself comes from root bone translation but keep in mind it gets tricky : XUE4 = XCas ,ZUE4 = Z Cas, YUE4 = -Y Cas , while their notation almost matched up (except -Y) ,their alignment does not : to move your character along Y in UE4 - you have to move root bone verticaly DOWN along Cascadeur (-Y) axis and so on.
- While root bone follow rules above, pelvis and the rest has to be aligned normaly without any special treatment, YCas will become character Z(Up Vector), ZCas will be Y(Right Vector),XCas will be X(Forward vector).

To give some quick examples i was doing character backward hop and had to do some setup before exporting to unreal :
(-X) aligned linear 1D motion with character facing X direction works as intended with this setup.

While same movement but aligned along -Y with character facing Y had to be treated with work around.

All in all:
- IF you oriented your mannequin toward X ( i out of mind why default manequin rotation is Y tho UE4 forward vector is X) and all your root motion required only 1Dimension - animating along X axis should have no problem.
- IF not, you can still animate as usual, but after you done :
- you have to orient root bone trajectory with "interval edit mode with fixed pivot around origin" tool to match UE4 axis.
- then by double clicking pelvis bone and turning on "interval editing with moving pivot" tool - orient character to desired rotation.
- then reset root bone global rotation to (90 ,180,-180) for all frames (change any frame , settings > copier > uncheck all but rotation, select root bone - ctrl+c on root bone , select interval on time line , ctrl + alt + v to paste value on all selected frame) .