My Animation Root Issue?

Greg DAlessandro

Issue:
For this backwards dodge animation I moved the character without moving the root, so he ends up off center of the root (the leftmost pose while the root remains at origin). This will eventually be exported into Unreal Engine 4 as the player's backwards dodge animation. The root (and character) for my other player animations remains at origin in Maya and would be translated via UE4.  

As it is right now, I don't know how I would be able to play (for example) the idle pose animation after this one without the character ending up sliding back to the root at origin (rightmost pose is the idle pose)



Question:
Does anyone know of a solution? Thank you

Hito

you can bake the COG out to the root. create locator for all the world space controllers and set them all to children of single root locator. constrain the locators to the matching rig controllers, baked the animation to then locators. then constrain the root control Z to the root locator, and the controllers to the locators. and mute the Z on the COG control. The animation should look identical, but root control will move the character through space instead of COG. don't have to worry about controllers that only rotate.
or you can add separate node to track the COG control and tell UE4 to use that extra node to calculate root motion.

cgmation

Can you not just animate the root? Constraining the root bone to a control/locator that you can animate would be the simplest solution, especially if you plan on doing any root motion driven animation in the future.

PatrickCommen

I have almost zero knowledge about UE4, but one golden rule while animating is usually to never animate away from the root and export it like that (in case you don´t make a moba game I guess). This is also one of the things that is harder about game animations compared to animations for movies.  

Now this doesn´t mean that we game animators can never animate away from the root. We can do it but just to get an understanding of our animation, to see if it looks right, just for help. Usually one has a root controller but also a main bone that is a child of the root but controlls the whole rig. You can just animate away from the root with the help of the main bone and when done just break the connection and get the character back in to the root and origo.

I hope I didn´t misunderstand the question

Good luck and cheers