What I tried today#
I think today I got quite lucky as things worked out magically.
Retargetting#
I was worrying about this step a lot. Basically I have to check if UE5 Animation Retargeting will accept my mech’s rigging, and if they do, how well does the retargetted animation look like? Luckily, with some quick fixes, the retargetting worked perfectly. (Watch out for sneaky Blender issue, where you shouldn’t have same bones name as the mesh name, otherwise Blender will try to add suffix number behind bone name, breaking the rig naming scheme and screw up the retargetting ).
Use ALS for mech#
The next step is to find out how to setup the anim blueprint. This is when I had Jeremy Clarkson’s big brain moment where I was like “hmm, ALS works fine for the human character, why not slap the mech mesh on top of it and scale it up? This way I don’t have to program run/jump/mantle etc.” And guess what, with some trivia
This video helped me a lot. Again, this just shows how great the UE community is and you should always share your work!
What worked#
Retargetting and binding to ALS worked and that’s a huge leap.
And what didn’t#
I do think I need to be more consistent on time management. Yesterday I glued myself to the chair since I woke up, and today I spent less than half a day working and most of the time doom scrolling and rearranging furnitures (literally).