This sprint wasn’t touching the code base for the myMO game. It was focused on getting some DJ and Music related animations into the game. The approach was to develop a workable approach to retargeting some of the literally thousands of animations we had for the Poser/Daz Avatars and moving them into myMO so that they would work with our RPM avatar. We spent a great deal of time trying many different approaches using python, Blender plugins and Unreal Engine animation retargeting approaches. We ended up with a workable mostly manual work flow to take animations from the Poser/Daz skeleton, combine them in Blender, convert them an intermediate RPM skeletal mesh in Blender and then import them Unreal Engine and run it through the UE animation retargeting program to get it from the intermediate skeletal mesh onto our actual RPM skeletal mesh in the game so that we can use the already written myMO animation system and apply the new converted animation on to any RPM avatar that is brought into the game by game players.
The first video is one that shows how to combine animations in Blender. We did this because the DJ animations we were using were 7 animations we needed to blend together into a single long animation for a DJ performing.
The second video shows that basic process that we ended up with for doing the retargeting. This is not straight forward, but still doable for retargeting animations we have for Poser/Daz and getting them into the game.
This sprint, while very challenging and not related to UE coding, was fruitful as now we have a way to get the animations we have and may need into the game. Animation and especially retargeting is very fiddley and detail oriented and requires hours and hours of moving bones to get them to match up at the end of the conversion process. It is the thing that can lead to nightmares …. trust me …. it did.
