Character (AtomsUnreal)

Owned by Alan Stanzione
Last updated: Apr 03, 2023
3 min read

In Atoms, you can retarget animation sequences from different characters at runtime.
For the retargeting to happen correctly, you must set up a Character asset per Agent Type and set the “Compatible Agent Type” (Atoms Anim Clip User Data) field on each animation sequence you want to reuse.

You can create a new Character asset by right-clicking on the content browser and then clicking “Atoms Crowd > Atoms Character“. Alternatively, you can drag and drop a “.atomscharacter“ file on the content browser, and the asset will be created and populated automatically.

Once you have created a character asset, you can define the rules for retargeting.

First, you need to provide the name of the “Root Bone” of your skeleton.

After this point, you can add new “Chains”. Each chain has different parameters:

  • Type: root, spine, clavicle, limb, effector

  • Subtype: arm, leg, foot, neck, head, thumb, index, etc. (only for limbs and effectors)

  • Horizontal: horizontal position of the chain, Right, Left or Center

  • Vertical: vertical position of the chain, Top, Bottom or Center.

  • Depth: depth position of the chain, Front, Back or Center.

  • Index: number to distinguish between different chains with the same configuration of the other tags (use 0 as default)

  • Bones: the joint names belonging to this chain

The “Retarget Base Pose“ contains the data of the retarget pose of your character.

In order not to fill all this data manually, you can create a standard retargeting Unreal setup on your Unreal skeleton(UE 4) or an IKRig (UE5), then in the content browser, right-click on the Character asset, then click on one of the following:

  • Update from Skeleton.

  • Update Chains Map from Skeleton.

  • Update Retarget Pose from Skeleton.

  • Update from IKRig.

Then select the skeleton, and the Character asset settings will be filled in for you.

 

Tutorial

Unreal 5

You can create an atoms character asset directly from an IKRig asset.

  • Create an Atoms Character asset.

 

  • Right-click on the Atosm Character asse and choose “Update form IKRig”.
    Only the chain information is extracted from the IKRig. Atoms try to identify the Left/Right and Limb chains from their names using the same naming convention of the default Unreal Manequinn IKRig asset. If you use a different naming convention, you must manually set each chain property inside the Atoms Character asset.

 

Unreal 4

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