Easy Retargeting with IK Rigs

The new IK rig retargeting system lets you quickly and easily retarget animations. You can also retarget them during runtime to save you even more time and not require you having to have multiple of each animation asset per skeleton

The third person template has an IK Rig file thats already included. When you open it, it should look something like this minus it will be the Manny mesh and not the one I’m using

With this asset, click the Preview Skeletal Mesh dropdown and pick the mesh you want to retarget to. Once it loads, just make sure that the bones line up correctly in the preview. In my experience, I haven’t had to make a single adjustment for a biped character

For this example, my IK Rig file is named IKRig_Biped. Next step is to create an IKRetargeter. This asset will let us retarget animations in the editor as well as during runtime

To get it to work all you need to do is edit these 4 fields

The source/target IKRig Asset should be IKRig_Biped and the source mesh should be the skeleton that contains the assets you want to retarget and the target should be the mesh that you want to use the animations for. You should now see a list of animations and you want make sure they all look the way you want while playing before you retarget

Note - Click the Global Settings button and then click Enable Root if you want to retarget root motion animations

Retargeting in Runtime

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel since Epic’s documentation is already complete on the topic. Here is the article that teaches you how to retarget during runtime. You can use the IK Retargeter asset that we created above