How to use skeletally-mismatched animations in Unreal

(yet another bonus blog cus it came up in email)

This becomes relevant if you ever want to use the Manny anims with a different skelly, or similar cases where you grab an asset pack on the marketplace with cool animations specific to their skeleton. I'm not saying this is necessarily ideal. For IDEAL results, use Unreal 5's new Runtime IK Retargeting system, or the offline equivalent that lets you bake retargetted animations out. Either of these will be more able to account for severe pose differences in your skeletons, and both of these also handle radically different skeletons.

The below, though? Will work mostly fine as long as your bone names match. So long as when you started your skeleton in Maya or Blender, you started with a Manny default skeleton (and you almost certainly did cus it's what every one of the rigging plugins hands you)? Odds are very good this'll work well enough for prototype, and might even be shippable if you don't squint too hard at the results.

Also, I'm going to show the lengthy way first cus it shows another property folks might not know about, then the much simpler way if you know where the right checkbox is:

So at first you attempt to do that, and it seems impossible, since the animations don't show up, right? They're filtered by the skelly in use by the ABP. This is good! But, in this case, annoying.

There is a way though! Which requires leveraging the knowledge that those SequencePlayers can be forced to expose a ton of pins that are otherwise hidden. Sequence? Play Rate Basis? Anything with one of those dropdowns that seems built-in? Nope, all potential pins.

Now we make a variable of type AnimSequence, and those aren't skeletally typed, so HAH

... and this feels really cool and like you've done something magical, until you remember to look and. Oh right. There's just a checkbox for this if you know where to look:

and then, haw, we can just drag 'em out

Either way you go, even on my extremely weird rigs, this works fine. Because way back when we started in Game Rig Tools, we chose to use a Manny UE4 rig, so all the bone names match, so, yep! Here you go. Plays uhhhhh mostly right. Definitely not shippable, but whatever, we're asset slamming here, perfectly acceptable placeholder.

The main thing to take away from this is that there is ALWAYS a checkbox somewhere.

Unreal is lousy with checkboxes that do exactly the thing you want it to do, no matter how bizarre. If only you knew where it was. mwahaHaHAHAHAHAHA<cough> anyways, this is why I've found having a Discord or whatever of experts to ask questions of is vital.