AAA animation retarget to Roblox (TLOU2 test)

Yeah… you read that right. Took some TLOU2 animations, tore ‘em apart, and shoved ‘em into Roblox. Don’t ask me why. Boredom, curiosity… call it what you want. I just wanted to see if you could take something big and complicated and squeeze it into something tiny and simple like R15.

The process:

  • Dug through the game files, cracked open the .psarc, and pulled out Ellie’s skeleton and animations.
  • Converted them into .smd using some tools. Took a few days to figure it out — first time doing this, lots of cursing.
  • Inspected the animations in Noesis, scaled them properly, and exported.

Now, the fun part: 1072 bones → 15 bones R15 rig. Feels like trying to fit a truck through a doggy door.

Here’s how I made it reliable this time:

  1. Start with a clean R15 base rig in Blender — this is your template.
  2. Run a Blender script to strip unnecessary bones and auto-map names to R15. Less manual copying, less chance of chaos.
  3. Normalize scale and root positions before retargeting — avoids the weird jumps Roblox loves to throw at you.
  4. Retarget the AAA animation directly onto the R15 template rig using Hat Tool. One armature, one shot.
  5. Export with Rbx Animation addon + Blender Rig Exporter → import to Studio and cross your fingers.
  6. Test, tweak minor issues if needed.

Result

Why do it?
Not for a game, not for a project. Pure experiment. Mixamo exists, yeah, but their animations are generic. I wanted something nastier, more complicated, more real… and this is what I got.

That’s it. Dumb idea? Maybe. But it worked… sorta. Thought it was worth showin’ off.

4 Likes

That’s fascinating, keep experimenting keep trying ! good luck

1 Like