I’m having issues characterizing and applying skeletal animation within the story tool using a very hires joint hierarchy.

The joint hierarchy I’m working with for a just a leg totals 18 joints, 4 for the upper leg, 4 for the lower leg and an additional 10 twist joints sprinkled in between the others.  I’ve characterized as many joints possible during the characterization step, but I’m left with quite a few others.

Pressing on, once characterized I create a character animation track in the story window and drag an fbx file into the track.  The fbx file is an animated walk cycle with same exact joint hierarchy and skeletal animation or joint transforms.  This results in a semi-walking character only applying animation to characterized joints.  This makes sense as the story window only applies animation to characterized joints.

There’s seems to be a few relevant posts but this one specifically related to character extensions stood out: question-why-i-can-not-get-character-extensions-to-work

Brad is right- the Character Extension is just a means to store the data along with the Character. What this means is that, if you have objects defined as part of Character Extension- any animation on them will be stored along with animation on your Character, which can then be loaded through the Character Controls/Story Character Track or Pose Controls.

From here I tried adding these extra joints as character extensions with no luck.  I created a character extension for my character and added the non characterized joints to the new character extension by drag and dropping.  Still no animation when using the story window.  Do I need to add some type of constraints on these joints to get things working?

What am I doing wrong?  Has anyone else dealt with this many extra joints and driving a characterized character from within the story tool?

Thanks!
Justin