PES 2021 .gani/.mtar animation format: channel mapping, IK chains and UE5 reconstruction

[Zampax]

Hi everyone 😁,

I’m studying the PES 2021 .gani / .mtar animation format and trying to understand how the animation data is applied to the body skeleton.

My final goal is to reproduce a similar football animation pipeline in Unreal Engine 5 for study and experimentation.

So far, I have been looking at:

.ask skeleton files

.gani / .mtar animation data

QUAT12 / QUAT_DIFF rotation tracks

root motion

track/channel mapping

IK-like chains for legs and arms

I already have my own extracted local PES 2021 files, and I’m comparing them with public tools/templates such as Fox Engine templates and old Python/Noesis scripts.

The biggest doubts I’m trying to solve are these:

In PES 2021, is ChannelIndex supposed to map directly to a bone, or does it represent a track/unit that must be interpreted through chain rules such as IK legs/arms?

For .gani/.mtar QUAT_DIFF tracks, should the decoded quaternions be applied as local absolute rotations per frame, accumulated as deltas, or combined with a skeleton/render basis?

For bones such as feet/hands that appear to have multiple channels, are those channels simple additive/end-effector tracks, or part of a chain solver?

If anyone has old notes, parser scripts, format documentation, examples, or even just remembers how this system works, any help would be extremely valuable.

I am not asking for game assets or copyrighted content to redistribute. I’m only trying to understand the technical structure and the correct animation reconstruction logic.

Thanks a lot!!!!! 😉