Animate a Metahuman Using Mixamo // Blend Animation // UNREAL ENGINE TUTORIAL

hey guys so I recently did this tutorial where I taught how I animate this character uh so I thought I'd do a smaller video that just breaks this down real quickly so you guys can learn so if you want to learn how to animate a metahuman using mixo and then blend the animations um this video is for you okay so if you open quickel bridge and click on the metahumans tab you can find plenty of metahumans here that you are able to use you can also go into the my metahumans tab where the metahumans that you've created yourself will exist um if you're not sure how to create one there's plenty of tutorials on YouTube but also you can just type in metahumans and do maybe quickbridge metahumans uh in Google and it should pop up and it shouldn't be too hard to find um just sign up and you'll be able to create your own um in this case I'm using AI uh and this character as well um so just for this this sake of this tutorial I'll just be using this one so once you click on the metahuman you want uh all you have to do is Click add and then it will import into your uh project so now that we got our metahuman downloaded and everything enabled uh the next thing we're going to need to do to animate this character is go to a mixim mo converter um to get it uh I will have a link in the description below but it'll be on this website right here just do the direct download and here's the uh ZIP password as well uh once that's all done open it up and you will see something like this so this is going to be the first scene you see uh click left click to continue and then enter the conversion process and here you're going to want to download an fbx that you're going to bring into miimo so in this case we're going to use Manny and we're going to take this Manny simple. fpx uh so now we want to go to mixim Mo's actual website so this is mixim Mo's website uh I'll also have a link to this in the description um you might need to sign in but in general this is a completely free site that you can use use uh so you'll have a different character here it'll either be this red uh girl or this blue mannequin guy um what you want to do is first uh download a character or sorry upload a character so click upload and then so now you're going to want to take the uh Manny simple. fbx file and drag and drop it into the upload character so once it's uploaded your screen should look like this where it's showing your character currently being animated uh if that is the case click next and then click next again so now here's your character uploaded to the site so what we're going to want to do when blending animations is we need something to move um close to the other one so in this sense you can't just do I don't know someone dancing and then jumping uh because they will uh not fully connect to each other so you kind of want a nice fluid animation so in my case my character is going to be looking around and then he's going to start walking and then continue walking so we're going to be looking for those three separate animations that we're going to then blend together um so what I want you to do is type in looking and what we're going to first take is looking behind um so when we do this we're going to go click on the animation we want see the character uh is working well we like um his arms and everything if anything's kind of you know moving too close or too far from each other we can change the arms see now they're clipping so let's go back to 50 but overall this is completely fine how it comes and don't worry about changing the trim none of that uh so click download and then we're going to change the skin to without skin and the key frame reduction to uniform and then download now in the case of downloading this is going to skip a step for you guys but it is easier wherever you saved your mixo converter you can actually click on the miimo converter go into the incoming fbx file and you can download the file or yeah you can download the file into the correct folder that is going to be used to convert later so if you want to do that you can do that and skip a step if you want to download it somewhere else where you want to save the animation for future use you can do that as well uh I personally only save the animations that are converted so in this case I download directly into the fbx folder which it's going to be found in your mixo converter and then the incoming fbx uh so click save and then you're now going to want two other animations um so you already have the looking behind you can do start walking and we're going to do the male start walking without a gun in his hand so this one and again download exact same way uh uniform uh without skin uniform download and it'll be right here uh I'll just cover up this file yes and then the last one will be Swagger walk which is going to be this one right here and then again click download without skin uniform everything's good so now you have your three animations downloaded so the next thing we need to do is go to the converter so here we have the converter if you scroll all the way down you're going to have three um this one was already converted earlier so that it doesn't technically count yet but it would just come up as a custom rout motion all the way down if you don't have this in here it's because you didn't uh download it into your fbx incoming folder um so in that case all you need to do to find that folder would be click right here uh open the original folder and then wherever you downloaded your animations just drag and drop them into this folder folder right here and then you'll be ready to go so once they're all downloaded into that folder all you need to do is go down to here to click to convert the animations uh this little guy will go crazy and then you'll have these three pop up over here and now these are your three animations now what you're going to want to do is most likely save these three animations so in my case I'm just going to copy them over uh I made a separate tutorial folder for this in animations and now you have the three animations right here so the next thing we're going to do is bring these animations into our project so you can copy and drag and drop now when you do that you're going to get this right here and we need to make sure that this is going to be correct as you upload them because this matters a lot so the first thing we're going to want to do is go back to the mixo converter and then under the uh convert the animation animations converted if you keep scrolling down you're going to see very important information that you're going to want to be made correct as you're importing the folder so the first thing we want to do is do the SK mannequin skeleton so in that case we can go right here and do SK mannequin skeleton the next one we're going to want to do is you default use default sample rate uh this is going to be under the advanced um animation tab um use default sample rate so if we just move this out a little bit you'll see right here so that's collect uh the next you want to make sure is import custom attribute um I have these undone um so that one isn't directly seen in this version uh but if you have these unlicked you should be good the next one we're going to do is import bone tracks which is already clicked over here and then uh Delete existing morph Target and do not import curves so if you go down here do not import curves is checked so we don't want that and then this one is already unchecked so we're good here so uncheck this one and then now you should be good to go so import all and now you have all your three animations right here so the next thing we're going to want to do oh and all these came in as well so the next thing we're going to want to do is actually go to a retargeter so if you go to your content folder and type in RTG you'll have this retarget right here and we want to do ui4 to ui5 double click open it up and you're going to see the old mannequin and the new mannequin and then over here on the side in the asset browser you should see your three animations so if I click looking behind my mannequin is now doing the looking behind motion if I do Swagger walk they're going to walk and if I do start walking they're going to to start walking so now that we know this is all good what we're going to want to do is retarget this animation to our um metahuman so to do that we want to go into our metahuman and make sure we know exactly what type of metahuman he is so in this case we're going to click on our metahuman go to that edit button right there and then if we click on body over here it'll say mcore mediumcore narrow body so this is the skeletal mesh asset that we need our new animation to be attached to so if we go over here to mcore mediumcore narrow it should show up right here so this is the body skeletal mesh so if we click on this I understand it he's missing part of his body uh but this is the actual skeleton that the metahuman is working off of so if you can see now he's looking behind and doing everything correctly and all we need to do is export this animation so it now applies to this character so just click export animation um you can go to wherever you want I'm going to go to metahuman and put it there so he has the animation right here and then I'm just going to go down the line and Export every single animation for this exact metahuman okay so now you have all the different animations set up for your metahuman so we can now um guess we never needed him there in the first place um we can now start to animate the character so what we're going to want to do first is you're going to need a camera and a camera sequencer to um see this correctly so if we go over here um to this little box go to down to cinematic and click C camera actor um we can now click on the actor uh right click on it and then go to Pilot and now we can see our character so let's just set up a scene so we can see him nice and clearly um he's not in focus and that's just going to bother me so let me change that one real quick then you go to the actor it'll now track the actor so now that that's all set let's open a level sequence so we can just call this add level sequence that one's simple and then now we have a level sequence and we can track the actor so now we clicked track and added um our metahuman into the track now the first thing we can do is actually delete the control wigs and we can add over here to animation and when we go to animation if we keep scrolling down we should find our start walking Swagger walk and then this is s so it's below it's all um alphabetical order so somewhere in here you are also going to find a looking behind where are you right here uh so we can add looking behind since that's going to be the start of our animation so this is him now looking behind fully animated and now what we want to do is blend all these three animations together um so let me add more space to this and now we're going to go up here again go to animation actually we can click right here and we can also add the start walking animation and bring it up next to it and then now we can also add go to animation again go all the way down and add the Swagger walk animation now if we play these back to back this is what they're going to look like see how he jumps and then now he's going to restart in the beginning which is all things we don't want to be happening this isn't nice smooth animation um also alternatively if I deleted the start walking with a Swagger walk it'll still be a little weird because the feet position don't line up exactly so the first thing we're going to want to do uh this is actually nice and simple is all we have to do is click on our middle clip uh right click and then go to match this bone in the next clip or in the previous clip so in this case we want our start walking to be matched to our looking behind so we're going to go match with this bone in previous clip and then I personally think the feet are the best position since this is mainly walking so I'm going to go to the Bone which is the right foot and now he's going to be looking behind and without jumping starts walking so that animation is Blended now the next animation we want is the swag or walk to not restart and shoot back exact same process we're going to right click Mash his bone to previous clip and go all the way down to uh right foot and then now if we click and play the animation he is completely moving fluidly throughout our scene and you can even go so far as copy and pasting the next animation uh you need to make sure there is no overlap so the animations don't get weird and then you can do the exact same thing previous clip to right foot it's already done since it was a copy paste and now you'll have a nice character looking backwards starting to walk and then now he will continue to walk throughout the scene and you can make him walk straight into Oblivion for all you want forever and ever uh you will get this crazy uh head pop off off uh not really sure what that is uh but again once you actually play your playhead it'll look completely normal um so yeah when you're editing your scene and you're not playing you might have some weird crazy head movements where his head is decided to leave his body uh not sure how to fix that but it won't affect your scene if if you're only recording the parts that he's moving in or if he's animated throughout the entire scene you can also animate an idle scene into this as well by bringing in uh something like a stop walk and then have him idle if you want to have him walk and then stop um so you can have a lot of fun with this blending animation um but this is overall how you can bring in animations and animate your uh metahumans or and retarget um me Manakin animations to your metahumans so hope you guys like this tutorial please like And subscribe and uh I will catch you on the next one

Channel: Mr. Hollt

Views: 9,351

Keywords: Ue5, unreal, unreal engine 5, garden, landscape, modeling, raytracing, niagara, tutorial, learn, orb, mirror, materials, new, updated, unreal engine 5.1, ue5.1, lighting, displacement, fog, material, export, settings, commands, preset, unrealengine5.2, ue5.2, god ray, starter, course, total, beginner, promo, ue5.3, unrealengine5.3, tesselation, nanite, firefly, fireflies, leaves, falling leaves, megascans, epic marketplace, Camera, Camera sequencer, camerasequencer, sequencer, basics

Id: nGKdJbpUuZo

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023