Animate Models for your Game: Export UE5 models to Cascadeur & Back - A Complete Guide

hey guys welcome back to the channel today we're going to be looking at an easy way to take a model from Unreal Engine 5 and add new animations to it this could be a model that you got from the marketplace or maybe you just want to animate the default mannequin model either way this method will work in order to animate the model we're going to be using a free piece of software called casador casador is free software that allows us to create new animations for our game quicker and easier than ever before if you don't already have it we're going to go over where to get it and how to get started with it but before we get into that let's take a look at the model we're going to be animating I got this model for free in the Unreal Engine Marketplace it's provided by epic games and you're allowed to use it any way that you want so if you need to get this model let's go ahead and open up the epic games launcher and we'll go to the marketplace as soon as that loads up we'll go to search and we'll type in Paragon Quang that's k w n g it'll hit enter and you can see it's right here you can go ahead and click on it so go ahead and add the model to your library after that click add to project and then select a project that you want to install the model into once you've done that go ahead and open the project and you'll see right here in the content browser there's a new folder called Paragon Quang we can expand that and if we go to to characters heroes Quang meshes we can see there's a few different meshes that we can play around with all right so just go ahead and pick one that you like I'm just going to go with this default one Quang GDC so now we need to go ahead and Export the mod model go ahead and right click it go up to asset actions and Export save it somewhere where you'll remember CU we're going to need to load this model into casador I just kept the default name hit save then hit export so if you don't already have it it's time to go ahead and get casador go to their website cascad door.com I'll leave a link in the description below and you'll see a get started button right here click on that and you'll see some various options here for pricing we're going to use the free one but if you want to purchase and support them go ahead I'm just going to hit get started under free and you have three download options Windows Linux and Mac so I'm using Windows so I'll hit download and I'll go ahead and install it okay so now we're ready to do the install I just ran the installer that I downloaded click the next button next next install okay so now that that's done so I'm going to uncheck create desktop shortcut you can leave that if you want um and I'm going to leave run cascad or selected so let's hit finish all right so you should be greeted with a login screen kind of like this if you haven't already you're going to need to go ahead and make a new account I already have one so I'm going to go ahead and log in all right as soon as you log in you'll be presented with an option to choose a dark or light theme I like dark themes so I'm going to go with that okay so we're on the home screen for casador we're going to go ahead and click new scene and we're going to go over here to file import FX so go ahead and browse to the exported file from earlier and select it it's going to ask you if you want to enter rig mode say yes it's going to ask you if you want to use the quick rigging tool go ahead and say Yes says the character cannot be fully recognized please check if all bones match and click add rig elements at the bottom of the window okay let's see what's going on so in this screen this is the quick ring tool basically we're saying here's our bones here on the left and here's where they correlate to on the right so we see we're missing the left-handed weapon the right-handed weapon and this chest bone I'm not always worried about the weapon bones for this but this chest bone is going to cause some problems so we need to fix that all right so let's go back into Unreal Engine and see if we can figure out which bone didn't get set up correctly we'll double click the model click on the skeleton here on the top right and let's see our list of bones we know from casador if you look back here it looks like it's this one that's gray that didn't get set up correctly so let's see if we can identify it here and usually that happens if the name of the bone isn't the same as what casador is expecting so in this case it's expecting a bone called chest so let's see it's probably called something different we know that there's a spine bone so let's take a look at that so we spin1 that looks a little low spine two spine three okay so spine 3 looks like it's the last spine bone and it's probably in about the right position so let's go back to casador see if we can find spine actually we can type in the filter right here okay spino 3 we're just going to drag this bone right here to the chest section where it says None and now spino 3 should be set and let's take a look at the rest rest are looking pretty good okay let's go ahead and click add rig elements says your hinge has a problem with autop posing proceed let's just go ahead and continue and see how it works and it asks if we want to generate the rig we do let's go ahead and try that all right so we have our model in casador so for those of you who don't know I'll give you a quick rundown on how to navigate this we can use our middle Mouse button to zoom in and out and we can hold the ALT key and use the left Mouse button to rotate around if we hold the ALT key and the middle Mouse button we can Pan the camera and if we hold the ALT key and use the right Mouse button we can zoom in and out so so that's about it when it comes to navigation the cool thing about casador is it's really smart when it comes to making animations so it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you for example we can click on this arm here and we can kind of move it forward and you can see it's actually moving the entire body in the direction that I'm moving rather than me having to you know adjust the Torso and things like that it even does the same thing for the legs you see here so another thing to pay attention to at the bottom here this is where we have key frames so the first key frame is set on frame zero if we go over to like say frame 20 and we press the F key or you can click this little key icon here you add another key frame all right so now we have a key frame added let's go ahead and make a change think I'll slide this foot back maybe slide this foot forward and I'll rotate the body a little bit and then we'll skip over another 20 frames to frame 40 we'll hit F and maybe we'll just slide this foot back fix this arm I'm really just playing around at this point I don't have a Target animation in mind I'm just moving the model and let's go to frame 60 We'll add another key frame one cool thing we can do is we can select a bone like this foot here and we can press R and that locks it in place so no matter what I do that foot is now stationary okay let's see what we got so we have a pose here we have a pose here here and here so you may be wondering what about all the frames in between because we don't want just these random poses what we can do is we can click the first frame and we click frame 60 and we can go over here the step and we can choose desier clamped and that's going to go ahead and fill in all of the frames in between so if we hit play you can see the animation now is filled in key frames and another thing we can do is click this little blue button right here this makes the timeline fit on the screen and it allows the animation to Loop correctly so just go ahead play around with the model and see if you can strike up a cool pose so another thing is if you kind of screw up and the model starts looking really crazy you can go over here and click box controller mode press control a to select everything go to commands at the top and click go to to pose and that's going to reset your model for you after that if you want to get back into autop pose you can click on this little icon right here and autop POS mode will turn on all right guys after a little bit of work I've built this animation and I know it's not the best in the world but it's good for testing I'm going to go ahead and Export this now so the way we can do that is we go to file and we want to hit export fbx Dae and we want to do it without mes es so we'll do that and we'll say test animation or just call it whatever you want really now we're going to go back to Unreal Engine and I guess right here is good we'll go ahead and click import and we'll pick our test animation we'll hit open the important thing to do is make sure you've selected the right skeleton if you pick the wrong skeleton it's not going to look right so you need to make sure you select the one that uh corresponds with your model go ahead and click import all and let's see what we got there it is there's my animation so guys I hope you found this useful that's a quick and easy way that you can take a model from the marketplace or one that's pre-loaded unreal and you can export it out make new animations for it if you found this useful go ahead and click like And subscribe to the channel there's gonna be more coming soon thank you for watching have a great day bye

Channel: Ben Shukrallah

Views: 1,403

Keywords: unreal engine 5, cascadeur, animation, game dev, cascadeur animation, keyframing, key frame animation, 3D animation, UE5 to Cascadeur Workflow, Realistic Character Movement, Game dev, indie, indie dev, character animations, anims, ue5, epic, kwang

Id: EFJa1pdj5hU

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024