Animating Expressions and other Morph Targets in Unreal Engine

take a look at animating one of these morph sliders that we've brought in from Das Studio I'm kind of liking both of them but I think you know maybe maybe just one of them as an example and yeah this this is this is how you can animate eye blinks and all kinds of things there's multiple ways of doing it I'm going to do it directly inside the kickboxing animation sequence that we've had there pretty sure these sliders were called something else yesterday since I've since then I've restarted uh Unreal Engine and you know Silas are called have underscores in the front I don't really know how why but you know that's just that's just how Unreal Engine roll so let's not worry about it too much I'm gonna go and make a copy of my original animation sequencer called kickboxing so Ctrl D and I'm going to call that kickboxing angry perhaps and I'm gonna go Ctrl shift d save everything then double click that to open that and it opens in Persona so now the first thing that we see is we can't use our face forward pose anymore because this is already an animation here but I'd still like her to face forward as I value the facial expression here there's a hacky trick that I'd like to employ called the turntable hack if you head over here to these little three dots there is this thing called turntable and when you press play the character will turn around and eventually you can just go and press pause again and then she stops and she's facing a different position in the lie I'm sure there's a better way to do this I just don't know what it is to change the light source of the angle where the light comes from in Persona here so I'm just going to go and do this and then she's kind of facing almost facing forward like maybe like Soul perfect so that's gonna that's that's a little bit better so down here when I move my playhead I think I'd like for the facial expression for the angry expression to kind of begin here when she goes like this like this is where she starts pulling the face then we're going to hold that expression and then we're going to go out again and then she's going to go back into you know neutral expression so at the beginning at the end of the sequence I'd like for that to be a keyframe and that locks in the neutral expression of the morph Target being zero the way we do this is via curves track down here so with the playhead at the beginning here head over to Curves add a curve and there we have all the morph targets that can be animated so mine is called Thea angry with the underscore on the front so I'm going to select that and then gives me a curved track you can add multiple curved tracks and animate them all individually of course so you can have multiple facial expressions being pulled at the same time and this is just kind of a mini version of it so you can double click the track and that opens it up in a separate tab up here and this is where we're going to go and set our keyframes now keyframes previously when I made the facing forward pause that was done by pressing the S button on your keyboard but when we do curves it somehow do you have to click the middle Mouse button I don't know why there's an inconsistency to set keyframes you'd think it's the same thing everywhere but no it's not so right here I'm going to do that I'm going to go and click my middle Mouse button I'm on a trackball so that's really really difficult and then on the end I'm going to do that as well so that just means there's a keyframe with the zero on this curve on both positions here so keyframes come in pair so this is why I'd like to for her to start pulling the expression so I'm going to set a keyframe here as well and then a little later this is where I want the morph slider to be at 100 so I'm going to set another keyframe here now I'd like for her to hold that expression to about here and then I would like for it to go back down to neutral to here so this hasn't done anything it's only set keyframes now we can grab these two and these are the ones that I want to elevate so I can lift them up to this and you can see that multiple values are changing I need to set mine to one or you know to 0.5 if I wanted to have the most either go to 50 I'm going to set them to one and that then goes and makes me this so if I go and move my playhead over that I can see that her facial expression is now being pulled now notice the type of interpolation that we have here is linear so it changes constantly until it reaches the value you can also go and multi-select these keyframes and then press one on your keyboard and that turns them into curves so that might look a little bit nicer depending on what you need so it's kind of you know starts slow and then goes fast and it kind of goes goes curves here I wouldn't want to do it at the bottom here because that goes into the negative but yeah this is how you do it this is my more slightest animated so if I go and save that now I can go and play that on my character here and the details I can go and use an animation asset and this is going to be kickboxing angry and then if I go and switch my Unreal Engine over to simulate again then I can see her totally getting angry as she kickboxes somebody else in the face that's kind of nice so this is also playable from a keyframe track from a sequencer but we're going to deal with that in another video

Channel: The WP Guru

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Id: yCAWjY0G6sg

Length: 5min 0sec (300 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023