Animating Metahuman using Mixamo | Lesson 4 | Chapter 7 | Unreal Engine Cinematics Full Course

foreign [Music] how we can use motion capture animations from example.com to animate any metahuman inside Unreal Engine so we need two things here first of all we need motion capture animations from example.com so here is the website address www.mexama.com I will also put them this URL address in the link in the description below also we need an example converter now what is an example converter it actually converts your mexamo motion capture animations to a format that can be readable by Unreal Engine because if you will directly download any motion capture animation from example it cannot be read by Unreal Engine and you won't be able to use that so we need a converter that can easily convert any animation that you can download from mixava.com into an Unreal Engine format so for that purpose we will use them example converter you can download from here direct download and you can unzip the with this password here it's quite easy to install and we'll learn in this lesson how to use both of these Okay so first of all I have already downloaded it so I will just close this and I will log in to my max ammo uh website it is free law like sign up you can sign up for free or if you already have an account so you can log in I already have an account so I will log in from here so I will just press the login button here and it will automatically allow me to log in now I've logged in so it is loading them example now first thing what you need to do here is that you have to upload your own skeleton here you will see there are bunch of motion capture animation already shown here plus you can see there are some adventure packs and all those things here okay so first of all what we need to do here is that we have to go to our web example converter so here is some example converter that I installed and I pinned that in the taskbar usually I do that and here when you will open this up you just have to click here with the left Mouse button it will start your mexamo converter here is the main menu and you can just simply go to the enter the conversion process once you are here it will show you different options here okay you can use character for from Unreal Engine mannequins you can use some example characters you can use metahumans and underneath it will show you uh let me delete these two files which I previously used I want to start from the very beginning so I don't need those so I will delete those here now you once you will install the uh an example converter it will give you two folder let me show you those folders now this is the Maximo converter folder where I install the mixam or converters this is my maximum converter okay and here I have two folders incoming fbx and outgoing fbx so whatever you download from the mixamo.com you have to download it inside the incoming fbx folder and once you will convert that it will automatically go to the outgoing fbx so usually what I do to make my life more easier I have already pinned these incoming fbx and outgoing fbx in my taskbar so I can easily quickly move in between these two folders plus if you will go to incoming fbx you will find there are some files which don't which you don't have to delete move or edit keep them as it is otherwise your max ammo will not work okay an outgoing fbx you don't have anything inside the mannequins you have all different kind of mannequins that Unreal Engine offers or example converter offers okay so you have uh it's up to you whatever you want to choose so this is uh my workflow so uh I I encourage you to uh make these two as pinned here okay so I will just minimize this go back to I will go back to my um exam converter now what I will do here is that instead of going to this folder and then going to the mannequins and searching for the skeleton that that we have to upload because without uploading any skeleton you cannot download any animation you have to upload your own skeleton so what you need to do here is that first of all I will choose the Unreal Engine 4 uh skeleton which is the basic uh skeleton the reason I always use this one because the points are already set so I don't have to manually set the points inside them um example you can easily set the points like xamo will ask you where are the hands where where is the neck where is the groin area where is the knees so just you have to point it's not a big deal but if you will use these skeletons which are the Unreal Engine skeleton then the example won't ask you because the points are already set and you will save your time so that's why I use these so I will choose this one I will click on this then it will open the folder you can see that it's the same folder which I showed you so directly it will open it up let me minimize uh this now I will go to the upload character option here and then I can go back here where I have my uh mannequin which I just opened I will take this one and drag and drop here to upload now it is uploading the same character and it is processing as I told you before the points are already set so you don't have to set the point you will save the time otherwise it will ask you the points and you just have to pinpoint that which is quite easy now you can see easily it has already uh animated the whole thing and you can see it is now ready to uh animate okay so I will just press next and here is my Unreal Engine uh skeleton now let's make our meta human dance for example okay so what I can do here is that I can just go here okay and I can choose a dance option here I will go to the dance you can see animation genre I have dance as well so I will choose and it have different sort of dance let's choose uh something like a funny dance okay so let's see this what what I do okay this is fine but as you will notice in this animation let me pause this for now the hands go through the legs add our meta human you know is more like bulky so better is to move apart the arms so I will increase the arm space so it won't touch now I think it is fine sorry if I pause let's see yeah that was fine so now this is good what I will do simply uh what I will simply do is that I will just go here in the download option okay let's get no I don't need it with skin because the skin I will use is my meta human skin I simply need to choose without skin these are the options that the download settings will ask you when you are downloading the motion capture frame per seconds you can keep 30 or you can choose whatever you want I will keep it 30. keyframe detection I don't want to reduce any keyframes I want every keyframe as it is FPS format yes I need the xpx format I will not change anything fpx binary so I will keep it fbx binary nothing else and now I will press the download option here now once you're downloading it will ask you where to download now that's the reason I made these pins so simply I will just choose this incoming fpx and and save the file here so that will easily download that now let's search for something like a walk so I would choose walk here and you can see there are different type of walking okay so this is a normal walk I guess yeah this is fine and uh I have two options in place or uh the normal walk in place he will walk in his place and what you can do you can move the background so it will look like he is walking but if you don't want that uh you can make the character uh walk and you can move his position so it will look like that but it's quite tricky because you have to exactly move the positions in a way that it looks like he is actually walking but I usually don't use this most of the time because it's quite tricky I use uh normal regular and plus our character is little bulky so I will choose more character or like honor space overdrive will make the animation slow or faster so it's up to you if you want to use that okay I think the arms are too wider part now now it's fine so I can just go to download okay same settings I won't choose anything uh I won't change anything here download and already I chose my folder the incoming fbx folder so it will just directly go there and I will download that now I don't want him to just start walking I want him to start walk and then start uh stop walk so I will search for an image animation which is like start work okay so I will search for some addition yeah this is good so he will start walking okay and then I will also increase the up space here as well download and then I will choose the same folder the Inc the fbx incoming after this I will just go back here and I will choose the end walk maybe I want him to stop walking okay or you can say stopwalk I think stop walk is the better keyword Okay so yeah stop working this is good now he stops yeah that's good a little bit or space okay good select this one download it now I have four animations uh we will see how we can apply uh like one of uh these in this class and then others we will uh learn more in detail in our next class so let's download this one for now here now we are done we have downloaded whatever we want and I will close this one I'll simply go back to my maximum converter go down and as soon you will see here uh we have downloaded downloaded everything and inside the incoming uh fbx folder you can see they are now automatically appearing here that's uh the best way to do that to Black pin everything and if now what I have to do is that I have to just go here click here to convert the animations I will start I will click on it and it will start animating and now they are in the outgoing fpx folder okay that's done so I will close this one for now because I don't need it anymore I will go to the content drawer here I will make a new folder here inside the content and I will call this folder as I will rename it to animations and then I will right click here import game or import to game animations whatever you have to import and now simply I will go to the outgoing see how easy that's uh that this will save your time okay and you can see the converted one will have dot u e dot fbx that's just to indicate that these are converted ones okay so I will select all these open them up and it will ask me which mesh skeleton you want so I will go here and I will choose the meta human base skill okay because they are for the best skeleton that they don't have any facial expression otherwise you can choose facial archive if it is facial uh animation it is not facial animation it's just like the body animation I will choose this and report all and you can see that it is importing and some message it will pop up but don't worry about that just close it and you can see all the animations are here now let's see what do we have here we have all the uh animations that we have downloaded let's see the walking I will double click on the walking and you can see my character is walking but it kind of looks very weird because it is distorted now how we can fix that the reason it is distorted because the animation is based on the many skeleton that we uploaded the mannequin that we uploaded and this is not uh the mannequin it is basically some uh the experiment guide that we made in uh inside the meta human so it's not uh it doesn't suit this uh like metahuman and in Unreal Engine is basically forcing that animation to apply over it now we have to fix that now it's quite easy to fix you can just go to your skeleton tree okay and then here we have to turn on few options and to see what we uh what we can do here is that we can go to the settings here and and click on show retargeting options so we will get all these retargeting options now I will go to the root and set this route I will right click on this root and I will recursively set translation record retargeting to skeleton so the animation that we have downloaded will be applied to the skeleton of our meta human not to the one that we uploaded okay so we will choose this but once you will do that you will notice that the guy is kind of squished and he's walking in his own place the reason is that because of the everything is now uh you know squished to the skeleton so to fix this we have to go to the root and choose the root as animation so that it can move in its own position and the pelvis we have to choose animation scaled okay now he kind of looks like a hobbit or an elf from Lord of the Rings or you know those uh like scary creatures so don't worry about that the reason is that because at this point he's using an old obsolete mesh which is the F net narrow body and by default your meta-humans uses these uh like preview meshes that's why it looks like that so we have to change this preview mesh so I will go to this uh fmat narrow body and I will use the actual mesh which is M tall over body if you remember we created a very tall meta human like body inside a meta human character like the Creator now how to know which body is our body simple way to do is that if you will go to your meta human if you will just uh sorry double click on your meta human okay and then it will open the blueprint go to the viewport and choose the body here now once you will choose the body it will show you what type of body and what is the name of the body it is using the body name is mtol over body so this is the body that we should be using so if I will go back to the walking UE and instead of f f met narrow body which is the default uh Unreal Engine uses I will use the same which is the m tall over body if I will use that this now you will see everything is perfect and uh I have already pressed the assign button here otherwise you will see assigned to the mesh button here so you can press that I don't have it because I already assigned it before so that's why I don't see that button here and you can close this and now everything should be fine in the animation and I have done uh the same thing for all of them so I have taken all of them and I have assigned the same body here now you can see perfectly it is working fine so all your uh animations will also show here as well okay and some pre-made animation that um like matter Unreal Engine offers so what we can do now is that we can create a new level sequence so I will go to the levels here and I will create a new sequence which I have already created just like we created in the last class you have to right click here cinematics level sequence so I already created and I renamed it to dance so if you will go to the dance double click on it I don't have anything I just only have a camera here okay so if I will go to the uh if I will come out of the gaming mode you can see that I have this camera which is actually uh rotating basically okay so you can see the camera is actually rotating around this character so I animated this uh like before like like before so what I will do here is that I will take my meta human here or from here I can drag it here or I can select from here go to plus track option actor to sequencer add BP underscore experiment and as soon you will do that uh the phase control board control now for this class we don't need these because we are using vexamo animation so I will go to the meta human control rig and delete this one from my keyboard delete button select this one and also I will press the delete button now we don't have any control rig because we will use the uh pre-made mexamo animation here so I will go to the body and here is the plus track I will press this plus track I will go to the animation all the animations are here I will add the dancing one so I will just press type here dancing and then you will automatically see it is there so as soon I will click on it you will see the whole animation is appeared now my animation actually is basically a same length of my uh time timeline otherwise if it is smaller just like this you can just make maximize it okay you can increase the timeline from here and you can move this from that part okay now what we can do here is that just play and see how he is dancing he's kind of in the air okay because uh the max ammo uh characters are bit raised so how we can solve this first of all you have different options to do that you can take the floor you can raise the floor which is the simplest way to do that okay now hey s dancing on the floor otherwise what else you can do let me undo and move this floor back to where it belonged so I will go so I will now oops so I will just go to my meta humor here go to the first frame and what I will do here is that let's move this frame back or this floor back to its position I will reset the location of the floor okay and then if you will see here I have this meta human in the air right now you will take the metahuman you will go to the body of the metahuman you will press this plus track and you will go to the transform and assume you will press the transform now you can animate its transformation so I can make a keyframe in the beginning in the first frame and move this down and make sure your auto key is on also otherwise you have to press this button after like you know after animating it so I usually keep this on so that I don't have to keep on making the keyframes manually now it's the same thing but actually it's uh uh like instead of the floor I have moved the meta human so now the uh The Meta human is on the floor and if I will turn on my camera cut here so I can see the whole animation going on in this way so this is uh a very cool way of animating your meta humans okay and you might notice the hair color is changing that is because of the memory and if you render render it out with the high memory with all the control variables which I like console variable which I gave you in the last classes you wouldn't have you won't have this uh issue in the final render because right now we are in the preview mode so uh as we are at the low lods the color changes so don't worry about that and the high quality render if you will do that you will not have this issue so you can see how nicely he's dancing and he got some cool nice moves here and as you have seen the mexamo offers really good library of pre-made like motion capture animations there in the deck class we will learn how we can animate the facial expression and we have two choices live link from the iPhone or audio to audio to face from the Nvidia if you have not subscribed to my channel yet please do it now and don't forget to hit the Bell Icon by the way I have noticed that many of you are watching my videos without subscribing so let's change that subscribe to my channel and be the part of the interactive Community now here's something really important I want to talk about please do not download my videos just watch them online when you download them it messes up my watch time hours and that's a bummer I want to keep creating awesome videos but it's demotivating when I lose out on those stats thanks a bunch for your support you guys rock catch you all in the next video [Music] thank you thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: zinteractive

Views: 564

Keywords: Mixamo integration, animation workflow, character animation, animation simplification, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5.2, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine tutorial 2023, unreal engine tutorial cinematic, unreal engine tutorial animation, unreal engine tutorial series, unreal engine tutorial for beginners, unreal engine 5.3 tutorial, unreal engine 5.3, English, virtual production, unreal engine for filmmakers, how to, language

Id: adq5qaMgh9I

Length: 25min 57sec (1557 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2024