Animation Retargeting In Unreal Engine 5.1 (Tutorial)

hey guys and welcome back to another Unreal Engine 5 tutorial in today's video what we've been going over is how to set up animation retargeting inside of Honor engine 5.1 as the system has changed ever so slightly from my last video on honor version 5. this one now just makes it a lot easier to do a lot quicker and a lot more efficient so I'm going to be going over covering how to do that today so essentially what we're going to do is have this animation you see on screen now go from this character to our own character so I'm just using the base default ue5 mannequin but you can't use any character you want or you can go from the mannequin to this character it works whichever way the process is the exact same for I'm going to show you we'll just have to swap around the targets so you go to the correct skeleton you want which I'll actually show you where to do that so this is only going over and creating today so without further Ado let's just get right into it [Music] so the first thing we want to do is obviously you want to import the skeleton and the animations we want so you see here I have the export skeleton and this hip-hop dancing and I also have my other skeleton which I want to go to which again like I said is just going to be the default ue5 mannequin which we should have here under meshes there it is SK mannequin again that's what we're going over but use any ones you want and this export here I have from mixmo so if you do want some great custom characters and custom animations definitely watch my video on screen now where you can use mix mode to get hundreds of free animations but the first thing we need to do after we've got everything imported is we want to create some ik rigs so I'm just going to right click here go to animation and then go to ik rig and create an ik rig and the one I'm going to start with is just the export so the one the animation is currently on it doesn't matter which order you do this in but that's what I'm going for so let's search for exports and we have it here so you have the export skeletal mesh so make sure to search the name of the mesh not the skeleton so let's select that here and I like to name these IKR for ik rig underscore and then the name of the mesh so for me that is exports so we have IKR export here and we're going to open it up straight away now in here what we want to do is pretty much the same as before but if you've never used it before don't worry what we want to do is we're just going to select the bones we want to add so let's do the spine first so we'll select spine hold shift and then select the final spine which in this case is spine two and you can see here which Bones these are selecting so we have just the spine here then in the bottom right we're going to add a new chain the chain name will be spine and you'll see it's going from spine to spine two so it's going to do this automatically for us which is why this is a lot more efficient and a lot easier to do we'll press OK you can add gold and Bone but I'm not going to do that so we'll just press no goal and you see now it's already done it for us we have spine going from spine to spine two the ik goal I'm not worrying about because I'm not using ik bones but you can obviously set that up if you wanted as well then we'll do the head so we'll go neck to head add chain chain name head so again and then no goal so this is a very simple very repetitive process similar to last time but it just makes it a lot easier for us also I've just noticed actually this has heads top end as a bone in here as well which I should maybe also do as well if I select them yeah I will also add that so the benefit of this is you can still just press the start button and then button here to very quickly change them over and modify them like that it's not a final thing once you've done it you can change it however you want as well so let's go from right shoulder down to right hand and you know actually I will select all the fingers as well add new chain right arm okay no goal and then sometimes it will glitch out and do it twice like this this is just a bug which they might have fixed in 5.1.1 I don't think I've actually downloaded that yet so don't worry if you get this you can press OK no goal it will do it twice or in this case three times or even four it will just keep going as long as it wants and then what you might get is multiple down here as you can see like that all you can do is just delete those I'm not sure why it does it it's just a bug it's just a glitch but again no worries you can just delete them afterwards now let's do the left shoulder all the way down to the left and Pinky four and you chain left arm again one thing I really like about this is it automatically knows what to name it as well as well as obviously doing the starboard and then bone it just makes it a lot quicker because that's one thing I didn't like about the old system was it was just really slow to do now I wonder if I just press the X here that will then mean we don't have to delete and afterwards it will just add the one so that's a better way of doing it then let's do the legs so add new chain right leg no go and then let's do the left leg as well okay no goal then the final thing I'm going to do in here once we've added all of these in is I'm going to right click on the hips and set retarget root as you just want to make sure the root of this is the hips now it is already anyway but we want to make sure it's the retarget route as well so then we set up the next skeleton we can make sure they match to make sure the animations retarget perfectly so let's save that and we can minimize this as that's all we need to do for it we can now start setting up the ik rig for the other skeleton so I'm going to go to control space right click animation ik rig ik rig then again this is the other one I want to use so I'm going to search for skm money and actually I want to go to Quinn sorry so skm Quinn here I'm gonna again name this IKR underscore Quinn I'm going to open this up straight away once it has been created so let's open this up and it's just the exact same process we just did before so again you can see we have all these chains here we just want to add in the same chains but on the other character so it's very very simple and easy to do so let's go from spine to spine add new chain chain name spine spine one spine five okay no go simple as that it's done for us then neck to head well I just select the wrong one sorry so neck down to head add new chain okay no goal once you've done a couple times and once you really understand it it's actually very very easy and simplistic to do and to understand so let's go all the way down to here add new chain left arm and again with this you can also see what bones are actually selected so you can see if you're doing the right ones or not so as that no goal and against doing the same thing I noticed that only ever normally messes up when you're doing the arms again I'm not too sure why it happens but it's no worry we can just make sure we ignore it like this it's doing it a lot for this one for some reason so let's just get rid of all of these hopefully this is something they have already fixed or they fix soon but we now have left arm like so it doesn't mess anything up as long as you just make sure to remove them or not add them like I've been doing here I just added spines as well by accident so let's go back to clavicle R scroll down make sure you're reading these so you select them properly down to cover Peg R like so add new chain right arm no goal and then we'll just remove all these extra ones they're annoyingly there but no worries at all we'll just get rid of these make sure we don't add them in there we are now let's go down to the legs so thigh are all the way down to thigh forward walk R add new chain right leg and you don't need to select all of these bones you can just choose which ones you do want to do obviously the more you add the better it would look but sometimes it might be better to do the fingers all individually so at the moment I'm doing the arm going all the way down to the fingers same with the feet down to the toes you might want to do just the arm to hand and then with the fingers all individually so index finger thumb all that stuff all individually add new chain left leg now go easy as this and again the final thing we need to make sure we do in here is once all of these are gone is we need to make sure we set the retarget route as well so go all the way up and now you see the root of this one is a bone called root but of our export it's not it's the hips so we want to make sure they match so we're going to go to the pelvis which is the hips right click and set retarget root so you notice the root is different but they're going to be the same between the two which is why we do that so that when we are retargeting it they're using the same root to make it look a lot better but you can see we have the same chain mappings down here they have slightly different names but you don't need to worry about that if they had the same name they would match up perfectly but if they don't have the same name we can just do it manually and actually I think they do have the same name they're just in a different order which is perfectly fine so the final thing we need to do now is set up our ik retargeter so we've set up ik rigs now we need the retargeter so let's go to control space right click go to animation go to ik rig and create the ik retargeter and as you can see pick ik rig to copy animation from so this is going from two so I want to take it from the export so I'm going to pick IKR export here then I'm going to name this IKR for ik rig retargeter you don't have to use my naming conventions these are just ones which I like and then I'm going to do underscore export so I know it is the retargeter going from the Xbox so I'm going to open that up straight away and you can see we firstly we're zoomed in on its feet so we'll zoom out but this again looks slightly different from 5.0 but if you've never used that don't worry so again you can see we now have this skeleton we're going from in the top right we can see the source ik rig so we can obviously change that as well if we wanted but the one we're going to change is the target ik rig assets so that wants to go to the IKR and then we'll scroll down to Quinn so we have IKR Quinn here now thirsty on top of each other which we don't want so we'll just move the target mesh offset slightly over to the right like so let's put them 250 like that and I'll just move my camera over and you can also change the scale as well if you want to but for me since they're the same size it's perfectly fine now one thing you might notice is the exports is in a t-pose and Quinn is in an A Pose that does actually make a difference we want to make sure they are in the same pose so in the top left you can see current retarget pose what I'm going to do is press edit mode and then if we were to select a bone for example Cloud call L we can then move this into the position which we want like so that's a wrong one sorry uh so we'll move this up this can be a little bit finicky but you'll notice that's kind of not doing what we want so let's not select cloudfl let's select upper arm L and then we'll rotate it into position this again can be a little bit finicky to get the correct one selected sometimes but that's a lot better so we'll rotate it up and I've noticed I've rotated that up 60 degrees I'm keeping up that so I can do the other one the same as well we notice that looks pretty good between the two characters so let's then go to upper arm R and we'll do the same thing we'll rotate it up 60 degrees so it's in the same position like this then if we press edit mode again will we take it out and this is now the pose we have so they are now both in a t-pose that is perfect in the bottom right if we go to chain mappings you'll notice these are already done for us because they have the same name if they have different names or they're not been done correctly just press the source chain and change it to the correct one for you they're going to be spine spine neck head left arm left arm right arm right arm right leg right leg left leg left leg so neck and head don't have the same name but Unreal Engine kind of knows what it is you want to do so it is automatically done it and I think it's not only taken the name but also the data of these bones in there as well so just do it automatically for you but again you can change it if need to be so then in the bottom right we'll go to the asset browser and double click an animation we want and you can see now perfectly we have this animation retargeted from the export to Quinn and this looks absolutely perfect this has worked really really well now if it's not looking perfect for you just make sure to double check the retarget route is the same and that you have done all the bones properly as well so you might need to do more bones to make it look of higher quality or you might need to do different bones less bones whatever but just mess about with it and make sure it is all perfect but you can see I have perfectly now got this animation from Xbox to Quinn also one thing which does affect how this looks is if they have very different skeletal structures it's obviously not going to look perfect so because these are very very similar they're both humanoids this is going to work very well for me but once we've done that we can select the animation we want to export and then go up and Export selected animations and you can put this wherever you want and rename it I'm just going to go into content and press export then if we minimize this close that here we can drag this on stage as well to be next to this other one we have here so let me actually just move these about and I'll get back to you once I've got these in position I want them in so I think that'll be it for this video on animation retargeting in Unreal Engine 5.1 as you can see on screen now we've taken an animation from a skeletal mesh and put it onto a different skeleton so I've got a maximum animation with a mix my character gone on to the Unreal Engine 5 default mannequin skeletal mesh and again it looks absolutely perfect it works amazingly and obviously I've used a dancing animation but this can be used for anything you want so just idle running walking jumping attacking shooting whatever it is you want I've just used dance because it's obviously more visual is showing it off a lot better and you can see all the individual bones moving so I've chosen animation which moves every single bone to really show it off but thank you so much for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you found it helpful and if you did please do make sure to like And subscribe down below as it's the best way to support me in the channel so thanks so much for watching and I'll see in the next one [Music]

Channel: Matt Aspland

Views: 12,754

Keywords: unreal engine, tutorial, ue5 tutorial, how to, ue5, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, ik, rig, retarget, blueprint, blueprints, new, how to use, ue5 animation retargeting, ue5 anim retargeting, animation retargeting, anim, animation, animations, anims, retargetting, change, retarget anim assets, skelenton, mesh, mixamo, characters, character, bone, bones, t-pose, y-pose, pose, t pose, y pose, skeletal, manager, humanoid, custom, from, to, another, re-targeting, bone chain, chain, chains, bone chains, 5.1

Id: DnHxgXTi0aw

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2023