>>Amanda: Hey, all, welcome
to this week's Unreal Engine News
and Community Spotlight. Witnessing the success
of 3Lateral and Cubic Motion motivated
Korea-based creative studio, Giantstep, to create
a digital human of their own. In our write-up,
discover how Giantstep used real-time rendering,
machine learning, and Unreal Engine to introduce
to the world to their new, photorealistic
digital human, Vincent. Meet him for yourself
on our blog. On the heels of Samurai
Shodown's successful launch
to PS4 and Xbox, and with even more platforms
on the way, we spoke with art
and game director Nobuyuki Kuroki to see how SNK
crafted a fighting game that not only appeals
to hardcore enthusiasts, but also feels modern
and accessible to newcomers. In our discussion,
Kuroki reflects on the pressures of making a new addition to the long-running
Samurai Shodown franchise, how they leverage
deep learning for their AI, and the process of translating
their classic 2D characters for a beautiful,
stylized 3D world. It's time for the next
Twinmotion Community challenge. Twinmotion is looking for
your best autumn-related video created in Twinmotion.
With $500 up for grabs, head over to our blog
to get full details on how to submit
your entry by November 13th, based on the best
modern building in fall. Good luck! To see how the fledgling
studio Artplay was able to create
a critical success with Bloodstained: Ritual
of the Night, we interviewed prominent
Castlevania producer, Koji Igarashi, who talks about
what it has been like developing a new IP as an indie studio,
with more finite resources. Igarashi also elaborates
on design elements, how they balanced fair
gameplay with challenge, and how community feedback
impacted their visual design leading up to launch. Jumping over to our top
weekly Karma earners, many, many thanks
to Crisp Clover, ClockworkOcean, ThompsonN13, Adnoh, Unearthlywhales,
chrudimer, AyanMiru, IndieGameCove, Shadowriver,
and Firefly74. These rock stars are helping
others out on AnswerHub. Answer questions there, and you, too,
could see your name up here. First up for our Spotlights
this week is the short film, Sentinel, created by
a small team of students from DigiPen
Institute of Technology. In it, a lone warrior faces off
against a mechanical alien ring, which threatens her world. Here we have Project Haven, a tactical turn-based RPG
in development by a team of two, based in Portugal.
As commander of the Steel Dragons,
control squadrons of mercenaries to combat your enemies and take down the corrupt
government of Haven City. And last up is Interactivity:
The Interactive Experience. In their own words,
"Interactivity is a short, kind of creepy,
meta-narrative walking sim." It started as a UE4 Jam game
back in January 2015, and is now available on Steam. Thanks for joining us.
We'll see you all next week! >>Victor: Hey, everyone, and welcome
to the Unreal Engine Livestream. I'm your host,
Victor Brodin. And with me today,
I have Matt Workman, the developer of Cine Tracer. >> Matt: That is how you say it.
It's not "Cine Tracker," it's Cine Tracer.
You nailed it. >>Victor: Have you seen Tracker? >>Matt: I get all the
variations. Tracker is the most one --
I think "tracer" is not, like, a word that people
are used to saying, so Tracker is the next closest. >>Victor: Would you mind telling
us a little bit about Cine Tracer? What it is,
and the history behind it? >>Matt: Yeah, so Cine Tracer is, technically,
an Unreal Engine game. But I've tried to take the fun
aspects of video games, and apply that to professional
filmmaking previs tools. So in the film industry,
they like to plan shoots beforehand in 3D these days, but typically that is happening
in more complicated programs, like Maya. So my idea was to take that kind
of previs workflow out of DCCs and into an actual video game. And Fortnite Creative
and Minecraft kind of proved that you could really do
some significant building. So I moved it into sort of
building in Unreal Engine, and it's kind of like Fortnite
Creative, but for filmmakers. And we have cameras and Actors, and right now
it's a creative mode. And for the last month, I've been working on making it
into an actual video game, and has an educational
component to it. >>Victor: Alright. So there will be some
sort of interactive learning, sort of how to set up shoots,
I guess? >>Matt: Exactly. Yeah. >>Victor: I saw some cool
tweets, where you were playing around
with ray tracing as well and making it look very,
very, very good. It's kind of cool to see that, and get that just as a binary
that you can play around with. >>Matt: Yeah, and that's
all Unreal Engine. I just turn on the ray
tracing switch, but yeah, I think we are
a good use case where we are not looking for 60 frames per second
all the time, necessarily, so we can turn
on the shadows, turn on the reflections. And for us, we are mostly just
looking to take a screenshot and then bring that on set,
and be, like, this is what we are kind of
looking to make it look like. So we are a great use case
to turn on the ray tracing, even on the -- I think it's
early access, though. It's not technically, like,
a shipping feature. >>Victor: Correct, yeah.
>>Matt: But we ship it. That is okay for us, though.
We take advantage of it. And the cinematographers
that use it, we really care
about the lighting. And the ray tracing just makes
the lighting way more realistic. So it's really great timing. >>Victor: How long have you been
working on the project? >>Matt: I think it has been
about a year and a half, something like that. >> Victor: Okay. >> Matt: Started knowing zero
Unreal Engine. A yeah and a half ago, I did
not even know what an Actor was, I did not know anything. >>Victor: Yesterday and today,
we've just been chatting. It seems that your vocabulary
is definitely the vocabulary of a game developer,
which is interesting, because your background
is in film and sort of directing, right? >>Matt: Yeah, I was a commercial
cinematographer, and music video cinematographer for about 10 years
in New York City. Though early college, I did go
to school for computer science. So I have a little bit
of C++ knowledge. But I never did
it professionally. And I sure definitely
forgot all of it. So coming back
into Unreal Engine, I knew it a little bit, but it was pretty fresh,
just learning it all over again. >>Victor: That is awesome.
So today though, we are here to talk about your Blender
to Unreal Engine workflow. Because you moved from other
DCC tools, like Maya, right? That is what you used
to work with. I guess within the film
industry as well, previously. Then you switched to Blender. >>Matt: Yep.
>>Victor: What was the reason? >>Matt: The real reason is,
I was in LA, filming a project that
we might see a clip of soon. And my Maya subscription lapsed.
So at that point, I was, like, you know, I don't think I'm
going to keep going with this. It was, like, I keep seeing
so much stuff about Blender 2.8. I had used
the beta 2.8 a little bit. I just kept seeing more
and more content around it, and developers
being excited about it. I was, like, I think it's time
to really just try Blender, and try to make it
work completely. So literally, when I was in LA,
when I came back, I decided I was, like, you know,
I'm in the phase of my game where I'm stripping out
all the Marketplace assets, and I'm rebuilding
everything myself. I was, like, I'm going
to do this all in Blender. And there was
another developer I know who makes a game
called Industria, which I can show later.
He has been using Blender, and I've been watching
his live streams on Twitch, and he is getting
everything done. You know,
great-looking Meshes, UVing everything,
the Skeletal Meshes, it was all working out for him. I was, like,
if it's working for him, then I think it's time
to give it a try. And for the last month,
I've been doing it every day, pretty much,
and working out the workflow. And it's perfect. It works
perfectly for my workflow now. I'm just excited to see
all the developers who were contributing
source code to this, and updates to it. It's pretty exciting to see.
I think after in no time at all, like a year or two,
we are going to see just incredible things
coming from it. And the integration with Unreal,
I can just imagine, is going to get better
and better. >>Victor: Yeah, Blender 2.8 -- and for those of you
who don't know, Blender is an open source
DCC tool. There is modeling,
texturing, UVing, even sculpting, I believe. >>Matt: Oh yeah,
sculpting is great. It's amazing. >>Victor: And it's easy,
small binary download. >>Matt: Yeah, it's performant.
It runs great on Mac and PC, and is way more performant
than my game right now. You can just leave it on, and it has a built-in
renderer -- it has so much. I think they really got
the benefit of looking at what
the modern 3D ecosystem is, whereas older programs, you know,
they were built a long time ago. And a code basis design for things
before there was ZBrush, before there was
Substance Painter, you know? And so Blender, I think,
has kind of a fresh start on making what a modern 3D DCC
should be like, so they have sculpting in it, and they know how
that pipeline should look. And they have so many things
built into it that the older DCCs, they did
not exist back then, you know? This is like a re-thinking
of how 3D should be. And 2.8 really nailed it. >>Victor: It's a pretty
powerful combination. You know, Unreal Engine
is free to use, Blender is completely
open source. If you have a PC and you would like to get
started with game development, you can ship an entire game
of using just these two free
and very accessible tools. >>Matt: Yeah, it's
an incredible time. I think back in high school,
it is, like, eh, I want to make a 3D anything. Even if it was just
a still picture. Like, back then I wanted
to make a short film, like a game cinematic. It's so expensive
to get the software. You know, I think they had,
like -- it was, like, Discreet 3DS Max. I think it was the first
software I bought, big blue box. I think it was pretty expensive. My parents were
pretty supportive, so I got it. Hardware was expensive. And I don't think --
there were not game engines that were open source back then,
I don't believe. But then you fast forward
to today, and, like, Blender has everything
that you need, completely free. There is hundreds and hundreds, or I think
more like thousands of hours on YouTube for tutorials,
and the same with Unreal Engine. So they are both free, and you
can just get right into it. You would have
to get hardware, right? But it's a great time.
And it's like one of the things that keeps me going right now
for my project is, like, I want to make things
that kind of inspire people to create things digitally.
You know make it easier. Cine Tracer, I'm trying
to make it easier for someone to just make a little cinematic,
something short. Then bigger picture, you know, me streaming Blender
and Unreal Engine, that is like
a more advanced tool. But it's, like,
you can build Fortnite with it. You can build -- you pretty much
could, at this point, I think. So I'm excited to share Blender
and Unreal Engine, and show how I use it. It's not necessarily
the endorsed Epic way, but it works for me,
and I'm getting results. And the content I've made
with it this month, with Blender and Unreal, I'm shipping in an update
on a live game on Steam, like, next month.
It's, like, it's for real. >>Victor: Yeah. Cine Tracer
is available on Steam. We should probably drop a link
in Chat at some point. If you want to go check in out, there is plenty of content
on YouTube as well. Do you have -- do you livestream
your development frequently? >>Matt: Yeah. When I first
started doing game development, I was streaming on Twitch,
every single day, mostly because I did not know
Unreal Engine at all. People would come on
who knew a lot more, and they would tell me
how to do things. They would walk me through. I remember the day someone was,
like, "You should stop using arrays.
You should use data tables." I was, like,
I don't know what that is. Literally,
I'm the one streaming, and they were walking me
through data tables. Now I use data tables,
and it's lovely. >>Victor: Thanks to the community,
that is what happens. I know myself, it's fun to jump on and see someone work,
see what they do well. Not wanting to be
a back seat developer, but sometimes it's just, like,
hey, did you know about this? You know, very similar
to what we do here sometimes. >>Matt: Yeah,
it was really helpful. Then, you know, from a marketing
point of view, we had some -- like, my alpha users
were on there. And we would just go through
bugs together, kind of live. Now I've moved
back to YouTube, so I stream on YouTube. Which is a little bit awkward, it's not exactly
the Twitch community, as far as game development.
But I like YouTube now, because my YouTube channel
is much bigger, and the VODs just are nicer.
Like as a developer now, I will stream for four hours
or something like that. And YouTube keeps the VODs
there forever, and I put them in a playlist, and I can go back
and watch them. I will watch myself building
the Blueprints, 3D modeling. It's kind of like if you are
a professional gamer where you can watch
your replays, I think about it the same way.
Like, I want to watch -- I want to see, like,
how did I 3D model this? Like, how did I do this?
I like to watch it back. I think even within
the last month -- you can go to my YouTube channel
and look at the progress. I'm much better at Blender, it's a much
more seamless process. So I like personally
being able to go back and watch what I was doing. >>Victor: Cool.
Why don't we dig into it and see how you actually
work with it? >>Matt: Sounds good.
>>Victor: Yeah, yeah. >>Matt: Was there a video
you wanted to show first? >>Victor: Oh, right, we were
talking about -- yeah, yeah. Let's go ahead and play it. So a little preface
for the video, this is a project you did with
Epic a couple of months ago, specifically for SIGGRAPH,
right? >>Matt: Yep.
>>Victor: Let's watch the video. I think it's
pretty self-explanatory, and then we can chat
a little bit about it. >>Matt: Sounds good. [VIDEO PLAYS] >> Okay, let's cut and reset. >> No matter
what the project is, the creatives always want to see
the closest representation to the final product as early on
in the creative process. >> When I first walked on
the set and the wall was up, and we started to look
through the camera, it really started to feel like I was just filming
in the actual location. >> We can track a camera's
position in space in real-time, and render its perspective, so that we can
compellingly convince a camera that something else
is happening in front of it that really is not there. >> The thing to keep in mind
is that the 3D world that you see on the wall
is also a 3D scene that you can manipulate
in Unreal Engine. So this gives the filmmakers
full flexibility to make any change
they want to the scene, live. >> So it's really exciting
to see that we can use the real-time lighting to not only change
the environment virtually, but also have it affect
the on-set lighting as well. This opens up kind of like a
virtual playground to shoot in. >> We have tried to expand
the Engine to be a very
collaborative platform, so the director of photography,
the director -- they can all go into the scene and make modifications
as they wish, as opposed to waiting
for months and months. >> In this new frontier
of virtual production, the filmmaker is more grounded
into the scene that they are shooting, into the story
they are trying to tell. >> Because you can interactively
change the world, it brings all of
those departments together, because each one of them
has a role in how this world is portrayed, at some point
along in the production. >> It has been my dream
to get computer graphics to the point
that they are totally photo-real and I love video games, and movies, all my life. And this is bringing
the best of them together. [BACK TO LIVESTREAM] >>Victor: Alright. Was that fun? >>Matt: It was fun.
That was a first for me. I had actually done
a smaller version of shooting live action
against LED walls, but that was a very,
very big one, so that was a lot of fun. >>Victor: Cool.
Perhaps we can get back and talk a little bit more
about it later. I think it's time that we get
to the meat of the stream. >>Matt: Right. People want
to see Blender? >>Victor: Yes, they
do want to see Blender. >>Matt: Is that what we are here for?
We want to see Blender. >>Victor: Yep.
>>Matt: I could guess. Let's do Blender. >>Victor: Alright.
>>Matt: Cool. So this is a stock Unreal Engine
third person Blueprint. If you have never opened it,
definitely go open it. This comes stock, right here. You get the mannequin,
you can run around. This is actually
how I started Cine Tracer. Cine Tracer
is literally this project, and then I kept adding to it, and
adding to it, and adding to it. So one of the first things
that is really cool to do is, change the animations
on the mannequin, right? That is one of the first things.
You are, like, okay, he runs. You know, how can I make it so that
he does something else, right? Can I make this mannequin
do something else using Blender? And the answer is yes. So that is what
we are going to do first. We are going to make
this animation, or we are going to make
the mannequin do something, that if you have seen
the thumbnail, you might know -- You might know what is going on. So that is the goal,
the big picture. Okay, we are going
to jump into Blender. We want to generate an animation
for this mannequin that we make ourselves. And for me, in Cine Tracer,
I have my Character pull up, like, a view finder, or a light meter,
an action like that; something custom that we can't
get off the Marketplace. So a lot of people
have probably tried, if you right now, if you take the Skeletal Mesh
of the mannequin, which is around here somewhere,
I think that is him. If you export this out
and you bring it into Blender, it's technically possible
to do that workflow and get it back in.
But it's not the best. So the way I personally do it,
I will show that right now. We are going to hop into Blender
here, and this is stock Blender. >>Victor: 2.8 right?
>>Matt: 2.8, yep. Not the --
the betas are 2.8 1 and 2. They are betas, I think, still. Let's see if I can
pull this tab over nicely. Oh, it got kind of stuck.
It's coming. It's coming. So I found this plugin
rather recently. It's made by Jim Kroovy here. And let me get this other window
over like this -- this is aptly named
Mr Mannequin Tools - 1.0. And it's great,
you can download it for free, or you can help support
and you can put in your price. That is something that people
do on Gumroad, for sure. So I've been testing this,
and it works incredibly well. And we are going
to show it right now. So thank you to Jim Kroovy
for making this, and sharing this
to the community -- it's really good.
I'm just going to dock these tabs over here,
real quick. So we are in stock Blender,
and I come from Maya, first and foremost,
for game development. So it took me a month
to switch over, but I will try to keep kind of
a Maya-centric mind when we are talking
about this stuff, if you are new to Blender here. So what you are going
to need to do is, you are going to need to go to Preferences here --
it's off-screen -- and we are going to go
to Add-Ons, which are plugins, essentially.
You download that zip file, and you basically click Install,
and you find that zip file, it installs it,
it's really easy. There is no other setup
than that. And once you have Mr. Mannequin, I'm going to first clear
the scene out. I'm going to hit
A, which selects everything, and then X to delete it. Going to hit N,
which brings out our toolbox. And this is, I think, in general where the add-ons go,
is right here. So this is, by far,
the fastest workflow I've seen for getting a mannequin in that
is rigged, that you can animate, and goes directly back
into the Engine. So we are going to start
by doing Load Rig here. We'll zoom in.
This is the rig for it, and then we are going to load
a mannequin Mesh here, like that.
And we are done. That is it. Trust me, that is a breath
of fresh air, that is very fast. >>Victor: Yeah, it was
pretty impressive, because I've tried myself
before the export/import workflow,
and there was a lot more manual work
than I was willing to do to get the bone orientations
to be the proper -- >>Matt: Oh man, yeah.
Even if there is another rig that is out there --
there are several. There are other ways
of doing this, but you have to still
import them as an FBX,
and that can go wrong. This is handled for you,
it's really nice. I think there is a 1.1 update
coming out soon, if you want to switch out
the custom Mesh, and that sort of stuff.
But we are going to kind of stick
to some high-level stuff here. So I will show you how rigs
work in Blender. I'm not an expert, but I'm using
this current workflow here. We are going to select
the actual rig itself. And we are going to switch
over here into Pose Mode, right? If you look really quickly,
Edit mode is where you would go if you wanted to change
how the bones were set up, like your default pose --
don't do that, unless you really like
a tech artist, in Blender don't do that. Go to Pose Mode here, and now we
have your typical IK controls. These are really good.
I like these a lot. For a fresh Blender,
we have to do Gizmos, because by default, Gizmos do
not really show up, necessarily. So you have to turn
on these two here. And this is your typical move,
rotate and scale -- we are not going to be
scaling anything right now, but I'm going to start
to make a pose here. It's a dab.
I've been told that is okay, this is an okay thing to do.
I'm using Global Move, so I'm just going to start
putting together a pose, and just showing
how this rig works. That is how elbows work. That is a good elbow
right there. >>Victor: Yeah.
>>Matt: That is really good. So we are just going
to take the elbow target -- no big deal.
No need to freak out. I saw you guys freaking out,
so it's all good. The wrist a little broken here. Again, in there we are
going to rotate it. I'm not going to pose here. I'm not going to sit here
and pose for too long, but we do have to get
a proper looking dab here. This is technically
a right-hand dab. This is a right-hand dab,
I believe, is what is going on. >>Victor: I'm not a pro. >>Matt: That is what
the kids call it. That is what I have heard.
So with just this rig here, if you have tried to rig
the mannequin before yourself, you can actually see -- I'm going to switch
into Local -- you can actually see, let me get
in real close on here. There is a lot going on. But if you rotate the wrist,
you actually see that he has the twist bone
for the wrist setup. I'm twisting
this kind of awkwardly. But the wrist
is actually twisting. And that you have
to set up yourself. Like, the twist bone is there,
it's skinned, but you have to rig it. So he has already
done that for you. It works really well. If you don't twist
the bone like that and you just spin the hand
without doing the twist bone, the hand just, like, rips off. It looks like it's -- >>Victor: It's like
more of a doll part, right? >>Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So Epic gives you,
you know, a proper Skeleton, but you have to rig it.
And it's a lot of work. So this rig does
all that for you. So here is the making
of a fine dab. I think
this is going well so far. I'm going to go
to the other hand. People do it differently,
there are different ways to go about it.
Some people keep their hand low, we are going to go
for a high one, for the counter hand, like that.
So same thing with this wrist. We are just going to do a little
more tweaking on this pose, and then we are going to
bring this into Unreal Engine. And there are all sorts of controls
on this that are pretty clever. Some of them
I've never seen before. But there is a lot of
volume preservation going on, specifically near the thighs
and the shoulders, there are a lot of ways
to control this. So this is like
a pretty professional rig. And from how I've been
testing it is completely
animation-ready, too. We are just going to
bring out a pose. But you can definitely
animate it as well, and I will be animating it later
for my project. So something like this,
it's feeling okay. And we are just going to bring
the head down just a little bit, go for a little nod
and a little turn into the DAB. We are going to turn into it,
this is feeling good. Okay. And you don't typically rotate
this one too much; you can. It's going to be a little
bit awkward on the chest. But he has got
some spine controls here. So there it is. This is lovely.
We have done fine work. So I'm using Blender at 1080p,
so it's a little squished, the UI. So to key this now, to save it,
we are going to hit A, and that selects
all of the controls, and a right-click,
Insert Keyframe, Location Rotation Scale. You could probably just have
done Location and Rotation, but I will do the whole thing. So we've got
one big old keyframe here, and there is our pose. So if you have used
any other IK rigs, this is
production-quality, I think. This works
perfectly well for me. So, the process of getting this
out is a little bit different than your standard export, which we could talk more
in detail about it. You want to use the way that
he has designed the export -- there is a lot of settings
to manage with Unreal Engine to Blender.
This one does it for you. With the mannequin
it's fairly complicated, so this really just makes it
very click and simple. We'll go over making
our own custom Skeleton, and I will show you
more of the actual settings too. But if you are specifically
looking for mannequin stuff, this is the easiest one
I've found so far. So real quick here --
I'm not sure if his handles it. We want to change the frames
per second to 30. So Blender is defaulting
to film, 24 frames per second --
I want to change that to 30. I believe that that has
to happen for his plugin; I'm not sure
if it converts it by itself. But so we have keyframed
this pose here, and within this plugin here,
this add-on in the Mr. Mannequin Tools, we want to do Export Mesh,
and Export Animations. And we are just going to set up
these folders here. So I have a folder already made,
I have one for Meshes. This is if you are going
to export the FBX, and one for the animations, which I will go over here,
Anims. There it is.
I believe -- I was messing
with this earlier -- you have to click on Start
and End Keyframes -- that is what was helping me
get this actually out. So with that -- fingers crossed
-- we Export to FBX. Let me just double check
in the File Browser that that actually came out;
I believe it will. Off-screen -- it did not.
So hold on one second. Let's see here --
I did that, we keyframed it. I'm in Object -- click. Export Meshes -- we are not
technically exporting this Mesh. The animations --
this should go there. Apply Modifiers. Oh, you know what
I'm going to do? I'm going to save this file. >>Victor: That is a good idea.
>>Matt: I think that was it. Yeah, I think
it wants to be saved. So I believe this is
my Blender folder here, so we have
a little Blender folder. I will just overwrite this one. That might be it, it might need
to be saved for this to actually export.
There it is. >>Victor: There we go.
>>Matt: Excellent. Yeah, so save your Blender files
in general, decent practice. So the name of that comes
in a little bit long, but you can just change it
if you want, here. So now we are back
in Unreal Engine, and we are going to apply
that animation we made to this mannequin. So it's a little crunched,
the Content Viewer, so I'm going to try to find
all this stuff. Is this a Skeletal Mesh
right here, right? This guy, I guess
we'll drag him out. So we are going to import
that animation; there is an Animation
folder here. So we are going to make
one of these here. We are going to Import, and this
is that folder, Blender Anims. Definitely go ahead and rename
that; for me,
I'm just going to leave it. That is like a stock name,
you would change it to whatever makes sense
for your project. And we are going to apply it directly to the UE4
Mannequin Skeleton. There is a lot of workflows
where you bring in your own Skeleton, and you retarget --
those are pretty easy, but there are a lot of places
that go wrong. This, you just apply it right
to the Skeleton really easy. None of this --
don't change anything. Keep it all stock. And we are going to import --
ooh, look at that! We have no errors!
[APPLAUDS] Like, if you have
never done this before, you are probably like, oh, it's probably
how it's supposed to work. But if you have done
this before, and you have gone through
the alternate ways, you could spend hours just trying to tweak
all the settings, and trying to get it right.
This one, with the plugin, right in there,
like how it's supposed to, how you would hope
it would always work. So we have this animation
in here, and a quick way of testing is,
taking this Skeletal Mesh here, and we are going to switch it to
just using an Animation Asset. We'll just drag it in there.
Oh, my goodness. Lovely! We'll go inspect it
really quickly. There it is. >>Victor: There he is. >>Matt: The mannequin,
doing the thing, deep, deep dab going on.
So that is incredible. And I've been messing around
with the Skeletons for quite a bit,
and the mannequins. There are other Projects
out there; Rigify is good. It's more of
an art-style plugin. So you have to kind of know how to set up Skeletons,
a little bit. It will generate
the rig for you, but this is, like,
the best one-click, really simple workflow. And for me as a solo Dev --
that is what I want. I want this to happen quickly. I don't want to have
to get into the tech, if I don't have to. So this allows me to work
pretty high-level, make a pose, make an animation,
right onto the mannequin. And my project
uses the mannequin. >>Victor: This is a way
that you can, for example, make animations
for the Paragon Characters, or pretty much any of the Characters
on the Marketplace, right? >>Matt: Yep. >>Victor: Because they are
all using the same Skeleton. >>Matt: Yep.
So for me, I use the -- it's ALS,
I'm trying to remember, it's Advanced
Locomotion System? >>Victor: I think so. >>Matt: I don't use the actual
Blueprint, because it's pretty heavy.
I'm sure it's performant, but I just take
the animations from it. There are a lot of walks,
you know, crouch walk, normal walk, and a run.
They are really nice eight-axis, because I do, like,
a strafing game. And I take those,
and I use the feet for the lower body animations,
for walking around. But then I will mix in my custom
animations for the upper body. So I will do
that really quickly here, because it's going to be fun. Then we'll jump back
into Blender and start to work through
kind of making props. Then making our own Skeleton. We are going to kind of dress
up this a little bit here. But what I will show you real quick is
just a general workflow for -- oh, that is not the Blueprint,
we want this Blueprint. It's just a general workflow
to mix Marketplace assets, or the default
Blueprint animations, with your custom one here.
This is something that -- if this was the first thing
you did in Unreal Engine, it's pretty fun. So I'm going to try to jump
into this Blueprint, open the Editor, and I need to go to --
we'll go to this one. We'll click
on the Skeletal Mesh, it's an itty bitty sidebar
in there. Let's find the Animation
Blueprint here -- there it is. So we are going to lace
in that dab into this game so it actually works. So to start, we are going to
have a variable on this third person Character,
and we are going to call it -- oh, I added a graph.
Graphs are cool, too. But I meant to add this.
We are going to call it, isDab?
Unreal Engine is the only place where I will put a question mark
in the variable, and it works out.
It's cool, I like having them. >>Victor: I'm sure there are
some programmers in Chat who would have something
to say about it. >>Matt: Hey,
it's going to compile. I'm shipping a game --
>>Victor: It will. >>Matt: I'm shipping a game with
question marks in the variables. Okay, so we are going to do,
what is it, Event, Mouse Left-Click, I think? Oh, there it is.
Mouse Button. Mouse Button. And this is
standard programming, the is dab variable setup here. So when we press down
the left mouse button, we will be dabbing,
it will be true. When we release,
we will not not be dabbing. >>Victor: Jim actually --
he is in Chat right now, the developer of the plugin, and he said that update
1.1 goes live tonight. >>Matt: Ooh, excellent! >>Victor: "It can import
mannequin animations to the rig for editing." >>Matt: Ooh, that sounds good.
It's the one. It's the one. I told -- we will not talk
about the -- anyway, yeah. That is -- it's really good. I think everyone should go get
that right now and support it. So we've set up the dab here.
I left-click, and we are dab. Now I'm going to go
to this Animation Blueprint, and we are going to go get
that variable out of here. And Victor was showing me
some hacks, some tricks. We are going to cast
to the third person Character -- should I make it pure?
Should we go pure here? >>Victor: No, let's do it --
>>Matt: No? >>Victor: Let's do it the way
you have done it. We can talk about the pure
a little bit. I have before. >>Matt: My way -- I don't know
if my way is the right way. But it's working.
It's working for me. >>Victor: It depends. So --
we were talking for pure for casts --
you have to be 110 percent sure that that will never return
a null pointer, and not using the pure prevents
that error from ever happening. >>Matt: I think that answers it,
because I'm not 110 percent sure about anything.
Especially casting. >>Victor: So then leave the cast
the way it is. But for those of you
who are curious, and like to clean up
your Blueprints, and maybe you are
110 percent sure, you can right-click the cast
node and convert it to pure. >>Matt: In this project,
I'm pretty sure that this is
what we are casting to. >>Victor: It will. >>Matt: But in general, yeah. So high-level,
we are just trying to -- we are in
the Animation Blueprint, and we are getting the pawn
that owns this Blueprint. Just making sure that it's
the third-person Character, and because we are sure,
that third-person Character, because we added
the variable dab, we can find out
if it's dabbing enough. So we are going to drop
a quick branch here. Promise this is not
a long tutorial, as far as setting this up.
We'll get back into Blender. So now the Animation Blueprint
knows if we are dabbing or not. And we are going to add another
variable here called Dabness. And I'm going to make it
a float, which we'll see
why in a second. Like that.
Saving. And we are going to
drag these out, and so if our Character
is dabbing, we are going to set
Dabness to 1. And if not,
we are going to set it to 0. You can also use the Select, but I'm always a little
bit clumsy with Select node. But this is kind of
a simpler way for me, at least to debug later. So now the Blueprint knows
if we are dabbing or not. And we are going
to simply take -- if you have never been in here, this basically allows you
to have the legs move and jump, and it handles those animations
for the whole body. And I will have to
get back into this, right? And what we are going to do is, we are going to intercept
that animation here, and we are going to just layer
our animation over it. So that is a layered blend
for bone here, like that. Throw that in there. We are going to find ours again.
We named it kind of crazy. So the animation we brought in
is named kind of odd; it should be called, like, UE4 Mannequin Dab
or something. But you can change that. So we throw that in there. And you will see that
it has a blend weight there. We are going to simply
make that our Dabness. So when dab is 1, it's going
to play that animation. We just have to set up what bone
that is going to take over at, and this is super-standard --
how do you -- is it this,
to add an array, an element? Yeah, there it is. We are just
going to do the blend at spine_1. If you have never
done this before, you will do it a lot,
eventually. Like, this is super common
to have different animations for the lower body, and then take over
the upper body. So moment of truth, is this
going to work the first time? It's not usually the case. Okay, let's go somewhere
interesting up here. We are testing it
for the first time. I'm going to left-click.
Oh! >>Victor: There it is!
>>Matt: Oh my goodness, there it is! The jumping dab? Is this going
to work out for me? Boom! Oh, spinning.
We are going to do a 720 dab and we are going to
go back to Blender. Oh, oh, oh -- one more try.
Just one more. Here it is, wait, wait, okay. >>Victor: We need to have fun.
>>Matt: Okay, a 360 DAB. We got it here. Okay?
So a little bit silly, but I think if you are making
your own video game, it's, like -- if it's third-person,
or even first, it's, like, you want to be able
to walk around, and you want to be able
to do actions, right? And if that is not shooting
or swinging a sword, there is not much -- you know,
the Marketplace has stuff; it does not have everything. So if you want something
more serious like mine, we pull out light meters
and whatnot -- that was a pretty fast workflow
into Blender, back here. And you can go show this
to your friends. This, right here. This is what I hope everyone
is making right now, following along,
is literally this. So go make your animation
of the upper body, layer it in, in Blender. And I feel like you
will feel pretty good, especially
if you are new to this. That is one of the first things
I struggled for, I think, months probably,
to figure this out, because I was in Maya
and used HIK, and a whole bunch
of other stuff. Blender in this is super simple. Oh, that is the tilde,
that is not escape. Okay, cool. So I will close this up.
So we have that Character now. So that is what I have found to be
the simplest mannequin workflow. And we'll jump back
into Blender and start to look
at some more -- just, like -- we'll start
with the Static Mesh workflow. If you want to make a prop, you want to make
a modular building piece, you want to make a building -- what does that generally
look like? And we are going to start
a new one, General. So a lot of people, especially
on the older Blenders, they would have gone over here
to Scene Scale, if I can find it. Where is that hanging out?
It's around here somewhere. Scene Scale,
where are you, Scene Scale? Units. So Unreal Engine
base unit is centimeters, and base unit for Blender
is meters. It's not the worst;
it could be inches. That would be
a straight disaster, if it was inches for everybody.
But it's meters. So worst case, you are dealing
with these offsets of, like, you will bring something in,
and it's, like, oh, it's 100 times too small,
or it's 100 times too big. But it's not the worst. That is an easy thing to fix.
Especially in older Blenders, you would have gone
to make Blender match Unreal, you would have made this 0.01.
And you can do that, but I think that starts to make
issues for Blender itself, like when you are doing physics, and you are doing rigging
and some other things, changing that scale
can really start to make things kind of funny.
So I tend to work at just one, and we'll look at what happens
in the workflow as you do that. For Static Meshes,
no Skeletons, you can work at just stock
Blender 2.8, and it works fine. I talked to some people
before this stream, and they said they were bringing
in their 2.7 whatever project into 2.8,
and then exporting, and then it was not working.
The scale is going to be funny. So that might not work. You want to work
in a fresh Blender 2.8. You will see here,
it's going to work fine. But just so that you know,
Blender is scale one meter, so everything is going
to look like that. So we are just going
to model something. This is like the workflow I use. And I will show you
some of the Blender tools here. If you are coming from Maya
and other programs, there is a setting
in the beginning that lets you choose
industry standard, like, hotkeys, so you can use
alt-left-click to tumble, W-E-R-S
for move, rotate, scale. It sounds like a good idea
at first, but I would not do it. I started off doing it
that way -- it's not good. You want to use the stock,
in my opinion, stock Blender 2.8 hotkeys, because all the tutorials
are basically taught like that. And Blender thinks
differently than Maya. So I think the trap that happens
is, if you use industry hotkeys, you are, like, oh cool,
it works like Maya. Now everything else
I want to work like Maya too, and that is the wrong way
to think about it. Blender has its own way
of thinking and the hotkeys are tied
into that mindset. So this is going to be like
a beginner tutorial for Blender. But in general, if you hold
the middle mouse button, it's tumble, shift-middle mouse button,
control-middle mouse button? Yeah. So it's all
middle mouse button. That is what you want
to know at first. And so we want to add an Object, we are just going
to model something. You can go to Add here.
The best hotkey that you are going to want to know
is shift-A. I'm just going to
spit these out there, you are not going
to remember all of them. So we are going to make
our first Object. >>Victor: Shift-awesome?
>>Matt: Huh? Shift-awesome? I will take it. You are going to hit that a lot.
I hit that a lot. So we just made our first
parametric cylinder here. And anytime you do an action
kind of in general in Blender, once you do the action, you are going to get
this menu down here. This is for all sorts of things,
operations. And this is where it's still
pretty much parametric. So I can change
how many vertices -- eight is pretty good.
We'll make the radius 0.01. And I'm going
to make the depth 1. So it's still parametric. And there is a bunch
of other options here as well. As soon as I click
off of this thing, it's not parametric
anymore, right? It's not like Cinema 4D, that has infinite
parametric Objects forever. And Blender, once you make it,
it's gone. But the important thing to note is that when you do
an operation in Blender, that little box comes in there,
and you can change it. We are going to look
at some variations of that. Bring this up just a little bit. So next thing, we want to get
into this and edit the vertices and the edges. You can go up to Object mode --
and there is a lot. But you can go into Edit, right? And there are these
little buttons up here, Vertex, Edge, Face. But the fast way --
and I like this -- you click it,
you hit Tab, it goes into Edit. And then it's one, two, three,
for Vertices, Edge and Face. That is pretty nice. We are saying we are fellow
WoW players, and these are the NMO keys,
so like this. It feels good.
It feels really good. So let's look at doubling.
So I'm going to hit 2. Something that is important
about Blender is, like, I think from here I can actually select
all of them. But today, I want to select
the back faces. This is pretty unique
to Blender. Typically, you could go into --
oh, this UI is tiny. Oh my goodness,
can I even see it? There they are, okay,
we are okay. You know, it's your typical
view modes. You have wireframe,
and flat-shaded. And this one is for doing
Materials, and then lighting. What is important is, if you want
to select through in this, you actually have to
turn on this here, it's called, Show X-ray.
And to select through an Object, or select, you know,
I just did it behind it. You actually have
to have that on. That hotkey is alt-Z.
And you need that a lot. So tab one, two, three,
and alt-Z. If you are trying to grab
these back faces with it off, it will not grab them, right? That is something you have to
really know about Blender. That confused me
for a long time, like, I would be in wireframe, and I still would
not be selecting the back. Like, you would think --
you have to make sure that you have this overlay
onion skin loaded on. So that is important. So I'm going to show you
the kind of unique things about Blender
that I really like. I'm going to grab
these faces -- oh yeah, I know there is a mode
to actually show the hotkeys in Blender.
I forget how you turn that on. But I will just say it.
We are doing alt-left-click. In Edge mode we grab
this edge rim, and I'm going to do control-B
to bevel it. This is
one of my favorite things -- if I can get it to activate --
oh there she is, okay. So this is like a live bevel.
And what you can do is, you can scroll to change
how many subdivisions. So it gets like -- it feels good.
It feels good to do this. And you can really eyeball it and go back and forth.
And a lot of the tools, once you know the hotkeys
like this, they are great. They work just like this. >>Victor: And Blender has
always been pretty heavy on, I would say, being fast
at what you are doing. Which is, not clicking around
in the UI, right? >>Matt: Yes.
>>Victor: I remember, six years ago, I wrote up, like, what I call
a lazy dog sheet, where I had
all the hotkeys written up, instead of having to go
and search for them every time. But, you know, it's like
any piece of software, right? Once you learn that,
the workflow is so nice. And you can't not use it. >>Matt: Blender is fast. And you will see
that the Gizmo concept is actually kind of new
to Blender, and that most of it can be done
without a Gizmo, which sounds crazy for me,
coming from Maya, where it's, like,
almost all Gizmo. But I've gotten
into the hotkeys now. And you are, like -- it's, like, half commands,
half hot keys. And I will show you
some of them. And it's really fast. And if you like
to work parametrically, like I want to bevel this 0.2,
then I want to move it up 0.3, you can do that all
with hotkeys, really fast. And pros in Blender
turn off the UI, that is just, like, magic, which is cool.
I used to do that. >>Victor: I'd like to see that.
Yeah. >>Matt: I'm not saying I'm
at that point. But I'm going to Undo
out of this. This bevel feature,
you bevel a lot, right? It's pretty important. I hit the wrong button --
control-B. This is a lifesaver,
just to be able to kind of eyeball
how many subdivisions you want, especially for, like,
a low-poly game, it's great. Then once again, once you click,
you get this -- the parameters of it,
so you can go in here and be, like, oh, it's close to 0.03,
and then you can change the segments
after the fact, too. But I really like that live
moving the mouse and then scrolling. There are a lot of tools
that do that, and they are really helpful,
and really fast. >>Victor: It's like a mix of
sculpting and modeling, almost. >>Matt: It feels live. It feels like, yeah, like you have a little bit
more control, versus coming over and being,
like, click-click-click, and click-click --
how many, like, this is slower. It's combining those steps
together into a mouse and scroll at the same time.
A lot of tools work that way. So there is a capsule-looking
thing. So the next one that is really
good here, again, is control-R. And this is a loop-cut tool.
Same thing here, if I scroll, you can look
at the subdivisions. This is awesome.
This is super-fast for me. I do this constantly.
You would click -- and this is the next thing
that throws people off, and this threw me at first.
So I committed that edge loop, and now it's stuck to my mouse,
it's, like, why? Why is this happening?
There are definitely reasons, and if you want
to get out of this, immediately you right-click
and it snaps back to the center. But that threw me
super-hard at first. So that is loop cut,
that is bevel. Those are, I feel like,
a really primary part of low-poly game
development, modeling. So those are really important. And this Mesh is not
too impressive here, but I'm actually going to
just change this Mesh up a little bit, just so we can look
at Materials after this. Hold on.
Control-R, scroll -- I'm just going to Extrude
this piece out here, and then we are going to look at
applying Materials in Blender, because it's a little bit
different, concept-wise. And this directly relates,
again, to bringing this
into Unreal Engine. So I'm going to switch
to Face mode here. We have the X-Ray mode on,
alt-Z. It's also this little
overlay thing up there. I'm going to select
through here. Another thing that
caught me off guard here is that there is three --
there is more -- there are several Extrude tools.
In Maya there is one Extrude, and there are
a bunch of checkboxes. Here, they are, like, their own
tools -- you need to know that. So we are going to do
Extrude Along Normal. There are lots of tutorials
on this, but these are the things
that get me through my day when I'm modeling things. So we are going to
Extrude them like this, and we are going to stop
modeling for now. So we could show this the wrong
way, to start. We have this face,
we have this -- well,
I don't know what this is, a cylinder
with some stuff on it. And it's super-fast, right?
So to make this smooth, you are going to be in
Object mode out here. So I'm not editing
the vertices, and whatnot. You are going to right-click it,
and do Smooth. And that is not quite right.
It's smooth, but there is one more step you need to do
to get the Smoothing Groups, which is what Unreal Engine
will tell you, to make this look the way
that you want. So let's go find it.
Here it is. It's this little green
triangle thing. They are calling it Context
for Object Data. You define this,
you need to go to the Normals, and then you do Auto-Smooth. And Cinema 4D works very
similar; their tag for this. You are going to just drag this
until it looks right. It's essentially looking at
the angles between faces, and at a certain tolerance,
it becomes smooth. On an Object like this, you have
to really go and find it, because you want this
to be smooth, that to be sharp, this to be smooth,
that edge to be sharp. And most of the time,
you can nail it with this. There is other workflows
for splitting edges and stuff like that,
but if you want the fast way, I feel like
nine times out of ten that is going to work for you. So this is how you address
Smoothing Groups in Blender to Unreal Engine. So we are going to have
the Smoothing Groups the right way the first time, but a lot of people will model
something like this, bring it into Unreal Engine. It will be, like, you have
No Smoothing Groups error. >>Victor: I think it's the most
typical error, yeah. >>Matt: This is
the way to fix it. So just do this
right out of the gate -- right-click the Mesh,
make it smooth, and then go down to Auto-Smooth,
hit the number -- good to go. We have got to do
one more thing, actually. But I'm going to save this
beautiful file we made here. I'm going to call it
thing_01.blend. Saved it.
There it is. So can I do one more thing? So the next thing that is
interesting about Blender is that the concept
of pivot in Blender is not the same
as any other program. Like, if you say pivot, it's technically
this right here, I believe. Is this the pivot?
Yeah, Pivot Point. Pivot really means, like, where
you are going to scale from, or where you are going
to do an operation from. I'm not going to cover
the 3D cursor just yet -- I guess I will show it
really quickly. It's not the origin
of the Object. In Maya, you typically do
the operation from the pivot. In Blender, you can do operations separately
from the Object's pivot. The typical pivot
that you are used to for Maya, that is the origin in Blender. So naming you want
to be careful of. So if we look at this Object,
I will turn on the Gizmo. You will see that
it's moving from here. That is the origin.
In every other program, you basically would call that
the pivot, but that is the origin here. So this is a little
mind-blowing, if you have never seen
Blender before. So say I want to move the pivot,
or the origin, here. How does one do that?
It's a process in Blender, but it teaches you
how to use the 3D cursor, which is this thing here. I will show really quick,
just so that you can know. Then there is
a lot of nuance to it, but what we are going to do is,
we are going to hit Tab, I'm in Edit mode. Three into Face --
I'm going to select this face. Then, here it comes, hotkeys --
we are going to do shift-S, and we are going to move
the cursor, which we have not talked about,
to select it. It puts is there, because
that is where I want the origin, or the pivot, okay? So what we've done is,
we've put a temporary marker, which is this thing,
it's called the cursor -- it's just holding
a point in space, and it's just there
for us to reference. And we can do operations
around it. It's a new concept; you don't typically do this
in any other program. Then you are going to
right-click the Object and say, Set Origin to the 3D cursor.
It's a bit of a journey, but a lot of the tools work
with this 3D cursor. And I could show you
some of them, like Spin, when you are building roads
and sidewalks -- it's the best way
to make modular sidewalks, is the Spin tool. And it relies around setting
that point correctly. So different concept-wise,
Pivot and Origin -- it's different in Blender. >>Victor: You just taught me something.
Because what I've done is, that I've moved the Mesh
to the 3D cursor. Or what I thought was
the origin of the scene. Which typically, especially
if you want to scale that, when you scale it a lot,
you will notice the difference, because you will be
a couple of -- just millimeters off or so. So that is awesome. >>Matt: Yeah. Because you want
to put the origin of your Object at the bottom, frequently. You get good at basically
selecting something and then moving
that cursor to it, and you will get used to it. And as you get deeper
into the Blender tools, they get really powerful.
It's really, really fast. But that is something
that you are going to want to do right out of the gate. And then what you can do now
is re-center this to 0. So we have --
this is a pretty common way that you would send this back
to Unreal Engine, right? So those are some nuances
of Blender, if you are coming from Maya
and whatnot, that right out of the gate, if you don't know those things,
it kind of sucks, right? But this is going to help you
get through this. So we've taken care of
the Smoothing Groups, Auto-Smooth over here. And we moved the origin
to the bottom. You could have also
just moved it up, but this is a lot more,
like, you know for a fact
that it's in the right place. So we are going to go to some
Exporting here now. This is a -- oh no,
let's do Materials, right? Let's just do
the whole thing together. So I will close this,
and close that guy. We are going to go
to this cylinder here, and we are going to go
to Materials. It's this little tab here;
it looks like the Nuke logo. Currently, there is
no Materials on this Object. There is a concept here
that is pretty cool, that relates almost directly
to element numbers or slot numbers
on a Static Mesh, how many Materials on it. It has the same thing here,
so if we add one Material plus, here like that,
that is a slot for Materials. We can add another one
and another one, right? So you have
to actually designate how many Materials
you want on the Object -- it's just like
the Static Meshes. Then we are going to click
New Material, and that is it. You have really great,
standardized PBR Materials here, and EV does an incredible job
of showing that, actually. So let's say we make the first
Material on this metal. So I will make this Full Metal,
Full Spec, no Roughness. And if you want to see
what this is looking like, you have to go to this, which is
Viewport Shading, right? So it's more impressive
if I show that, actually. This is EV,
and it does an incredible job of showing
you reflections in metal. And you see people modeling
and sculpting hard surfaces with these really great
Viewport reflections and it's awesome. It's one of the best things
about Blender, I think. >>Victor: So I guess there is a
Skybox, or something,
that is sort of hidden? >>Matt: Yeah. I think that is in one of the
Project settings around here. You can change that. You probably can spin it, and use it for PBR lighting,
and spin it around. I don't know exactly
where that setting is. But I think the default one
is pretty standard. It's like a sky blue,
and whatnot. It helps you to just
to actually see this. It took a long time for this
to come into other viewports, to have it looking this nice. So that is
our first Material here, we'll just call it mat01. We'll fill up
these other ones, and we are going
to give different Materials to different faces. This is something
that is pretty common. We'll do another one,
we'll call it mat02. It's not my keyboard,
so I have to look at it. We are going to add another one
that is called mat03. And this took me a while
to figure out how this works, because it's a little bit
different than other programs. So really quickly, I'm just
going to change the base color of that one to red, and I will change the base color
of this one to green. So the point of this workflow
right now is not to actually use these Materials and convert them
into Unreal Engine, it's just to designate
what part of the Mesh I want to have what Material, which for me is extremely
important to what I'm doing. So say I want to make the top
red and the bottom green. Really, I'm just saying that I want them
to be different Materials, when I bring them
to Unreal Engine. So Tab 3, and I'm going
to do alt-Z to get into selecting through.
We'll take these -- oh, hey. I'm using the Extrude tool,
careful. So we want to go to Select, which is W,
gets you into that world. We are going to select
these here, that is fine. And I will leave
the bottom ones for now, and we are going to click
on Material 2 over here, and we are just going to click
Assign, right? So that is pretty easy. Going to go like that, and say we want this
to be Material 3, Assigned. And what have I modeled? >>Victor: Not sure. >>Matt: Chat, name this Object
for me. >>Victor: They have --
>>Matt: Oh, goodness, what is it? It's going to look like -- >>Victor: I'm not going to
mention it at all. >>Matt: You are not going
to mention it? Okay, fair enough. It looks like
a detonator button to me. >>Victor: Alright,
let's go with that. >>Matt: That is what
I'm going with. It's a detonator button,
y'all. Okay, so we are going to Save. And so we've made
this cylindrical Object with different
Materials on it, and so we just want
these Material IDs to show up in the Static Mesh.
So we've done a lot at once. I think I just moved
that Object back. So let's actually get this back
to the Engine. We have done a bunch
all at once here. Export FBX, as you would think. Here are all
the settings down here. And if you have done this with
a Skeleton before, it goes deep. There are a lot
of things happening. All we need to do is,
Select an Object -- don't change this.
Don't mess with that. We'll talk about it later
when we start doing the Skeleton --
don't mess with those for now. If you want the Smoothing Groups
to come through, you need to change this to Face,
and that is going to do that. Then we'll look at this stuff. This is Armature --
this is the Skeletons -- I'm just going to
turn that off. We'll talk about it later.
That is it. That should do it. So here is our Blender folder --
I guess I will just put it here. Thing_01.fbx, Export,
it's done. We have done it. Let's see how well
we've done here. So I just going to go
back into the -- ooh, how do you make it
so that it does not show all this stuff at once,
like that? Put a filter?
I just want the folder view. I will just put it in here,
never mind. So I will import
into this folder, and we'll go find it. I've got a shortcut for it
somewhere here -- there it is. Thing1.fbx,
let's see how we did. All of this -- Import menu
is all the way up there. Did I bring in the right thing?
Is that right? The Thing1? Convert Scene --
so I believe -- wait a minute. Did I clicked the right Object? I'm just going to for --
to make sure, I'm just going to make sure
I'm bringing in the right one. Thing_1.fbx, okay. There is usually a lot
more options for this. Oh, here it is, ah, okay, yeah.
The monitor is -- >>Victor: Look for the
checkbox. >>Matt: The monitor is smaller
than I'm used to. I'm, like,
where is all the things? You get really used
to your resolution. I usually work in 4K. >>Victor: Also, I believe
that might be saved, so once you have done it and you
open up the Import again -- I might be wrong, but -- I also remember more frequently
seeing all of the options. >>Matt: Yeah. I was, like,
oh my goodness. But is this the default?
Is it Import by default? I forget. Because I feel like --
oh, it's Import, that will be fine.
That will be fine. So point being that
we are trying to say stock, not getting to messy
with these yet, until we absolutely have to.
Here is Thing1. It brought in three Materials,
and let's inspect this thing. I think we are still compiling. So, did not get any errors. No Smoothing Group Errors,
no Non-Manifold -- that sort of stuff.
That is super common when you are coming from Blender
for the first time. And you will see the scale
should be right as well, we are going to bring it
in the scene. And you will see that we have
our three Material Slots, mat1, 2 and 3 --
it even kept the order. If you have done
this type of stuff in Maya, there is usually
a really kind of -- you have to separate the Meshes
and order them under a node, and then Export and combine
to control this order. Otherwise, to me the Maya ones
are random -- I can never control this. Here, that is
a really great workflow. It's almost one to one,
the Material Slots, and what we call them here,
the Material Slots, and element numbers, right? Those are the basic things
you want to look at. And let's test it
for ourselves here. That is about a meter, yeah?
So the scale is right as well, without having to do
that 0.01 thing to change it. So we have our Scale,
we have Smoothing Groups, we have the Material Slots. Can you dab on these?
I don't know if you can. >>Victor: They called it
a Dab Controller. >>Matt: Oh, the Dab Controller.
That makes sense. >>Victor: Yeah, that is what it is.
>>Matt: Let's see. Boom. Boom. That one is working.
That one is not working. Is this one doing okay?
That one is good. Okay, we've got them working. We have made
magic already today. Let's see if we can --
so if you are -- I know this is extraneous, but this is actual real-world
training simulator that you have to do
as you learn to dab, you need to be able to navigate
between these type of things, so pretty good. So that is Static Meshes.
And the mannequin -- we've done the things.
With this? You can make a game. >>Victor: Yeah, that is your
pipeline. >>Matt: You are bringing in
props, you are changing your animations
to be whatever your game does. Maybe there is
a little bit more, but that is a big piece of it. Next we'll move into making
your own Skeletons and your own rigs. It's a little bit more
technical, not everybody, depending on what you do
in game development, gets into making rigs. But I will show you the basic
way that it works in Blender. I will just say, long story
short -- it does work. You make, in Blender 2.8,
you can make your own Skeleton, make your own Mesh,
animate them. It comes into
Unreal Engine fine. There is one issue
that we'll look at, but it basically works, I've been doing it
for about a month now. And my whole workflow
works fine. We have done such a lovely job
with this Mesh, I'm going to use this.
I'm going to keep using it. We are going to duplicate
this up, and we are going to make
a Skeleton for it. I'm going to hit shift-D,
and it's stuck to your mouse. If you right-click,
it goes back down, and you could go like that. Little preview of how Blender
really works is that if you hit shift-D, and then you hit Z,
it's forced into the Z. When you get really good
at those things, you can start to model things
really fast, and move them like precision. And there is all sorts of snapping
tricks that are really good. Maybe we'll keep talking
about some of those. So we are going to
take these ones, and we are going to give each
one a bone and then animate it, right? So the way that I'm going to
do this, hit W to select, we are going to take
all of these, and we are going to make them
all one Mesh. I don't know where to find
this other than control-J -- it's called Join.
It's probably out there -- is Space set up for me?
No, space is Play. When you are
starting up Blender, you can choose
what type of hotkeys you want, and what spacebar does. I put spacebar
to the Search tool, there is, like, a Search tool. I think it's F3 by default --
there it is. I would make this space. Now you can just search
any command, and maybe half the time
I just search the command, because I don't know
where it is. I don't always know the hotkey. So I guess default is F3, I make it Space
because I use it a lot. I don't play
a lot of animations. Anyway, we join this together --
it's all one Mesh. I will name it up here. I'm going to call it
spinyBoy, because that is what
this is going to be. It's just going to be a spine. So let's add a Skeleton
to this situation here. You can go to Add, like this.
Where are you? Armature -- that is what
they call it in Blender, it's called an Armature. But I'm going to shift-A,
because it makes me feel cool. Yeah, I feel cool.
Ooh, here is a thing, right? So it just put
the Armature here. So this is a nuance
of Blender as well -- I'm going to Undo.
I think we are still merged. Our cursor here,
which is this, is down there. And every time
you make a new Object or you add an Object, it's going to make it
at that 3D cursor, which is really good, once you
get comfortable placing it. There are a lot of modeling
workflows where it's incredible to be able to call out
where you want it. If you snap it
to a certain point, you could imagine, a cylinder
comes at an exact point, it gets fast. But if you are not aware
of that, it becomes annoying. And the fast way to reset
this is shift-S. And there is a lot of cool
circular menus here -- it's Cursor
to World Origin. So personally, I use Cursor
to World Origin to reset it constantly,
and Cursor to Selected to kind of change where
the pivots are, all the time. Oh, what did I just do? So I'm going to do shift-S,
and then 1, which is the hotkey. Shift-S-1, that is part of
my life when I'm in Blender. That hotkey happens a lot. So with that back there,
going to shift-A, Armature now goes
where you would expect it to go, right at the origin here. So I'm going to go to the
Skeleton button over here. This is like your typical
Attributes Editor -- you dig through
these long enough, you will find the attribute
you want to change, right? That is typically how
this is going to go. There is one thing here
that is called In Front -- it's kind of x-ray bones
in Maya, it just puts the Skeleton
so you can see it, like that. So something that is
pretty different about Blender from Maya, we have this over here,
Armature, right? And you open it, and it's, like,
what are these two things here? There is another Armature,
and then a pose, right? Like, what is that? So this is a good time to
bring up that this Outliner here is not Maya's Outliner. Maya's Outliner
is the dependency graph, if you have ever gone
that deep into it. It will basically show you
the exact parent relationship, and a lot of other things
that are happening in Maya. This is not that. This is more like layers
and an outliner, put together. So these are --
point being that this is not -- these are not two different
Objects. It's actually a mode. I'm actually switching modes
at the moment. You will see on the top left, I'm switching from Edit
to Pose to Object -- I'm not super
in love with that, but I think there are
probably workflows that they do it this way. But just know that these
are not different Objects, like you would expect.
That was a Maya Outliner. You would be, like,
there I some sort of node here with two Skeletons under it,
that is what it looks like. >>Victor: Objects.
>>Matt: Yeah, but they are not. It's the same Skeleton,
just different modes. When you are in this one,
it's called Edit Mode -- that is where you are going
to set up the Skeleton, what you are going to do. And Pose Mode, that is when
you are going to animate it. >>Victor: Okay.
>>Matt: That is how they do it. You can't change that. So those are not
two different things, which is what you would think.
That is how it goes. >>Victor: You technically could,
since it's open source, but -- >>Matt: Oh, okay,
stock you can change. It's not a setting
you can turn off, or something like that,
that I'm aware of. But you just need
to know that, going out of the gate. So in Armature here,
we are in Edit mode. This is where you add bones. You move them, right?
You are going to set them up. We are going to skin this thing,
right, add bones to it. So another one -- here is the first bone,
right here, in the hierarchy. And technically, this right here
is the root bone, right? You can't leave it called
Armature. If you leave it called Armature, and you bring that
into Unreal Engine, it will not let you import it.
That is a name clash. So we are just going to call it
Root and we'll see the Skeleton
if we bring it in, that is what it is. So we are going to go
from our first bone here. And I think it works like this
in other programs -- oh, I'm not in Pose.
Let's just add bones. So what you are going to do is,
you are going to Extrude bones,
that is what they call it. Bone size, Extrude here.
You can also hit E. I'm going to Extrude
a bone up to there. I'm going to Extrude another
bone up to there. So we have three bones,
like this. Let's check it out. Spin_01
I called it spin, so I'm going to call
all the rest of them spin, too.
Like this. >>Victor: Consistency is actually
better than inconsistency, even though there is a typo, or if you come up with a better
naming convention later. If it's consistent -- >>Matt: I could still have a script
run through all the spins. >>Victor: Correct. It just might
become a problem whenever someone else
is working on your stuff, and they look for the spine. >>Matt: This whole thing is
a problem, I think, right now, though,
while we are getting through it. Okay, so we have the --
we've made a Skeleton. It's really good, actually. I've made what are pretty much
quadrupeds from this. It's pretty straight-forward
to duplicate bones, if you parent them. And you can make any Skeleton
that you want, but this is a really basic one. So the question becomes now,
how do we skin this, right? What is the fast way to do that? So we are going to go to
Object Mode again. I always get this order wrong,
so let me see. I think I'm going
to click the Mesh, which I did not click --
the Mesh then the Skeleton -- it's one or the other,
I forget. Then it's control-P -- I think we did it right --
to parent. And we are going
to do Automatic Weights. You will see that there is
a bunch of settings for mirroring,
and stuff like that. We are keeping it
real simple, right now. So like with the mannequin,
we should be able to click on this and go to Pose Mode,
which is like animate mode. Now I want to animate
this thing, that is kind of the way
I think about it. So we should be able
to take this bone, hit R, and it's stuck
on there like this, right? So we've essentially
skinned it. And I'm not going to go over
the weight painting workflow, but you could weight paint it just like
you would think in Maya. I will show you what is kind of
like a hard-surface way. If you were in Maya,
you would build a Skeleton, then you would literally
parent Objects under the bones. That is probably how
the mannequin is skinned. I guess the mannequin
has a little bit of skinning, but that is kind of
like a hard bind. I will show you
how that works here. How do we tell what parts
of the Mesh to go to what bone? It's actually really nice,
if I can remember how to do it, once I get to it. Once I find where in the Mesh
that actually happens. So if we look
at the Outliner here, you will see that
our root Skeleton has Pose mode, Armature mode, and the Mesh has now
come under it as well. So I believe it's this. We click on that, which I do
not know exactly what that is, it looks like it's geometry
under some node for the Mesh. What you will see here is,
you will have Vertex Groups, which are literally groups
of vertices, right? So say, like, all of these --
we could make that a group. What you see here is that this is automatically
giving you groups that match the exact name
of the bone, right? So this is really nice. I've done
some really difficult rigs, and this system is great. Knowing that this is spin_03,
spin_02 and spin_01, let's do some assigning. To start, I'm going to start
all of them. Am I in see-through mode?
I think I am. I'm going to select
all the vertices. I'm not in Vertices mode,
go into 1. Select all these Verts, and I'm going to click
on this one, and say Remove. Next one -- Remove, and Remove. So we've unskinned it,
essentially. Nothing is skinned
to anything, right? I promise this is fairly easy. We are going to take
these vertices -- I hope I'm selecting through --
I think I am. And we are going to select
spine_03, spin_03, and do Assign. Right? These go to that bone. These ones,
click on spin_02, Assign. These ones go to the last one --
Assign. Right? So you have to find this,
it's the Skeletal Mesh. You have got to click
on this triangle thing. There is a vertex group
per bone. If you name your Skeleton rig, I think it's pretty easy
to do that weighting. It can be trickier
in other programs, I think that is
set up pretty nicely. So that is like a hard bind. Let's see
if that actually works, and then we'll animate this
and bring it into Unreal Engine. Look at Skeletal Meshes. Some of the things
that happen there, some of the good, some of the
still need some work. So let me click on the rig. We are again going to go to
Pose Mode, select this bone. Ah -- and there it is, right? This bone only affects
that part of the Mesh. That is, like, for me, I don't do
a lot of weight painting, and making things, like --
>>Victor: Organic? >>Matt: No, I'm making
hard-surface stuff, mostly. >>Victor: Right.
>>Matt: So, like, light stands -- so almost all of my rigs
are geometry, basically parented to a bone. >>Victor: More mechanical?
>>Matt: Exactly. So this is going to work
for mechanical animations, and that is the workflow. So with that working, I guess I
could just start animating this. So we are going to drop
some animation on this. You select the rig -- I will close this,
I will just take it back -- Object mode,
select the actual Skeleton. We are not going to build
a control rig, we are just going to F-K animate
the Skeleton, which is valid. >>Victor: Forward kinematics?
>>Matt: Yeah. It means you animate the bones, you directly are animating
the bones, which you don't -- in best practices you
don't usually do that. You would build a rig
and then indirectly control it. You have a little bit
more control over it. But there is, like,
the brute force way to do it, and I do it this way
for simple Objects like this. So we are in Pose mode,
having the Skeleton. I'm going to click
on this thing. You know what, I'm going to
select all the bones, like that, and I'm going to right-click,
Insert Keyframe -- there are a lot
of different keyframes, but it's defaulting you to Location Rotation
Scale Transform, right? So I'm going to bring this
to 60, and I'm going to do
the same keyframe again. I'm going to go back to 30. Now I will make, like,
some kind of swaying motion. I'm going to rotate it here,
then this one, then this one, like that. I'm going to hit A
and select all the bones again. We are going to drop
a keyframe on it, like that. I'm going to change my end
to be just 60. And I think we still
have to go change our frames per second back.
Where did it go? Here it is. We are going to go
to 30 Frames Per Section, which is what
Unreal Engine wants. Unreal Engine wants one second
to be 30 frames. And if we hit Play,
we've made this happen, right? So let's go and see if this
comes back into the Engine, and how it comes back in. So this is an important step
as well, especially as your scenes
get bigger. And it's quite common
in Blender to have multiple Skeletons, which I don't know
if we are going to get to that. But you will have
kind of dense Skeletons, and you don't want
to bring everything. So in this case, it's simple,
but we want to select the Mesh, and then the Skeleton
in Object Mode -- that is the selection you want.
We are going to go to File, Export,
FBX, and Selected Objects -- that is really important, because you might have
all sorts of stuff in there. Don't change Scale,
don't change this stuff. If you really understand
the tech behind it, you can start to mess with it.
But I don't. We are going to have Face
as the Smooth modifier here, so that the Smoothing Groups
come across. We are going to go to Armature,
turn off Leaf Bones. And in a lot of cases,
you want only deformed bones, because you might have
a control Skeleton. A lot of people
will build rigs in Blender, where the control rig is actually
another Skeleton on top of it, which is not how you usually
do it in Maya, it's usually curves
and constraints. A lot of people
just build it with bones. In this case, if you click
only deformed bones -- only the bones that are actually directly
controlling the Mesh come. You don't get
the control rig with it. This is so that if you are doing
mannequin stuff -- basically, that plugin manages
this for you. There is a whole checklist
of stuff you have to change here, but you don't want to do that,
unless you like pain. So we are going to move on to -- we are going to call
this thing -- I will call it up front here,
this is a SKM_thing_01. This is the evolved
Pokemon version of that one. It moves, it has got three. I think that is the best way
that we want to think about it. So I want to bring it
into Geometry. You know, you probably want
to organize your stuff a little bit better,
but let's pop it here. So we are going to
Import SKM_thing_01. In this case it's a Skeletal
Mesh -- we want the Mesh. There is no Skeleton
to bring it on, so it's going to make
a new Skeleton. And I want the animations. There is a lot
to talk about there, but let's just see
what default happens, right? This is stock Blender
into stock Unreal Engine, without changing -- we have not changed
really any axes settings, nothing like that.
So we'll bring it in. No errors -- this is good stuff.
Going to save. It did make some more Materials.
Okay. So let's see
what it brought us. What happened? I think the Smoothing Groups
need a little look at, but here is our Skeletal Mesh.
Looks as expected, right? Evolved version
of the other one. >>Victor: A Thing Trio.
>>Matt: Yeah. A Thing Trio. >>Victor: That is what Chad called it.
>>Matt: That makes sense. Look at us, with Pokemon
knowledge, or references. Here is our Skeleton. Let's see
how this came out, right? So root, spin_01, spin_02 and spin_03.
That is how it goes down, right? It's a little bit --
I will just take us back into here to
remember what is going on here. Like, look at this Armature,
it has a lot in it. Now you have
animations in it, too. That is quite clear that
these are not Objects, right? These are nodes,
and mode switches. So a lot is going on in here.
This threw me super-hard, when I'm used
to Maya Skeletons, it's just, like, bone,
bone, bone, bone, bone -- like, and then
parenting constraints happen, and you don't visualize them. Here this is visualizing
a lot for you. But to inspect it,
you want to look at this. You will see that this root,
still called Armature. But the first bone
got called this. >>Victor: Okay.
>>Matt: That is how it is. I don't know if there is
another way to do it, but that is what I've
found so far -- that is how you do it.
That is your root bone, and then these are
the following bones, and everything works out fine. But that is a nuance
of the system, and that is
our Skeleton over here. So let's really
put this to the test. I'm going to place
this out here -- where are you? Here it is. That is so small. Okay, look at this
ultra-wide view of how we are operating this.
This is cool, right? So did my animation
come through? There it is. There it is. Okay, so we are going to switch
this to Animation Asset, drop it in there. There is only one way
to test animations. Well, I guess
there is probably more. There it is.
What do we call it? Spine Trio? >>Victor: Thing Trio.
>>Matt: Thing Trio. We are all so creative.
But can you dab on it, though? Yes!
Yes. It's dabbable. This is an interface
for dabbable. Oh, it does not have collisions?
Oh, it does. It does.
There it is. Okay. So Skeletal Mesh. Animations, Skeleton,
stock Blender into Unreal. >>Victor: No errors.
>>Matt: No errors. Animating properly, right? No weird scaling things.
It can be done. >>Victor: Ta-da!
>>Matt: I'm going to show you the one weird thing
that happens here, though, with my
Thing Trio Skeleton, right? I mean, I look at this and I'm, like,
I've got to add some sockets. It's, like,
that is the first thing. So we are going to add
this socket here. You can immediately tell
something is a little bit weird. Why is that socket so big? What is going on?
What is going on here? I'm going to
put it up here, right? Like, say I want to attach
another Thing Trio to the end of this. If you know that -- you should
already know something is up. It's, like, ooh,
that looks kind of weird. It's kind of large, right? So I'm going to go
to my World Outliner, let's get a small you up here. As one does, I want to attach
one of these to one of these. We are going to make it longer.
So I'm going to duplicate this, and I'm going to drag it
on top of it -- attach. Ooh, it's off-screen, but you can choose what socket
you want to put it on. So I'm going to put it
on that new socket we made. Let's go look. It's actually,
it has done an okay job. But let's go to Details.
I'm selecting the child now, this has been attached
to this one. It's keeping its offset, but let's go look
at what happens. So let's start resetting these,
right? So there is this offset, right? It's moving it forward,
and blah blah blah. So we are going to click this,
Reset. That goes to the top. Everything is fine, right? If you look here,
for it to look like this, which is normal,
we have a -90 offset. This is understandable, considering how the front axes
differ between the two programs. We also have a 0.01 scale,
right? So we have this -- kind of, if
you are going to see anything, these are both expected;
a 0.01 or 100 scale difference. This happens with the sockets. The way that I fix it,
which is a little bit funny -- you can go back to the socket,
make it -90, and scale it to 0.01,
and these will just stay normal. But this is the one thing
that I'm dealing with, because I'm shipping assets that go down
like this right now, and I'm just doing that
to my sockets. That is, like, the one place
where right now, it's a little bit funny. I have not gotten
into morph targets, and other aspects of it. But on the whole,
the Skeleton comes in fine. There might be something funny
with the -- because the sockets
got spun around and scaled up. Skeleton is good,
Skeletal Mesh is fine. Animations are fine, for everything that I've been
doing, been perfectly good. The socket thing --
kind of weird. I'm not sure --
these are predictable. I've tried
all sorts of different -- so I'm changing the scale to,
I'm rotating it -90, I'm changing the scale
to 0.01, like this. That seems kind of small,
actually. Let's see how that went. My Smoothing Groups
need to be adjusted here. Sockets, for me,
are the one place where I have to do
this kind of funny workaround. There is just something between
the FBX protocols right now, where something is funny. But if you are not
adding sockets, it works completely fine.
If you are adding sockets, you kind of have to do
this little workaround, or at least I do. So I should be able to --
I did that to the Skeleton, you might have to reload it
for it to actually know. Oh no, it did it. So I did the transformations
on the sockets, so now the attached Mesh
just today is 1-1-1, like you would expect,
like that. So that is the one thing that
I'm dealing with right now. Is it disappearing like that? I wanted to do one thing
to kind of celebrate what we've created today. The timing has to be right,
ready? Oh, is the collision gone? Oh, no!
Let me see if I can get it. But this is the workflow
that I'm using pretty much every day
with Blender. The only thing I'm
dealing with is sockets, and everything else
is pretty smooth for me. >>Victor: So PreCognis
reached out and said, the Blender file units are not set up correctly
regarding the socket issue. >>Matt: Is this a developer?
>>Victor: I believe so, it seems like he knows
what he is talking about. >>Matt: Okay for now.
It seems like -- >>Victor: Please fill us in. >>Matt: It seems like something
that within an 8.3, like, another iteration,
it just has to be -- they just have
to spend the time -- someone has to spend it --
>>Victor: He is saying that it's because of the fact
that you are working in meters, and units in Unreal
are centimeters. Now, it seems like the model Export and Import
works at scale. But I believe
regarding his statements, that the file units needs to be
set up to centimeters, and then the bones and sockets will be on the same scale
as well. >>Matt: So that is probably true.
I've tested this a bunch. I tried to get this even smoother
for this presentation of it. If you set it -- if you do
this whole process at -- I will show you in Blender -- if you do this whole process
and at the front of this, before you animate --
it has to be before you animate, because animation
has different scaling -- if you come to this,
and you are at 0.01, and then do exactly what we did, the socket issue
will not have scale. >>Victor: So that is the scale, though.
But what about actually -- >>Matt: The rotation? >>Victor: No. Regarding,
I believe, the units themselves. Not the scale of the units,
but the actual units. I might be wrong. I think it's
something that, hey, PreCognis, if you want to go ahead
and write something up for us on the forum,
that would be awesome. >>Matt: Sure. >>Victor: And we can go ahead
and discuss it there. He is saying the popup
is blocking the unit selection. So I believe -- >>Matt: You mean changing this?
>>Victor: Correct. That is what I used to be in
Blender 2.3 -- oh, sorry, 2.7. >>Matt: I've heard that is --
I'm not going to test it now. >>Victor: Yeah, yeah. >>Matt: I've had mixed results.
But it's worth trying. >>Victor: Absolutely. >>Matt: If that is the fix,
I missed -- >>Victor: Ship it.
>>Matt: -- I did not exactly get it. But it still does work. You just have to either
do it like this, which I like working at stock. I don't like
having to remember that. I'd rather change it
on the Unreal side. I've done it from here,
where if you do 0.01, do the whole thing --
it will not scale it. But I don't like
working in Blender when you change the unit scale. Tools in Blender start
to work a little bit -- things will be really small,
and it kind of throws me off. I would love it
to just work, stock. And it pretty much does,
except for the socket. But maybe we are saying
that for sockets, you should do
something like that. But I hope this shows
that the mannequin, that workflow is clean. We did not have to do any,
like, oh, bone axis is -Z, and remember any of that --
that is stock working. Skeletal Mesh,
with UVing and Materials and a standard FBX workflow.
That works great. >>Victor: Yeah, I've never been
able to do anything like this in this time period. And there has been a lot
of trial and error, working with scales, working with
other various settings. So it's rather impressive.
I did try out 2.8 briefly, and the fact
that I could just get a model to be the correct scale without doing anything,
that was rather impressive. So seeing that
the entire workflow is pretty straight-forward,
at least from -- which you have discovered
during your experimentation and workflow.
So that is pretty amazing. >>Matt: Yeah. So maybe it's
that one thing for the sockets, and I have not tried
morph targets. But 90 percent of it,
from my workflow, for what I need is good to go. I don't add a ton of sockets
to the stuff I'm doing, mostly socketing
on the mannequin, and that is fine.
So for indie solo game Dev, Blender, 100 percent,
covers the bases. We didn't look at so much more
that is specific to Blender, like sculpting and UVing, and all these other things
that are great. But I think that probably
represents a very large portion, or percentage,
of what people do, 3D to Unreal Engine, stock 2.8 Blender,
stock Unreal Engine -- it's, like,
pretty much working. >>Victor: Yeah. No, that is
great. Are you ready
for a couple of questions? We got quite
some questions here. >>Matt: I will botch some
answers. Let's do it. >>Victor: We got another
maybe 15 to 20 minutes that we can do questions for. >>Matt: Oh, yeah.
That was my thing, we dabbed. >>Victor: Yeah. Manny did,
Manny did. Maybe you did. >>Matt: I want to see everyone
making this exact same -- should we add that to the default
mannequin Blueprint Project? >>Victor: We are always
taking feature requests -- >>Matt: I think that would be
good. >>Victor: -- towards the Editor.
Alright. So early on, we had a question
about how to export Materials from Blender -- we covered that.
So if you did not catch that as part of the stream,
go back a little. >>Matt: Again, that is for, like,
Material Slots. That is how you would designate
different Materials. If you mean taking the actual
PBR Material you have created and bringing it in perfectly --
that is not going to work. It will approximate it,
but, you know, you want to build your Materials
in Unreal Engine, for the most part,
if that is what you mean. Like taking this Material
exactly back in -- it's never going to -- >>Victor: I did see there were
some comments regarding just the fact
that you could color it, basically, is what we did. >>Matt: Oh, yeah, if it's
simple. But Unreal Engine
shaders can be -- You are not going to make
a Material function in here, you know? You can have a basic
PBR transfer over, but, you know,
you typically want to make a Material master
and instances -- it won't do
any of that for you. But you can have, like,
the basic parameters come up, for sure. >>Victor: Any recommendations
for tutorials on transitioning from older versions of Blender
to the new version? >>Matt: I think
Flip to Normal is their YouTube channel
is pretty good. >>Victor: Flip Normals. >>Matt: I think
Andrew Price, his series. If you have the ability to make it through
the whole donut tutorial, and you just do it
with the Blender style, the new 2.8 hotkeys --
if you make it through that, you should have it, pretty much,
like, dialed at that point. I did not use Blender
before 2.8. I kind of swooped in. I was, like, oh, left-click
moves the 3D cursor and right-click is select --
I'm going to head out. Basically, it's, like,
I'm not staying for this. But now that they have
these options, and it's this smooth,
I'm all for it. But I did not come from -- I did not use Blender
before 2.8. >>Victor: Question
regarding animations -- how do you export
multiple animations you have in the timeline? For example, 0 to 30,
then 40 to 100, then 100 to 140, and so forth?
You can export all of your Character animations
in one file. >>Matt: In one file? I'm not sure.
For my Character animations, I'm using
the Mr. Mannequin exporter. So I'm not exactly sure
how to do that. I just kind of brute force it,
and just kind of make a different file
for every animation, which maybe does not work
for someone who is doing, like,
a lot of Character animation. For me, I'm making
basically poses. I will make, like, this,
and then some aim offsets. >>Victor: Then you are using
the animation loop to interpolate
between them, right? >>Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not doing a ton
of Character animations, where I will have
all the locks in one file. I'm not sure
exactly how that works. Pretty sure you could do it, but I don't do
that much Character animation. >>Victor: For all discussions
regarding the Unreal Engine, the Announcement posts
on the forums is a good place where we can start
some of these discussions and talk about it.
Maybe someone knows. >>Matt: Someone knows. >>Victor: Couldn't you just make
dab in Unreal Engine directly? >>Matt: I think there are tools
for that now. >>Victor: There is. >>Matt: But this is a Blender demo.
>>Victor: It is. So the next follow-up question
was, is it better to do the animation
in Blender or Unreal Engine? The answer to that is,
in Blender, you can really offer animations, you know,
at a high-quality level, whereas currently
in Unreal Engine, you can do some basic poses.
You can record it, right? But you are not really
hitting that sweet spot. For someone who is an animator,
they would currently not want to work and author animations
inside Unreal Engine. It's better to do it
in a DCC tool. >>Matt: Yeah. I mean,
I build IK rigs in my game. I've seen things out there,
but Blender is, like, you are making your own Mesh,
your own Skeleton, from the ground up.
It's just meant for that. Unreal is, yeah, like you say,
it's more for modifying. You might take a Blueprint
and IK of the hands so that it
can be independence -- >>Victor: Yeah, but you are not
going to author the rig, or -- >>Matt: Yeah, the whole
pipeline. Maybe for certain use cases,
but in general, this is more the way to go,
I think. >>Victor: Yeah, I
mean, I showed you how I used
the Paragon Characters, and I just scaled down the legs
to just get torsos for the indie motion
capture stream. >>Matt: If it works...
>>Victor: There are ways, right, that you can get
your end result. But if you are looking
at a pipeline for your game, you probably will not
author them inside a DCC tool, like Blender. >>Matt: Yeah. I think so.
>>Victor: Let's see. Did we talk about
the UE4 rig inside Blender? Yes we did,
earlier in the stream. >>Matt: Mannequins? >>Victor: I mean, not necessarily
if we talked about the rig, but we did show
how you can get the default Unreal Engine Skeleton
animated inside Blender, and then move it over and
actually see it inside Unreal. >>Matt: Yes. And my recommendation
is the Mr. Mannequin rig right here, for sure.
We don't have the time -- I could show you the beginning
of what importing the Skeleton from Unreal into Blender
looks like. It's about an hour
to get it actually set up, and you have to know
Blender pretty well. And it's not worth it.
It's not worth it, unless you are
a Character rigger, and, like,
I want to make my own rig. It can be done, because,
you know, Mr. Mannequin did it. But it's a lot of work,
you have to really, really know
what is going on there. And you have to know
how to make control rigs that are nice to animate, too. That is a whole
different subject. >>Victor: Is it possible to do
camera animation export from Blender
to Unreal Engine? >>Matt: I know it's possible.
I've never done it, though. I have seen people do it.
There are other add-ons. I did not want to get too add-on
heavy into Blender. One of the great things
about Blender is that it's open source, and so many developers
are making cool plugins, and they are,
by and large, free. Some of them are paid,
and usually worth it. There are a couple
of Unreal Engine ones; I think it called, like,
Blender for Unreal Engine, or something like that,
you can look it up. And their scripts will actually
allow you to select a camera, even if it has a path, and it will correctly translate
that back into an Unreal Engine one.
But I have not used it myself. But I've seen it demoed.
Have not tried it. Mostly this --
like, what we just did there -- I do that every day. I do this every single day.
I have not done cameras. I just animate my cameras
in Sequencer. >>Victor: That is another option.
>>Matt: I've seen it done. >>Victor: Okay. I'm working
on a game these days, and I started
working on VFX now. Do you recommend -- is it possible to do this
in Blender and export it to Unreal?
And what is the best approach? >>Matt: For VFX?
>>Victor: Mm-hmm. >>Matt: Is that mostly Niagara,
and, like, cards? >>Victor: That would be my
answer, is to start getting
familiar with Niagara. It will soon be out of beta. And it will be production-ready,
which is, say, the FX tool that we have inside
Unreal Engine. >>Matt: Yeah, that is typically --
I mean, from my understanding of VFX, it's mostly you are doing
the Photoshop, and you would make flipbooks
of animations, and then you would
have Niagara spawn them. And they do different
dispersions and bounces, and stuff like that. >>Victor: Yeah, or you can
do Meshes as well, and -- >>Matt: Oh, yeah, like the --
yeah, I have not done that yet, where you can dissolve things.
I'm not sure. VFX can also mean
using the -- you know, what is the destruction
plugin called now? Chaos? >>Victor: Chaos, the new
destruction system, yeah. >>Matt: Yeah. That stuff
used to be, like, you know, solely the domain
of a Houdini simulation that you would bake out
back to the Engine. But now you just, I'm assuming,
Voronoi-fracture it in Engine, essentially,
and then just turn it on. >>Victor: Yeah.
And you can cache it, and play it back
using Sequencer, so you can have a really,
really heavy simulation. >>Matt: And it could be interactive,
where the pieces are, like -- >>Victor: Yeah. There are some
ways where you can actually sort of interact
with the cached animation, if you may call it as well,
of a destructible building, or --
>>Matt: Yeah. That is not my specialty,
but that seems like that is mostly a Niagara
and a Chaos thing for me. >>Victor: Let's see.
They are wondering if you will come back
to do a virtual production demo. >>Matt: If you will have me.
>>Victor: I will. This has been a pleasure, so --
>>Matt: Maybe. It's a strong
maybe we have going here. >>Victor: Yeah. We'll have
to talk about that one. >>Matt: That is pretty
complicated to show in an hour. But it could probably be done. >>Victor: Maybe we can
stretch, make it a two-episode, maybe a double stream that week. >>Matt: Might need a bigger
stage for that. >>Victor: Mm-hmm.
Maybe we do. Let's see. Can you get the models
in a store, or something? Or do you have to make
your own models? >>Matt: Can you get the models
in a store? Yes, the Unreal
Engine Marketplace. >>Victor: That is the place
to get them. >>Matt: My game currently
is 90 percent in Marketplace. So I'm what they call an Asset
flipper, I'm proud of that. And one of the reasons
I switched to Blender is because I'm actually
in the point in my game where we are trying
to leave prototype and get into our final form. You know, like a version
1 work release. So I'm actually in the process
now of stripping out all my third party
Marketplace stuff, which was a very helpful thing
to get to this point. But now I have
specific parameters and poly counts and Materials,
and UVing styles that I like. So I'm going to be in Blender
a whole lot, making all sorts of stuff
like chairs to the right size, and I'm going to be remaking
all the doors and all the modular pieces. So Marketplace is really good
for prototyping, and then for me, at this point,
I'm, like, okay, I will pull those out, and I'm going to be in Blender
for the next year of my life. >>Victor: You can learn a lot
from seeing how someone else did it, right?
>>Matt: Oh my, yeah. Oh, yeah. >>Victor: I think that has been,
for someone like me who is not really an artist, and I cannot author anything
high-quality in terms of models or animations
or Textures, it's still -- it teaches me how artists
work in the pipeline and I can use them
and make my game look a lot better than
I would be able to do myself. >>Matt: Yeah. The only reason I know
how to make modular set pieces is because I think I've bought
all of the Marketplace modular kits,
and just looked at them. They are in my game now,
and I've just looked at the way
that they break up the Meshes, how they do the Materials
is really interesting as well. You UV from modular much
different than VFX UVing; it's all for tiling
Textures and stuff. So I've just mined
all that stuff. I would just -- well not mined,
I bought it -- use it, bring it back into
what was then Maya, look at their UVing,
be, like, that is crazy. Then try to figure it out. Marketplace --
really high-quality stuff. You could ship a game
with it easily. But then also really good
to reverse-engineer and try to learn it. Which I've been doing
for the last year and a half. >>Victor: There are a
few questions regarding, do you ever use the Blender
to Unreal Engine add-on? It was supposedly created
by Blue Raven. >>Matt: I have it installed. I've
played with it a little bit. It does not solve the issue --
I wanted it to -- because you can select
a Skeletal Mesh and be, like, Export,
and it will do that. But it did not solve
for me the socket issue that we were looking at.
So I stopped using it. That is what I would have
used it for, for my workflow. But I have it, and it does work.
Yeah. But I cannot 100 percent vouch
for all the features; I have not dug
through it enough. But it looks like it's in
the right direction, for sure. I use a lot of add-ons
for modeling. You can just go into your own
Blender world, eventually, that does not have to do
with Unreal Engine, but HardOps, BoxCutter, Edge Loops --
there are so many add-ons for this,
and they are incredible. Like, you really --
like, HardOps, BoxCutter and Sculpting
in Blender -- I don't think you can do that
in any other program. Like, you can
almost do that type of hard-surface stuff in ZBrush. But ZBrush, you can never have
normal DCC control after. There is some really unique
modeling workflows with add-ons in Blender, if you just keep daggering
deeper and deeper, that they don't exist
anywhere else. I think that is why we see
so many people coming to it now. And it's free.
There is that, too. It's good,
which is incredible. >>Victor: And no royalties, either.
>>Matt: That is true. That is true. It's also Blender Con
right now, so holler Blender Con
in Amsterdam. >>Victor: Hope you are
all having a good time. I don't know why they would be
watching the stream right now, I would not --
>>Matt: I bet you someone is. I will have to go next year.
Maybe next year. >>Victor: Do shape keys translate
from Blender to Unreal Engine? >>Matt: I have not tried it. >>Victor: Okay.
>>Matt: I have not tried it. Shape keys meaning, like,
morph targets? Blend shapes? >>Victor: I believe so, yes.
I think they are called -- I think when you make them
in Blender, they are actually called
shape keys. >>Matt: I have not tested it, because
I don't do my own facial rigs, or anything like that.
I'm not doing it at that level. I'm not sure. So, like, this standard --
if we pull it up real quick -- where are you?
Do I still have this? Yeah. So I don't
have this stuff memorized. This is the FBX
Static Mesh pipeline. So if you want to know
how to bring in LODs and UVs and lightmaps --
we did not do any of that stuff. That takes a long time
to demo properly, the full how you UV
and how you lightmap in Blender. It can be done.
Just pull this document up. I write UE4 FBX every day,
and this is how you do prefixes for different types
of collisions, and some base practices
for sockets, and whatnot. And most of this works
all the way through. I generate my LODs in Unreal
Engine using their insta-LOD -- I don't think
that is what it's called, it's called something else. But I use their automatic
LOD stuff. But this will walk
you through it. This is clearly, like, a Maya
Viewport we are looking at. But from my initial test, 99 percent of this works
in Blender as well. It's just naming conventions.
So that stuff mostly works here. >>Victor: Someone confirmed
that shape keys do work. And I remember that, yes,
I watched a tutorial -- I did it for a ball,
or something. Yeah, and they just turn into
morph targets in Unreal Engine, then you can use the slider. >>Matt: The slider? Nice. >>Victor: Or call it as a function
in Blueprints as well. >>Matt: Nice. >>Victor: It's been a long time
since I did that. That was a while. >>Matt: There are a lot
of features to test. I just tried to
share the basics. You know? There is a lot of nuanced
little things that we can get into,
like constraint, rigs and stuff, but -- less and less people use
that high-level stuff. >>Victor: There were some more
questions regarding sort of Materials
into Unreal Engine, and basically you
author the Roughness values, and your actual shaders
in the Material Editor in Unreal Engine or in Blender. >>Matt: Maya is much better. Yeah, I mean,
for performance reasons, for reuse, you typically
make a master Material and all the Materials
are instances of that. If you want to get into
that workflow, and your Textures, you want
to have in Texture groups. These are just best practices for Unreal Engine
for performance, and for just
general extensibility, as you have bigger
and bigger projects. If you don't set it up
like that in the beginning, it's not so fun. I know, because that is
the world I live in right now. So yeah, you don't really want
your Blender Textures, anyway. Or Blender Materials. >>Victor: Do you use Sequencer a
lot? >>Matt: I'm using it
a little bit now for the academic version
of the game I'm making. You actually play
through a game, and it teaches you
how to set up film lighting. Every time you complete
a major step, it pulls out -- a Sequence camera comes out,
and it's, like, whaaaa -- like,
here is what you just made. So I'm kind of using it for how
it's video game sequencing, versus virtual production
Sequencer, which is a whole -- that is a whole different animal
to talk about. >>Victor: That is why there
seems to be some people in Chat that are also familiar
with the workflow. They comment and said,
please tell people there is no need
of the old 0.01 scale hack for working
in centimeters in Blender. >>Matt: If you are working
in centimeters? So they say to switch
that metric? >>Victor: Yes. You can set
centimeters, it says length unit, in the length parameter,
below unit system. >>Matt: I will try it. I see
that. I have not tried
that myself yet, I will try it. But look how far we got
by not even doing that. The only time it tripped
was the sockets. So maybe if that
will fix the sockets -- I did not address
the axes difference, the front axes difference,
because I'm still trying to figure out what is
the best practice for that. So I did not want to confuse us,
because I'm still confused. I did not want
to further confuse anybody. >>Victor: It sounds like
it's time for a little bit of an updated Blender
to Unreal sort of doc; maybe something the community
can help us author, definitely. Especially using a lot
of references from this stream today,
how to do that. That sounds like something
we should have, to make -- for everyone to not have to go
through the sort of headaches, the differences
in the little things that you have learned throughout your process
of working with this. That was pretty much
all of the questions we would be able
to answer today. And there was a comment -- Matt, thanks
for sharing your workflow. Would you like to return
and do another stream with more focus on the animation
process as you use? Really nice presentation. >>Matt: Thank you, and pass.
I'm very bad at animating. I mostly just make dabs, and
simple poses and aim offsets. I'm not much
of an actual animator. My animation happens mostly
in the Engine. I do a lot of rotating and
spinning things in Blueprints; that is where
most of it happens. Most of my stuff
is very mechanical, so it's parenting to sockets,
and stuff like that. Actual animation-animation, that is not me.
I'm not very good. I don't even think I could do
the bouncing ball correctly. So thank you, but no. >>Victor: Yeah. If you know -- if any of you know
anyone in the community that are creating
that kind of content, please do ahead and share that.
That would be a nice resource. Thank you so much for coming,
Matt. >>Matt: This has been lovely.
>>Victor: It's been a pleasure. I'm really happy
we were able to do this. We planned it for
a couple of months, I think. >>Matt: I think so, yeah. >>Victor: Making sure
our schedules line up, and everything that is going on with what you are working on
is very exciting. As always, I end the stream with
a little bit of a couple of tips regarding our community,
et cetera. So I will move over to that. Mainly the most important thing
that we have got going for us, I think, is the transcripts
that we do for every stream. They are originally created
for captioning, so that the videos
can be captioned. But what it allows us to do is, you can open up
the transcript -- we usually put the link
in the YouTube description -- you can control-F
and search for keywords. We know the streams are long,
you know, we've been going for an hour
and 40 minutes right now. A lot of things have been said,
a lot of things have been shown. It might be
a little bit difficult, and say,
maybe you were only interested in the Materials part
of the stream. Now if you go back now, me saying Material
right there, it will be captioned, it will be
put into the transcript, and you can go ahead
and search for it. And the timestamp
is right next to it. In YouTube,
there is also an option -- you might be familiar
with it as well, since you do stream there -- where you can actually open up
the option to see the transcript,
or the captions live. And if you just click
each section, it would just take you back
to that part of the timeline or the video,
which is really nice. I use it myself to find, oh, I know we talked about that. Let me go and see where
it happened during the stream. So that is really cool. Let's know what you think
of the Livestream today. We have a survey
that I believe Amanda is -- oh, come on, man,
this is awesome! >>Matt: I said, good or bad.
>>Victor: Oh, okay. >>Matt: You just caught the bad.
>>Victor: I only looked over at the bad,
just to be like this. Thumbs down. Yeah, let's know what
you thought of today's stream. Everyone who participates
in the survey and enters their email
has a chance to win a t-shirt through our little
sweepstake there. If you are interested
in visiting, or meeting other developers
that are using Unreal Engine, go ahead and go to
UnrealEngine.com/user-groups, see if there is
a Meetup group in your area. If there is not, but you know some people
in your town or city, wherever you are in the world, or you might be interested
in hosting one -- go ahead and send an email
to Community@UnrealEngine.com, and we will talk you through what it means being
a Meetup group lead, and help you with resources that you might need
for presentations, or maybe finding guests,
and whatnot. Venues are always difficult. I know that myself
from being an old Meetup lead. Even here in Raleigh, it can be tricky
to find a good place to host it. But any questions you have,
please talk to us, and we will try to accommodate
you and your group. Go ahead and visit our online
communities, our forums. The community around Discord
is probably the place that I visit
the most frequently. >>Matt: You've got a Discord? I did not think
you would have a Discord. >>Victor: You don't know
about Unreal Slackers? >>Matt: No.
>>Victor: UnrealSlackers.org. >>Matt: I will be there.
>>Victor: Yeah. We recently hit over
27,000 members, I believe. Our Facebook groups,
as well as Reddit. If you saw the beginning
of the stream, we do our community spotlights.
They are projects around the community
that people are working on. If you want to go ahead and let
us know what you are working on, use the forums,
are a good place. Discord is just a little bit
more fleeing, so it's difficult to catch
what happened, like, last week, last month. >>Matt: It's that active, huh?
>>Victor: Yes, it certainly is. >>Matt: Cool.
I have to go there, okay. >>Victor: Yeah, yeah.
And we've got channels for pretty much everything
on Unreal, which is great. It's where
I've learned a lot. And I've had a lot of people
help me to get through
some serious problems in my projects
throughout the day. >>Matt: I'm missing out. I've got to install Discord,
I guess. >>Victor: Yeah. The forums are
obviously a good place, too, especially, I would say -- >>Matt: You could search
those a little easier. >>Victor: You can
search Discord, too, and you can put in filters
for the -- yeah. Yeah. So the search
has actually gotten really good. But the forums are good if you
are sort of writing a tutorial, and you want it
to be everlasting, and you want to link to it. But if you have
a quick problem, or you just want to sort of
discuss a workflow, or a tool inside of the Engine,
Discord is a great place. If you are streaming on Twitch, make sure you use
the Unreal Engine category, so we can follow along,
and everyone is excited and knows
what you are working on. Follow us on social media. And today, my special thanks,
of course, goes out to Matt for coming on,
and all of you for having -- everyone in Chat
for making it such a good time. It was a pleasure hanging out
with you all today. >>Matt: Good names. Good naming. >>Victor: Next week, we have
a company called Praxinos. They are developing a tool
which is called ILIAD. It stands for Image Layering
Architecture something -- I should probably remember that, although I prefer
the shortened version of ILIAD. It's basically a painting
plugin in Unreal Engine that allows you
to author Textures. And very similar
to how I had done it in Blender, when you paint on the Texture
inside Unreal Engine, you can see it immediately
appear on the UV Texture on the model,
which is really cool. And you can actually author
the brushes using Blueprints. >>Matt: Is it run-time?
>>Victor: Yes. >>Matt: Ooh.
>>Victor: Sorry, no. It's Editor time,
so it's real-time. >>Matt: Okay.
So it's an Editor tool. >>Victor: I'm not entirely sure
if it packages out. I don't think so.
But if you want to know, you will find out next week,
when they come on. >>Matt: There it is.
>>Victor: I think with that, I think it's time
to say goodbye, because we've been on an hour
and 45 minutes now. So thank you so much again,
Matt, for coming. You all have a great week, and we will see you again
next Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time.
Bye, everyone!
