>>Amanda: Hi, everyone. Ready to see what's
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PS4 and Xbox One. Thanks for tuning in to
this week's news and community spotlight. >>Victor: Hi everyone, and welcome
to Inside Unreal, a weekly show where we learn, explore, and
celebrate everything Unreal. I'm your host Victor Brodin and my guests today are
Pipeline Developer James Baber and Senior Technical
Animator Kaye Vassey. Welcome back to the studio. It's not too long ago that
you were here, actually. Yeah, thanks. Almost a month to the day. And we're back to
cover a little bit more about the Blender to Unreal
tools that we are developing. >>Kaye: Absolutely. So yeah, last time we
talked about Send to Unreal. And now we're moving
on to that second part that we promised, which is what
we're calling UE to Rigify. And it's just a little demo
and some under the hood sort of show and tell. And so we can jump right in. >>Victor: Yeah, let's do it. >>James: Yeah. Like what Kaye said,
last time we spent time on sending stuff to the Engine. This time we're going to spend
most of our time inside Blender with this tool
working on rigging. So kind of how I
did last time, I'm just going to quickly
demo what the tool does. And then we'll dive down into
it and talk about how it works. So you go into Blender. I'm going to import an FBX. And this is just the
mannequin character that's exported directly from Engine. So here we have the
mannequin character. And so when you import
the mannequin character, the bone orientations
aren't correct. Or they're just--
really, they're different than
how Blender's bone orientations are calculated. So we have a tool that will
basically take this character, and it will convert the
bones, regardless of what orientation they come in with. And then now we have a
Rigified Control Rig. And we can now animate
on this character and make our
animations for Engine. So what I'm going to do-- so I'm just going
to go over here. I'm going to key the location
rotation on his hand. I'm also just going to enable
the IK/FK controls from Rigify. And then I'm going to jump
forward about 40 frames. We're just going to add
another location key frame. Let's go here. And then let's take
this hand up here. Let's go up here. >>Victor: Doing a little wave? >>James: Yeah, have a little
wave animation here. And this is really just
to demo the IK controls that we have now with-- since we converted
to a Rigify rig. So now we have
this nice animation with him waving his hand. And then all we need to do
is send it over to Engine. And so I just had
that same hotkey I had in the last stream. And I just sent this
animation over to Engine. And so you can see,
here we are now. We have the mannequin, and
he's got our animation on him. So there is a lot that's kind
of going on in the background that you're not
seeing with this tool. And I'm going to
go over it here. And I have a PowerPoint
slide to kind of help explain this a little bit. Because it may seem a
little bit much at first. But you basically have
these modes on your rig. And there's five modes. And so I'm going to go
ahead and just pull up this PowerPoint
and kind of explain to you why there's five
modes and what each of them are doing. So working in Blender,
as Blender users, you guys are familiar with
working in modes and things like that on objects. And this is very similar. It's a three step process. But we have five modes. Because the original mode,
which we're calling source mode, is the original
state of your rig. So when you import
something, we're considering that
just the source. That's your source rig. And then when we get all the
way over to the end, which is a Control Rig, which I was
just making an animation with, that's what we're
considering control mode. So we have source
mode and control mode, which is really just the same
thing as your original rig and your Rigify rig. But we're just labeling
those things for you. And then the three phases
in building all the pieces that you need to get
from source to control are the edit metarig,
the FK to source, and then the source
to deform modes. And what the modes
are doing is all they're doing is hiding and
showing certain objects. And they're toggling
on certain settings that makes it a little easier
for you to edit in those modes. And it's also controlling
the state of your changes that you're making to
your entire mapping. So we have templates. And I'm going to go into
this as we progress. But just to kind of
summarize, we have the source, we have edit metarig, which is
we are actually adding bones. We are changing the
position of bones or modifying their Rigify types. And that's what you
do in metarig mode. And for those of you who
are familiar with Rigify, I think this will be pretty-- or you guys know what
editing a metarig is. And then the two modes
that we kind of introduced are this FK to source and
then this source to deform. And both of those modes are
modes where you map nodes. So we have what are
called bone nodes. And the bone nodes are drawing
relationships between the rigs and-- or they're drawing
constraint relationships. So based on the mappings
you create here, we have our FK bones, which get
constrained to the source, so our original rig. And then we have
our source rig that gets constrained to the deform. So what we're going to demo
first is source to deform. But the reason you
need two mappings is if you have animation
existing on your rig, you first need to bind all
your FKs to your original rig. And then, after you
have those bones bound to the original rig, then
you can copy over animation. And then we need our source
rig to be driven by Rigify. So that's why we have a mapping
that's source to deform. And so don't worry if this
sounds like a little much right now. Because as we go, it's
going to gradually-- I think it's going
to kind of clear up. And you'll understand it. Because it's some
terminology that's new. And we're just going to go
through it one step at a time. But this is kind of the
high level overview. >>Kaye: Yeah, so one thing
I want to jump in and add, too, is the slides that
James made definitely give you the overview,
like we're saying. If we want to get in sort
of under under the hood and really look at
what's going on, it's really not all
that complicated. The problem is, as
everybody complains about, when you bring our
mannequin into Blender, you get the bones sort of
sticking out in odd directions. Because that's the way
we had it rigged in Maya. And what the head
and tail positioner is representing is the
LRAs for the joint, right, the local rotation axes. So if you just
create a Rigify rig and then go to your
constraints and start trying to constrain
things up, it's not going to work
because of those LRAs. You can't just make IK
on the Unreal mannequin. And you can't easily constrain
the Rigify deform bones to drive the Unreal
mannequin, which is where the crux of the
process, like the good stuff, lives. And so just real
quickly, from a rigging standpoint for all
the riggers out there or technical animators,
what's going on is there are two sets of
empties that are created. And they're created, initially,
in the same space as the bone that they are going to drive. And then they are transformed
so that they line up with each other. And then that sort of bakes
in those relative offsets. And then the constraining
happens between the empties. And so that's where
the real sort of glue is between your rigs. We don't really have to go
too much deeper into that. But basically, what from
what I just told you, you could easily
sort of create this if you have the
resources and time. But that's how we're doing it. And what that allows
us to do is give you a reconstructable control
rig for a character that you pull from Engine. So anything that you get
off the Marketplace, which was originally the
point of doing this, starting with the mannequin,
but then any character that you get off the Marketplace
will run in this process. And right now,
we are slightly more married to Rigify. But there's no reason
that you have to be. And so that's what's going
on under under the hood. And it's represented
really, really well by the node tree in the node
editor that James set up. So-- >>James: Yeah, so--
yeah, like Kaye said, we're using
Rigify for this. This is really a mapping system. So we used Rigify
because that's free. It comes with Blender. But the idea was experimenting
with a modular rigging system and mapping between two. And we would like to do other
things or more custom things than Rigify. But right now, Rigify was
a really easy thing to use. And it's available already. So that's what we did. And this is a work in progress. So there's known
issues and things like that we're working through. But we're going to demo
what we have for you today. And hopefully you guys enjoy
seeing some progress on this. >>Kaye: While you're
bringing that up, I want to say one
other thing too. So once James starts going
through this second part of the demo, one
thing to keep in mind is you're going to
hear us say template. And he's going to
be using a template and showing you a template. The reason that that
one button press worked was because there was already
a template that existed for the Unreal mannequin. And so as you get into
custom characters, we'll be showing you
how you create that by hand on custom characters. But from this system-- I mean, James, we
can totally disagree, but I think that I would say
the deliverable of this addon is really the template. And so what that
allows you to do is if you have work that
you're going to be handing off to animators on a small team,
they can have the addon, and you can pass
them the template for a character that your
rigger or that you have set up. And that allows them to
go and do essentially what James did with the
mannequin in the first part of the demo, which is bring in
the template, and hit convert. And they're ready to
animate and send animation directly to Unreal. And so that's sort of where
the power of this comes in. Because we're not passing
around a character rig file, necessarily, which is
something that's super common. And you get into
referencing and whatnot. This is really just
about that template and how UE to Rigify works
with the template data that we give it. And we're also--
you know, you can't forget that this
is also about how UE to Rigify integrates
with Send to Unreal. And so I'm going to
let James take it. >>James: Yeah, so,
like Kaye said, we have the mannequin
template for you. This is just basically
the premade template that comes with this
addon for the mannequin. And so you see that we
had the run animation. And we copied it over. And all of the
animations baked over. Now we have a keyed rig. But I like to work
with the animation on the rig in this process. Because you can see the
constraints being created. Like Kaye said, there's
not-- there's nothing super complicated about this. It's really just constraining
one bone to another. And that's what this node
relationship allows us to do. So what we want to
do for this character right here is if we were
to create our own custom template-- well, actually, let
me first show you what this template consists of. So if we go here to
the actual modes here, you can see that we have our-- like I showed in the
slide, we have this mode where we can go in here and we
can tweak the actual metarig. So we can add, remove, change
the Rigify types on this bone here. And that controls the actual
process of generating bones. We can go to our FK to source. And here's our
node tree for that. So you can see here,
here's our spine mapping. So here's all the spine
bones that are mapping up. Right now I have--
this node right here I made is for the tweaks. So you have the spine tweaks
on the Rigify rig that are being mapped to our source. Then here's just the spine bones
and different things like that. I have the legs, et cetera,
fingers, and arms, and hand. So this is what we
would be building, or we're going to be building
throughout the course of just this demo. And then this is the
source to deform. So we're first
going to start here. And we're going to build our
source to deform mapping. Once we have that,
we can basically do what I showed you in
the beginning of the demo, is we can animate
on our character. And the original source rig will
be driven by our Rigify rig. So with that being said, I'm
just going to go back here. And instead of selecting
the Unreal mannequin, we're just going to create
the whole thing from-- or we'll create most of it
from scratch here on the demo, just so you have an idea of
what this process looks like. So this may look familiar to
some you guys that use Rigify. This is just one of the
starter templates on Rigify. So we have the basic human. We have the quadruped, and then
the bird, and cat, horse, and-- I'm going to zoom out
a little bit here. So with 2.8, they added
some more rig mods, which was nice in the
new Rigify update. But we give you the
option to select from one of these
starter rigs that are available just with Rigify. So what I'm going to do
is, just for sake of time, I'll just do
without the fingers. >>Kaye: Yeah, so basic
human with no fingers. >>James: And I think that
that will give you guys a pretty good idea
of the process. >>Kaye: Yeah. >>James: So what I would do is I'm
just going to call this Demo. Let's see. So I have a new metarig. And so now you can see that
from my template dropdown, I have Demo. And this is what we're
going to be modifying. And so if I look at this
now, just to show you, if I go into this mode, first
of all, he's-- this is too tall. These aren't linked up
to any of the bones. Same thing here. So what we need to do is we need
to get our metarig to match up with our source rig. So your-- where you would
start is in edit metarig mode. So for this, I'm just going to-- >>Kaye: I-- before you
start editing the metarig, I do want to say, as well,
that this is the point where if you jump into your
preferences for the addon, since we're talking
about the template, and you mentioned that the
template is in the pull-down, the controls for importing
and exporting the template are in the prefs
for UE to Rigify. >>James: Yeah, actually, I
can show that real quick. >>Kaye: Yeah, let's just
take a look at that. >>James: So yeah, so we're going
through how to build a custom template, right? But once you've built
a custom template, what if you want to share it
with someone else on your team? So that's why you have these
import and export options. So we could go in here. And I can select
this Demo template. And then I can export
this as a zip file. And then I can share that
with someone else on my team and be like, hey, I made
one for another character. And they just import it. And then now they
have that template. And all they have to do
is hit the convert button. They can copy over animations. They can animate with the new
control scheme or whatever. And in-- yeah, here,
they just import here. Yeah, so with
that, let's just go into making our own
mannequin template. So we're in edit metarig mode. And now there's a
lot of back and forth between this whole process. And that's why
when we made this, we thought it'd be
good to have modes. Because it's just this constant
process of, oh, did it work? Does it match up? Does it look right? No, we need to go
back and change stuff. And so that's what
you'll have to do. But since I've done
this a few times, I know that we don't
need those bones. And then this extra head
bone can be deleted. >>Kaye: For anyone that
may be in the stream right now that's sort
of new to Blender and using this as
a sort of tutorial, we should just quickly
mention that the reason James was able to select
that one chest bone and delete the other
side at the same time was because of
Blender's x-mirroring. That has nothing to do with us. That is all in the tool itself. >>James: Yeah, so there's some
view options, or some hiding, or, like this, in metarig
mode, I automatically turn on x-axis mirroring
for you since characters should be symmetrical. But you can always remove
that if you don't want it. But it just makes-- some that stuff makes it easier
for you to tweak and modify stuff. So, yeah-- >>Kaye: We should also ask and
make sure that, graphically, on the stream, they can
see the spheres that you have representing the
imported rig from UE4. They're a little bit
hard for us to see here-- >>James: Yeah, the
display's a little-- >>Kaye: --on our screen. So hopefully you
guys are seeing that. But the bones that
James is snapping to are based on the positions
of the original Unreal rig that we brought in. >>James: Yeah, and so this is-- you know, it's a kind
of tedious process, and especially with larger rigs. It's just one of
those things that you have to go through and
kind of figure out. But it's just-- >>Victor: Hopefully
only once, though. >>James: Yeah, so hopefully once
you get it how you want it, then you should be set. And it'll be as easy as what
we demoed in the beginning. It's just you hit convert,
and you're ready to go. So there's our clavicles. >>Victor: And would this be
a similar workflow in case you were working on a different
skeleton that was not Manny? >>James: Yeah, so-- >>Kaye: Absolutely. >>James: So yeah, this is-- this
will work exactly the same for any rig that
you're pulling out of. >>Kaye: Yep. >>James: Not even Unreal-- any application. >>Kaye: Yeah, this is-- you know, again, the thought
process behind this tool and workflow is really so
that if you have the ability to get bones and weights out
of your game Engine in an FBX format or however you could
import it into Blender-- if you have bones and weights,
this should hook up to Rigify in this
case and allow you to move it, and animate
it, and get it back to your engine of choice. We make it a little bit easier
to go to Unreal, of course. But it's meant to be
somewhat generic in that way. >>James: Yeah, and
sometimes I like to turn on the mesh to see
where some of this stuff is. But you'll see me do that. Sometimes I'll toggle a mesh on. And sometimes I'll
toggle it off. >>Kaye: I mean, you're really
making good progress live as-- pretty quickly. It wouldn't take
someone that long to-- >>James: Yeah, I mean, once
you're familiar with the tool, this is not a super, super
long process, which is great. >>Victor: Just letting
everyone know that we'll cover questions
a little bit later, at the end of the stream. >>Kaye: Absolutely, yeah. >>Victor: Unless they are
relevant immediately to what James is
working on, then we'll take them as they come. >>Kaye: Yeah, this demo,
you know, obviously we have-- you guys got a little
bit of a preview of what you can do with
importing animation, which is super powerful. And we will be going over
that as well as maybe some non-mannequin characters-- hint, hint-- in the
next stream or so. >>Victor: Yes, we-- >>Kaye: We want to leave plenty
of time today for questions. Because this is probably going
to generate at least a few. >>Victor: And we do have
another stream planned at the end of the month. >>Kaye: Absolutely. >>James: Yeah, so what I like to
do sometimes with this is you can see that there is
a lot of overlapping bones here from our other character. So I usually like to go into
edit mode with both rigs. And then I'm just going
to start hiding these ones that I find that are IKs
so I don't get confused. >>Victor: What's the
keyboard shortcut for that? >>James: You just go
back to object mode. Select both of them. Yeah, and if people
don't know, in 2.8, now they let you
get into edit mode with multiple objects,
which is nice. And so I'm going to
just snap that there. And then I'm going to snap
this to the ball of the foot. And then I'm going to
turn on that mesh again to see where the heel is. >>Victor: And so you're
doing this manually with a skeleton in
the 3D viewport. And then the tool will
create the nodes for you. And you sort of use them more as
a visual reference to what you did earlier when were
looking at the bones? >>James: So yeah,
we'll get to the part where we're creating the nodes. So we actually create the nodes. >>Victor: OK. >>James: And we define
those relationships. But once we have
those nodes created, they're saved with the template. And then people can just
click that convert button. >>Victor: And,
generally, you do want to have a similar
skeleton that you're working on for your
characters in the game, right? You're not using a-- >>James: A horse template
or-- yeah, yeah. >>Kaye: If you're going
to do a quadruped, you still sort of
should, in this case, be a little bit familiar
with Rigify's versions of those characters
or character types and pick the appropriate one. >>James: Yeah, and
for those of you who don't, or haven't
used Rigify before, it-- basically, they have
things called samples. And each chain
has a Rigify type. So if you're in
pose mode, you can see that the Rigify type
here is a super limb. And there's some settings here. And so that's how it knows how
to build those correct IK/FKs on the leg, or on the arm, or-- you know, we had
the spine, which is a different type
called basic spine. So that's just Rigify stuff. And they have their own
documentation and stuff for that. But I thought I'd
just touch on that. >>Kaye: Yeah, that's a good
point. We are definitely not giving
Rigify instructions here as far as any of that goes. Hopefully you guys, when
you get to use the tool, will be pretty well versed
in Rigify and able to-- >>James: And there's some
nice tutorials online. >>Kaye: Absolutely, yeah. >>James: And so I'm
looking at this. And I think-- well,
yeah, and I think we've got the head and stuff. So this is looking
pretty good to me. I'm just going to save this. And we can always go back to it. We can always go
back to that mode. But I'm going to go ahead
and just switch over to source to deform. And that's actually
looking pretty good to me as far as the structure of
the mannequin's skeleton. And so now it's just a-- this is where the real meat and
potatoes of this tool comes in. And that's the actual
quickly and rapidly building constraints with-- we'll see it in visual nodes. And so I will show
you that process. So we have a completely
blank node tree right here. >>Kaye: Oh, and that's a good
thing, too, in case people change their UI. I've been playing with this
a lot, as you can imagine. And I always end up
moving things in the UI, or hitting something I'm used
to and having to get back. So I do think it's a
good idea to show them in the node editor, in
the pull-down right there that allows you to
choose what gets created, which is the bone
remapping nodes. >>James: Yeah, so-- >>Kaye: That's going to get
added to your Blender session. >>James: Yeah, so you now have
the bone remapping nodes editor view. What happens is you get
this one node tree instance. So that will automatically
get generated for you. And if you have this window
on your active screen, that will become
the active tree. So you shouldn't have to worry
about setting that dropdown unless you open up the window-- you know, you flip
workspaces and open up another window or something. But if that's the
active tree, it's just going to toggle
that on and off for you. But on this tree, we're going
to start adding some rig nodes. And the way we do
that is we just select which nodes we want to
constrain to our deform bones. So those of you who
don't know, Rigify has the actual control
bones, like your IK/FKs. And then the ones-- the IK and FK controls are
driving these def bones. They have that post fix
def in front of them. And that's for defamation. And so that's what's
actually-- deforms your rig. And there's no skinning here. But we're just going to
constrain our source rig directly to the deform bones. So it's going to basically
get that same effect. So what we do is I-- all these little red bones
here are our source bones. So we basically need
to do red to green. We want to take just
this upper arm L, and we want to map it to
just this def upper arm. So I'm going to hit Alt-1. And I get two options
from my pie menu. And I'm going to link selected. So you can see here,
now our arm is linked. And as we start
linking this arm up, you'll see that it's starting
to constrain to that rest position. That's another thing that
we do, is we just pop this into rest position. And then if you have a
skeleton with animation, you can start seeing it's
going to be confined. And when you're in this
mode, when you're finished, you should be able to scrub
through your entire animation. And your rig should
not move at all. Because it should be completely
constrained, if you've done it right, to your deformation rig. And so we're just going
to continue linking these. And so now we have
a full arm linked. And this is just good
practice to just organize your node tree. Because you can get a
lot, especially when you get to bigger rigs. And it's important
to stay organized. So we have these two operations. And we're working on adding
some more to even speed up this process. But what I like to do is
hit this combine nodes. And there's also
align node sockets, which I'll show you later. But I like to just add
this to my quick favorites. Actually, I'll add both of
these to my quick favorites. Then I'll just hide that
so I have more space. But yeah, so we have this. I'm just going to hit F2. And I'm going to rename
this to left arm. And I'm not going
to be this thorough during the entire
presentation here. But I want to show you that
this is how you should do it. You should combine
stuff, and then you would rename it appropriately
so that when you go back to it or when someone else
takes a look at your tree they can figure it out. So I won't do too much of that. But I just wanted to let
you know that that's there and that's the
ideal way to work. And then another thing
to note is you have-- Rigify calls them tweak bones. On this particular
mannequin rig, they call them twist bones. So there are some twist
bones that we need to map to our deformation bones. And I usually like to keep
those in a separate little node group. So if you look here-- and this is where the attention
to detail's important. You can see there's
two bones here. This one is a twist. So we need a twist to actually
be mapped to another node here. So now our twist is mapped. And then also, there's
another arm twist right here in the middle. >>Victor: What's the
shortcut you're using to-- >>James: And I'm
just hitting Alt-1. Alt-1 brings up that
pie menu for linking. >>Kaye: Which is a part of the
addon when you're in this mode. >>Victor: OK. >>James: Yeah. >>Kaye: Yeah, so you will have
access to that when you're in this mode in this addon. >>James: Yeah, and then
I would just combine. And what I'd do is I would
just name these tweaks-- left tweaks, which,
you get the idea. So I usually like
to just separate out what are my actual source bones. And here's the
source twist bones. And here's the source-- or
the control tweak bones. So that's just organization. But let's just go ahead
and do the other arm. And I'll go a little faster. >>Victor: This is still
a lot faster than the-- than a different
workflow, right? >>Kaye: Yeah, oh, yeah. It really does not take long
to get something usable, especially if you're talking
about fast prototyping or if you want to get to-- if you're in a group
project, or you're doing something for
your school and you want to get to game
play stuff, and you want to get to figuring
out some of those things, this is really a quick
way to get it in there. >>Victor: But there's
no reason why you wouldn't be able
to use it in production for a large project
as well, right? >>Kaye: Absolutely,
yeah, absolutely. >>James: Well, and
like we were saying, too, is this isn't just an
Unreal to Blender thing. If you have any DCC
that is making a rig, and those local rotation axes
are different than Blender's, this can be that
translation layer as far as you could have usable-- someone working in Maya,
they hand something over, and then you convert it. And as long as you've
already made your mapping, they can make animations. And you can pull
their animations in. >>Victor: OK. >>Kaye: Yeah, I mean, it's the-- I know the tech
anim group gets so tired of hearing me say
this, but it's ultimately-- when you break all
of the DCC apps down and you get to just 3D graphics,
it's bones and weights. So it's whatever that
relationship is, wherever it came from, be it a DCC app-- which for anybody watching
that doesn't know, that's like Maya, Max,
Houdini, Cinema 4D-- are there more? Am I missing-- I'm probably
missing one besides, obviously, Blender. But that's what we
mean when we say DCC apps any of the game engines-- bones and weights,
that's all you need. And, I mean, technically,
you don't need weights. But I don't know
too many people that really love weight painting. I know we have a few
here that love it. But it's kind of a rare find. >>James: And so you can see,
as we're constraining it, he's starting to basically get
into that rest position, which is a nice indicator that
we're doing this correctly. >>Kaye: Once you're going,
you just don't want to stop, do you? It's like, just a little
bit-- just one more bone. Just two more bones. Just two more. >>Victor: You gotta
catch 'em all, right? >>Kaye: Right, you
gotta catch 'em all. You gotta rig 'em all. >>James: And here's another
one of those areas that's a little confusing. You've got to watch
the names there. That's an IK, which we
don't want to map to. And then that's just
another regular bone. >>Kaye: I definitely, too-- while James is sort
of finishing this up, I would reiterate, get under
the hood with Rigify itself, even if you don't have
this addon from us, to understand how adding-- you know, using one
of their templates, adding bones to that, how
that works, the types. He and I were just working
through one of the examples we're going to show
in a later stream. And it was us figuring out what
those options in Rigify were and how they
affected everything. And so that's really important. >>James: Yeah, it's really just
a game of learning the sample types and what the settings do. Yeah, this-- the
mannequin, actually, we didn't have to really
change that much on the Rigify settings. Or really, we
didn't really change any settings besides
deleting and removing bones. But sometimes, for
a more custom rig, which we're going to
talk about those later, you have to do that. And so you might get a little
more exposure to those settings in Rigify. But it's important to
know how that works. And so he's looking
pretty good to me. I'm going to scrub through
the timeline real quick. And-- oh, see it? See right there? >>Victor: Yeah, I saw that. >>James: His chest is moving. And that's because these two
clavicles weren't mapped. So that's why I like
doing it with animation is you can catch things
like that pretty easily when you have animation on it. So now I'm scrubbing through. I don't see anything moving. And I don't even think the
fingers were animated anyways. So yeah, I think we're good. So I'm going to
just test this out. And there's no need to
worry about getting it right the first time. Because it's just toggling
through the modes. And if something's not
right, we'll fix it. So I'm going to go
over to control. And you can see now there's
the mannequin character. >>Kaye: And James, while
you're going through this, let's talk about
what is going on with the template at
this point after you've started doing this work. >>James: So yeah, basically,
what the template is-- let's turn this off. Yeah, OK, so there we go. We have an arm. There's your arm working. And if we do our legs,
there is that foot roll. So you can see, very quickly,
we built the mannequin template. And now we don't ever
have to do that again. We just hit that convert button. And then the only other
thing we'd have to do is build a mapping
to the FKs so that we can ensure that we
can pull animation off of an existing rig. But back to what you
were saying was that-- with the templates,
this whole process is possible because when
you switch to control mode and you're converting,
what the tool is doing is it's saying, OK, so I'm
going to constrain everything. I'm going to constrain
all my FKs to my source. I'm going to go through
a baking process. So I'm going to get
all those key frames. And then I'm going to delete
all those constraints. I'm going to switch to
source to deform mode. I'm going to constrain
everything to that. And because that has key frames,
that rest pose is not just the blank rest pose. It actually is the action pose. Because it's not in rest pose
in the baking process there. So now it's just constraining
to that run animation that you made. And then it-- you're
driving the original. But you also have the key
frames from the run animation. And so at that point,
it's just, OK, I'm going to modify the arm or
something like that, delete the key frames
that I didn't want. But you have the
animation information. >>Kaye: And so once you've
got it to this point and your quote unquote rigging
is done, which is really more template building for
your project production team, et cetera, you
just want to make sure that you export it and save it. >>James: Yeah, and
now we just, like we said before, you just go up
there, export that template, and you can share that with
other people on your team. So we could go into
the socket mapping. Or we can do questions, or-- >>Kaye: Yeah, let's-- what are
our questions looking like? >>Victor: Most of them
are relatively generic. But we can go through a
couple of them if you'd like. >>Kaye: Yeah, let's
see some questions. >>Victor: They were
curious if you were planning on making a
Live Link with Blender like the one for Maya. >>James: Yeah, so I think we kind
of touched on this a little bit in the last stream. What we're doing is just
like an FBX export/import. And you can get--
and I think people have been seeing
that you can get pretty close to the same
effect as the Live Link. The advantage of doing
an actual FBX file is that it may not be as
responsive as far as, I can move an arm and instantly
see it moving in Engine in real time, but you
can tweak the animation, export it, and see it update. But the big benefit is you
can actually modify meshes. You can modify the actual
state of the object. Like we can modify the
weights and all that stuff that you're not going to be able
to do on just a Live Link where it's linking certain objects
and things like that. >>Victor: So even if
you had the Live Link, you'd still want a
workflow like this to be able to fully work
around the character? >>James: Yeah. >>Kaye: Absolutely. >>James: I mean, Live Link's
really great for setting up scenes and stuff and having-- say I have lights in Blender,
and lights in Unreal and things like that. But when it comes to actually
modifying the meshes, modifying the weights,
things like that, you need to pull a new asset. And so that's just kind of
why we're doing it this way. >>Victor: I think we
touched on this a little briefly in the last stream. But they're curious if the addon
will support materials as well. >>James: Right now it doesn't. So it's just whatever FBX-- well, whatever you can
export with an FBX file, that's what we'll do. For the most part, you should
be building your materials in Engine. But I mean, it's a good thought. >>Kaye: Mm-hmm, yeah. >>Victor: Someone's curious
why you would use something like this over Mixamo? >>James: So this would be--
so this is actually-- would be great with Mixamo. >>Victor: OK. >>Kaye: Absolutely. >>James: So with Mixamo, I can
bring in a character, right? And they might be in an
idle pose or something. But I want to customize that. So when you bring in
a Mixamo character, you're going to have kind
of the same-ish dilemma. The bones don't come
in quite as messed up as they do when they're
coming from Unreal, but you still, you want a
Control Rig to move those. So I could take my Mixamo
idle animation and say, I want to make him move
his arms, or something. I can just click
the convert button, and then edit my Mixamo
animation to customize it just a little bit. >>Victor: Just like you did
with the mannequin here. >>James: Just like I did
with the mannequin-- and then you could send
that over to Unreal. >>Kaye: The other thing,
too, is that the idea behind UE to Rigify
and Send to Unreal is to sort of work within the
Unreal ecosystem, to a degree, as well. And so we're very sort of
focused on the Marketplace and what's out there for our
Unreal users and licensees in the Marketplace to
be able to get down. >>Victor: That was actually
my next question was is it possible to re-target
Marketplace animations to Rigify? >>James: Yeah. >>Kaye: Absolutely,
that's what we're doing. >>James: Yeah, that's what
this was designed for, yeah. >>Victor: And the same,
there were a couple of questions regarding
motion capture files, you know, you name it. If you have
animations in Blender, you can use UE to Rigify, too. >>Kaye: So yeah, again, I'm
going to sort of go back to that bones and
weights things, right? So it's just very bottom
level, like low level 3D graphics, bones and weights. And if you have a way to get
those moving, be it mo-cap, be it some proprietary format,
if you can get those bones and weights moving inside of
Blender in some cohesive way, it's really no different
than bringing in an FBX. We're not-- you
know, once you import an FBX of the mannequin
or some other character from the Marketplace,
there is no magic there. It's just Blender
doing its thing. And then we're sort of
respecting it and hooking Rigify up to it in a novel way. And so-- >>James: Well, yeah, and
that's a good point that she mentioned with
the format is with-- you just need the weights. And so you could-- Blender, you can
import GTLF 2.0. >>Kaye: Absolutely. >>James: So you could
import a rig with that. And it would work the same way. The position of the
bones would be different. But it doesn't matter, because
it's just the joint position that matters. >>Kaye: Yeah, I
mean, any character that you bring into this
that's not the mannequin, you're going to have to do the
process that James just demoed, which we have on the docket
to show you guys with some fun examples soon. So it's pretty open to-- if you can get a model and it
animating inside of Blender, I don't see why you
couldn't get it in, right? And I would-- and
that's sort of-- that gets into another area,
too, where as a AAA game Dev studio, when were talking
about sending materials and things like that via
these tools, currently, the UE to Rigify relationship
with Send to Unreal is a very sort of tech anim
animation related tool set and relationship. And so we're looking at it
from the way that we work, which is very sort of
compartmentalized where you're going to bring in-- as the
animation and tech anim group, you're going to be bringing in
a skeleton through a skel mesh. And you're going to be setting
up things like physics. And you're going to be setting
up things like anim BPs. And so we are not trying to
design materials in this tool and get them into UE. That is not what we
are coming at this. That's not the angle that
we're approaching this from. We're actually coming at it from
more of a tech anim animation side, where I need to get this
character asset in there. I need to make sure that it
has a skeleton, and a physics asset, and all those sorts of
things in Engine, first of all. And then I need to move it. How am I going to move it? Or I'm going to have to
outsource to this group who has a lot of
animation potential, but they don't
have Maya licenses. And they can only use Blender. How in the world are they going
to get animation into my game? And they-- I can't give
them Maya licenses, right? Well, you send them a
template and this addon. And, ultimately,
they just need to be able to get that animation
into the game, right? So that's really where
we're coming from. >>Victor: They were curious
if this will tie-in with Control Rig at some point. >>Kaye: Oh, that's
a good question. I don't know. That's hard to answer right now. Control Rig is really awesome. And it's super cool. And it is on its way. And I guess we'll just have to
wait and see when that really gets to its ultimate form. It's going to be
amazing, though. The users of UE4 are super
lucky heading into the future. So we'll take a look for sure. >>Victor: They did ask about
quadruped and four-legged models or creatures with
multiple numbers of limbs-- still, same workflow. >>Kaye: Hang in there, hint,
hint. Yeah, that is totally
possible and totally happening at my desk right now. And so we will have
it for you very soon. >>Victor: More
generic question, is the tool geared more towards
studios versus solo indie devs? >>Kaye: It could be
either, honestly. I mean, I gave sort
of an off the cuff example right now where
you have a studio that may be in a position to reach
out to a studio or group who have all the talent in the
world and none of the budget for other 3D software. This will allow you to give them
a game asset and animate it. And so that animator
could be a student. That animator could be a 20
year veteran of the animation industry and game industry. And as long as they know how
to animate and Rigify and know how to set keys and
get you Blend files, you can get that
animation in your game. I don't see why
it would stop you. >>Victor: Something
they're saying is if they'd like to
practice and get prepared for the workflow that
will eventually be available, they should start
practicing with some of the basic Rigify tutorials
that Blender have available. >>Kaye: Absolutely, yeah. If you're-- I will say this. This tool, again, as I
mentioned, is sort of-- it's a lot of tech anim with
a little bit of animation on the side, as
far as what you're going to be dealing with. And so it would be good if
you're going to be sort of-- I'm going to use air
quotes-- but a power user to jump in to Rigify as it
currently exists in the latest release of Blender, and
understand how those rigs are set up and the phases
that you can get them into as far as building,
generating your rig based on the metarig,
what that does to the assets in Blender,
what that looks like, what you're actually doing. Rigify generates a ton
of bones or joints. And they each have
a different prefix. And they're sort of used
for different things. And so as much Rigify knowledge
as you can possibly get, that's just going
to be advantageous. That's, I mean-- >>James: And yeah--
and for people that-- I don't know what Rigify is--
what we're talking about, and I should've mentioned
this before is-- >>Kaye: Oh, good call. >>James: We have this
Rigify addon activated. And so that's an addon
available with the latest version of Blender. And so you just need
to activate Rigify. And then you just need
to basically learn how this addon works to
accurately build those-- that Control Rig. But I should've mentioned that,
is that we have this addon activated. >>Kaye: And you do-- just to underline and star
what James is saying-- you do have to activate
Rigify every time you get a new version of Blender. >>James: Yeah, by
default, it's inactive. >>Kaye: I always forget that. Every time I go, I'm like,
oh, a new version of Blender! And I download it. And it's like, oh, my
god, this is so great. I can't wait to get
in here and play. And then I realize,
I'm like, oh, I didn't do any of the addons. I didn't do any
of my preferences. And so it's always a-- you know. >>Victor: Do you have a
good workflow for that, or is it normally a-- >>Kaye: I mean, I'm sure
there's some awesome workflow. And I bet James knows it. But for me, it's like
the, ah, crap, I forgot. And then I just sit there,
and do it, and save it. And, you know, I do it once. And I try to remember,
next time, I gotta do that. And I always forget. >>Victor: I think we walked
through most of the questions we had for now. >>James: OK. >>Kaye: Cool. >>James: Should we keep moving? >>Kaye: I mean, we've got a
little bit of time left. So we should probably show him
some animation on this guy. >>James: OK. >>Kaye: And drop into Engine. >>James: Yeah, let's do that. So with that, I'm just
going to go ahead. I'm going to open up a new file. And one thing to note
is that template is not saved in your Blender file. It's actually
cached in the addon. So all that stuff we
worked on is still there. >>Victor: Chat did ask
you if you saved. >>James: Yeah, and so every
time I switch a mode, it will save the state. So if I'm in edit metarig
mode and I switch, my metarig gets saved. If I'm editing some nodes,
I switch to another mode, the nodes gets saved. Even on links, when links
are made, it gets saved. So there's a-- it's
saving at every point. >>Kaye: But just to
reiterate, that is-- that's saving in
the addon, caching in the addon and the template. >>James: Yes. >>Kaye: Yes, so not
the Blend file. So what that does--
that's a little bit weird to think about. But what it's actually-- the advantage there is, like I
said, the deliverable of this is really that template
for this character. And that allows you to
just send that zip file to someone who has the addon. And they can load the
model with the bones and then just
activate the template. And they can rig the
character and animate it. Now, you can save-- that's one thing
to note, as well. If you're animating
on a Blend file, and you need to
walk away, or you get a crash, or
anything like that, your animation is saved
in the Blend file. And you can always get it back. But we're not
storing any of that in a sort of monolithic Blend
file or anything like that. It's all about the
addon and the template. >>James: Yeah, so I think how
we'll finish this off is just taking animation from Engine,
importing it, and then modifying it, and then
sending it back over to Engine so you can see how that looks. So what I've done here-- this is a little bit of a
review from our last stream-- but I'm using the import on
reference skeleton option. And I just pasted in the
full path, the game path to the skeleton
I want to map to. And this is mapping
to the mannequin. And then I also am activating
that integrate with UE to Rigify addon. So that's basically
going to make it behave slightly differently. And it's going to do some
animation transfer on that Send to Unreal process. So it just makes that whole
iteration loop faster and less steps in between. But what I'm going to
do is I'm going to-- well, actually, I'm going to
keep Blender maximized for now. I'm going to import FBX. I'm just going to
import the run. >>Kaye: And this run was
exported via UE4 from the-- >>James: Yeah, so there is
absolutely nothing changed with this file, other--
it just came directly from an Unreal export FBX. We'll go here. I'm going to select the
skeleton that I want to convert. I'm going to use the
Unreal mannequin template. And then I am just going
to rename this action here. So you can see, I
have this one action. One thing to note
is that the Engine doesn't like those pipes,
those pipe characters. So I'm just going to rename
this to third person-- >>Victor: I realized
I don't actually know what to call that. Is it a pipe? >>James: Yeah. >>Victor: Pipe. >>James: Pipe, yeah. >>Victor: I use it
all the time, but-- >>James: Yeah. I think it's third
person run, right? >>Kaye: I believe so. >>James: Yeah, third
person run, and-- >>Kaye: And that does match
the name of the asset in UE4. >>James: Yeah, so
at first, I'm just going to send this over to our-- you can see where
this is going to go. This is just going to go
over to the untitled category within the animations folder. And then, after
that, we're going to put it-- if
everything looks good, I'm going to just send it on
top of the actual Blueprint, or the location that the
Blueprint is mapping to. So we have the run cycle. We have the name. I'm just going to hit convert. And you can see, now we
have our full run cycle in our Rigify controls. I'm going to turn on the IKs. And we could do
something kind of fun. We're just going to-- you can grab this. And, actually, his-- I don't want these
keys on his hand. So I'm just going to
select these, select those, and I'm just going to-- you can see right
here what I have. So I'm just going
to select those. And I'm going to delete them. And then I'm going to hit
Alt-R. And then I'll hit Alt-G. So now we have the
hand right there. >>Victor: That looked
like it hurt. >>James: Yeah, he has
issues, I think. So we can do that
same wave animation that we did at the beginning. And this is, I think,
a 16 frame animation. So I'm just going to
have him rock his hand or something as he runs. >>Victor: We're using
Blender 2.8.2, right? >>James: Yeah. >>Victor: 2.8.2, yeah, I thought I
saw you updating it yesterday. >>James: Yeah, and-- I mean, that's-- I'll
just add a location. So there's our animation. So it's-- you can tell it's
modified from our original animation. And so what we're going
to do is we're just going to send this over. >>Victor: And you were using
the shortcut the shortcut that you set up earlier. >>James: And yeah, that's
just that Control-U that I had set up earlier. And so you can see. And I usually like
to do this, where I'll export to another
category before I overwrite that relationship on
the actual Character Blueprint. But that looks correct, like
what we were trying to do. So now I'm going to
actually just change it to where that's going to go
on top of that animation here. And it's always good to
double check your name-- third person run. So I'm going to-- this is just what I like to do. I like to copy the reference. But I'm really not
copying the reference. I'm just going to get part
of the-- the reference does contain a file path. So you can see it goes
to the animations folder. And then that's
the actual path-- game, inside here. >>Victor: Yeah, nice clarification
is game essentially means the content folder. >>Kaye: Yes. >>James: Right, yeah. And then with the actual
reference skeleton, that is the full path. So I'm just copying the
path to the skeleton. >>Kaye: The reference path. >>James: The reference
path, not modifying it at all, just pasting that in. So now, since our
names are the same, we should just
overwrite that file. So let's just go over
here and export again. And then I'm going to go
ahead and hop into the game. And you can see,
there's our character. And he's waving his
hand as he runs. So we just took
an animation that was pulled out of the Engine. So you could do that
with anything you get off the Marketplace. Just export an FBX. Bring it into Blender. Modify it. And then send it right
back into your game on top of the skeleton. That may already have a control
system and blueprints set up, and stuff like that. So you could very quickly
modify and iterate on your game. >>Victor: Are we expecting a
Manny wave Marketplace pack animation? >>Kaye: Animated by James. >>Victor: Every single default
animation, but Manny's waving. Yeah, very welcoming. One of the questions
we received was, is it possible to export
to preserve volume from the armature to help
the character deformation. >>James: So there's
nothing as far as-- I assume that you're
saying that you would have some kind of a volume
set up, like in Blender, to-- >>Kaye: You mean the Preserve
Volume option on a character that you rig in
Blender, probably. >>Victor: Probably. >>Kaye: Right now, that's
not specifically set up. It's something that
we might look into. I assume that you
mean-- like if you-- in Blender, when you do preserve
volume, and you grab a joint, and you stretch
it, you sort of get a squash and stretch effect on
the mesh that you've skinned. >>James: There is-- so in Rigify,
they have the actual stretch controls. And they-- so they have a
relationship set up where it's preserving some kind of a-- the state of the actual rigs. So-- well, actually,
I still have it on. But-- >>Victor: I think-- >>James: If you see, like there. >>Kaye: Yeah, that's
your preserved volume. >>James: That's, I believe,
what they're referencing. So if you set that up, or
if you have that in Rigify, then you can do that. >>Kaye: So that's just going to
boil down to non-uniform scale data on your joints,
which is supported in UE4. So it should work. Although non-uniform
scale in certain transform spaces
and relationships gets super tricky. So you're going to want
to be careful with it. And you're going to want
to test the crap out of it. But as long as it's non-uniform
scale animation data that comes in on a joint, it should work. >>James: Yeah, and my
answer would be just if you can see it, if you
have it working in Blender, and you can export
an FBX file, and you can import it into the
Engine, then it will work. Because that's what
the process is. So if you're not having
issues with that now, you shouldn't have
issues when you're doing it through this workflow. >>Victor: I think we've
covered this last stream. But they were curious
if shape keys will work. >>James: Yeah, so in the last
demo, or in the last stream, we did shape keys. So if you guys are
interested in that, you can always go back
and look at that last one. Near the end-ish
of the stream, I talked about importing
morph targets. >>Kaye: Yeah, and if you need
to force open the import settings, remember, there's
that option in the preferences to do so if you need to
check on the morph target import for your scale mesh. >>Victor: And I'm going to throw
a little bone out there, and let everyone know that
we do transcripts for all of our videos. And so in case you're looking-- would like to only see
the shape keys portion of the last stream-- I think we were here for
almost two hours last time. And if you don't want
to scrub through that, you can go ahead and look at the
transcript, and just Control-F, download that PDF file, do
Control-F for shape key, or morph, or any of
those search terms. And you'll see the
time stamp right next to that in the document. And then you can go
to the YouTube video and find the portion
of the stream that we talked about that. And that's not only
for shape keys. That applies to everything. And any of our
livestreams, you'll see a transcript
a couple of days after the stream
goes up on YouTube. And it's a good way to sort
of find the part of the stream that you were most interested
in, or even wondering, like, did they mention this at all? You can go ahead
and search for that. It's-- that was-- we covered
pretty much all of the sort of technical questions that
we'll be able to answer here today. But chat was curious how long
you both have been animating, was the question. But I believe, James, you
do-- you more so do animation as part of the technical
pipeline, right? >>James: Yeah, so Kaye is
a technical animator. I'm just a-- what my title
is is a pipeline developer. And basically, what we do is
we talk to people like Kaye. And she describes a process. And then I figure out
a way to automate that. And to-- how can I make
that, what you're saying, happen in code? Or do something that you're
doing that's repetitive, just make it one click
or something like that. And so sometimes I
have to talk to her and get her expertise on
subjects like animation. And then I figure out a way to
make that happen in the tool. >>Kaye: You take all my
nasty code in pieces and put it all
together so it looks as cool as what we're showing
right now is what you mean? You were about to say just a-- you were about to
be like, I'm just a. That is not a phrase
you should say. >>Victor: This is magic. >>Kaye: It's awesome work. It's magic work. Yeah, it is. Me, I've been animating
and rigging a long time. I got my first job in the
film industry in 2000. So that's all we need
to say about that. >>Victor: That is many years
before I ever touched any of these DCC tools of any kind. Very exciting--
thanks for sharing. It's interesting. Just to reiterate a little bit,
as well, that we are covering-- it's not available. The tools are not
available currently. We're going to make them
available this year. >>Kaye: Yet. >>Victor: They will be
available. We're currently-- James
and a couple of folks are still developing them. And we'd like for them to
come out in as good of a shape as they can be. So stay tuned. We do have another stream
planned in two weeks, actually, where we will be
covering more of the custom armature, quadruped-esque,
more, less limbs when it comes to your skeletons. And with that, was
there anything else as part of your
presentation that you guys wanted to go over? >>Kaye: I think that was it. >>James: Yeah. >>Kaye: I hope everybody-- >>James: Enjoyed it
and stuff, yeah. >>Kaye: Yeah, I hope
everybody likes everything that we're showing. We're super excited about it. We think it's cool. And so hopefully
you guys do too. >>Victor: And I guess
to reiterate again that we're aiming on
the sort of static mash and the skeletal mesh slash
animation pipeline right now. Materials, particles, et
cetera, all the other things that you can do in Blender,
we're leaving that for-- to be done in Unreal for now. >>Kaye: Yeah, just to sort
of put a pin in that-- again, sort of the workflow,
at least we have in the game making side of this company, is
if you're going to be doing-- there were some questions
last time about, hey, the scale might be off
for doing this physics simulation in Blender. That's something that we
traditionally wouldn't do. I know that there are options
to do that with a DCC app. But that's where the
Engine comes in for us. That's where if anything's
going to be dangling, deforming, cloth, anything like that, we're
going to handle that in UE4. And so since that's the
ecosystem we're working in, it's not something that
is really high on our list to handle to make sure
that cloth works with this. Because for games, we're
going to be setting it up in our Engine. And so-- >>James: Yeah, and to elaborate
on that a little bit, is it's not that this addon will
break your physics simulation or anything, or
it's incompatible. What that just means
is you're going to have to break up that process. So if you want to make a
baked cloth simulation, and you want to have
a unit scale of one, then you would do that. And then you would
import it into your seen that has this unit
scale set by this addon. Or you can activate the addon
and set your scale back to one. Really, the only reason
you need that scale factor is for things that
come directly from-- well, we know for from Unreal. But it could be different
from other DCCs. But if you have
that scale factor, you'll have scaled key frames. And so it's kind of
one of those things where, you know,
pick your poison. You could try to keep it in one. And you could fight remaking
all your key frames. Or you could just do
this simple option. If you want to do physics,
go ahead and turn that back to one. Just make sure you use your
measuring tool and everything's scaled up before you export. >>Kaye: Yeah, our-- again, the
thing that we're really trying to accomplish is, hey, I've
got this animation pack or this animation from UE4,
and I want to get it-- I want to change it. I want to alter
how the run looks. I want to alter how the
weapon hand pose is. How do I do that as quickly
as possible in Blender? >>Victor: And it's nice,
because it's free. >>Kaye: Absolutely. >>Victor: Yeah, and so are many
of the Marketplace packs. Just to reiterate again--
there was another question that came in. Until it gets
released, for people who are looking to learn and
eventually adopt this workflow, learning how to use Rigify
would be the suggestion, right? >>Kaye: Absolutely. And I'm going to throw
on top of that, as well, the nonlinear animation
functionality in Blender as well as the action editor and
how that works with character animation is another-- or object animation,
for that matter. Because you're doing a lot of
work with that in the addon. And I think it's important
to understand what's going on there in the addon. So it'd be helpful. >>James: And in our
second part, I think we'll touch on a few more
things in Rigify and then things like the nonlinear
animation editor. But I know that a
lot of people may not be familiar with
that area of Blender. And that's basically how Blender
ties animations to an object. That's how that
relationship is made. So it's just important
that you understand that. And so we have another
stream and some other things like that we can dive
into a little deeper. But like Kaye's
saying, learn Rigify. Know what the nonlinear
animation editor does and why that's important. Those are all good
things to know. >>Victor: I did have one
more question for you, since we have a little bit time. >>Kaye: Of course. >>Victor: Does Send
to Unreal handle setting up bone hierarchy
for leg and arm IK? By default, Rigify makes
that tough with tweak bones. >>Kaye: Setting up
leg and arm IK-- >>James: I think I have
missed the question. >>Victor: Does Send
to Unreal handle setting up bone hierarchy
for leg and arm IK. >>James: On an import, is that
what they're asking, or--? >>Kaye: I think the word
that's sort of getting me in there is setup. Because none of the addons
here are going to really help set that up. If you need to-- well, let me think. I guess the best way to
answer a question in that sort of vicinity is to say that if
you need to alter the metarig to control something,
like if you need to add IK bones to the
metarig to account for the IK bones that come in
on your character because the IK bones are useful
in Engine for the mannequin, let's say, that's where we're
saying make sure that you know how to do that in Rigify. It's not terribly difficult.
But it is something that you should know. And those bones need a type so
that they get a control if you need them to have a control. Otherwise, you'll just be sort
of parenting them yourself into the hierarchy of the
Control Rig to get exported. Or-- well, I won't
say to get exported-- to drive the IK bones of the
mannequin that were imported. And-- >>James: Unreal-- you were
exporting that skeleton. And so just remember that
whatever information's on that skeleton, that's what's
going into Engine. So if that's already working
in an Engine, and that's fine, then you're good. And then you're just using
the controls from Rigify to move those. So just keep that in mind, that
you're not actually exporting that Rigify control
rig, although it may look like you're doing that. You're exporting that. And that's because that
rig is automatically moved into that rig collection
that we talked about last time. So that rig is just getting
automatically moved. That root rig, which is, you
can see, that rig right there. It's just getting
moved in there. And so if that
rig's working, it's moving correctly in Blender,
then it should work in Unreal. >>Kaye: I want to add
onto that as well, too. If you're talking about
taking a character out of Engine or some
character that comes in with bones and
weights, and you're like oh, I need to
add IK bones to this, our addon is not
going to facilitate you creating those bones. If-- the screen
that James showed you, which is right
behind him, you would need to bring in
that character from Engine or from wherever in an
A pose and actually add those bones to that armature. >>James: Yeah, we will not add
bones to an existing skeleton. We just drive those bones. >>Kaye: Right, so if you
determine that you're going to do an animal-- and this is the example
I used yesterday. If you're going to do an animal,
and the animal is coming out of UE4 with no ear bones,
and your animators are like, oh, I want those ear
bones, then you're going to have to bring that
scale mesh into Blender, add those bones properly to the
armature, take that skel mesh, via Send to Unreal--
and that will work. Once you add those bones inside
of Blender to that armature, you can use Send to Unreal
to update the scale mesh and the skeleton in Engine. Then you can go and use
the UE to Rigify process that we showed here
today to actually rig up everything and add those ears. And if you've already got a
template for the character, then you would load the
template, update the template, and then make sure that
that's exported as well. >>James: Add in a few extra
nodes and a few more meta bones and you should be good. >>Kaye: To map all
the controls, yeah. So that process, it's a
little bit different way to think about those
sorts of processes. Because everyone is just
sort of used to having-- like in more of an animated
film capacity, where it's like, well, here's my character. And here's the rig. And I'm going to
reference it into a scene. Or I'm going to grab it, somehow
non-destructively, and animate this stuff and then render it. And so we're taking a much more
technical sort of game engine being the owner of the
process, and the DCC being more of a utility
partner to the game engine. >>James: And another way
to think about this that maybe some of you guys
have already thought of is this tool could be
used in another way. Because-- like with the
mannequin character, when we hit that
convert button and we bring over his
animation, we have our Rigify deform bones that
are now keyed and everything. We have the animation
information we need. We could bypass the process
that is used with that integrate to Send to Unreal. We could weight everything
to our deform bones. And we could throw away
our source skeleton. And we could just use our
new deformation skeleton. Because maybe you wanted to
pull off some mo-cap data. But you don't want to have,
basically, a rig like this that you're having to hop with
a template back and forth. You could just, if we need to
pull this off one time and just extract some information from
it, like animation information, we could do that. And then we could
add our own weights. We could add more bones. And we could just customize
it all we want from there. >>Kaye: Yeah, because
we are already setting up the relationship
to the deform bones in Rigify. So moving those
vertex groups over is very feasible in Blender. >>James: Just look
at your node names. Look at your node names. And you can use a copy weights
modifier that they have. And you can just
copy over weights. >>Kaye: Yep. >>Victor: That's awesome. I think that's it for today. >>Kaye: Cool. >>Victor: Thank you so
much for coming on. We'll be back in two weeks-- two weeks. >>Kaye: Awesome. Thanks everybody. >>Victor: Not saying
goodbye just yet. I have a little spiel
here I need to go through. >>Kaye: Oh, oh, spiel away. >>Victor: Yeah, a little spiel. I already mentioned it
earlier, but we do caption and put all of the captions into
a transcript file that goes up on the YouTube
video, just usually between three to five days
after the stream goes up, when it's done processing,
actually, on YouTube. And so if you're looking
for specific content, whether it's in
any of our streams, and you're not really
sure if we covered it or when we covered it,
rather than watching the entire stream,
you can go ahead and download the transcript
file, Control-F in there, and search for the key terms
that you're looking for, and then find the time
stamp right next to them. We do have a survey
that we do every week. Feel free to fill it out. We appreciate your
feedback on the streams. And there's also a
section where you can suggest what we're to cover
in the future on the stream. Everyone that enters
their email address gets to be part of a
t-shirt sweepstakes, which is the nice cursive
Unreal Engine t-shirt. I mentioned, I think
first time last week, but we do have a new community
page for Meetup groups around the world. And so go to
communities.unrealengine.com. And you can find a nice
layout of upcoming Meetups, as well as Meetup groups
in your part of the world. If you have a little
community locally that are working with
Unreal and you're excited about getting together
and possibly increasing the size of your
community and there is no Meetup group in your
area, there is a button right there on
communities.unrealengine.com that says, become a leader. And it's easy. You just sign in with
your Epic Games ID. And you can request
to become a leader. It's a simple form. You fill that out. You send it to us. And we will possibly get
back to you regarding what it entails being
a Meetup group lead, and how to get you
set up with Meetup. So the system is called Bevy. It actually ties into Meetup. So whether or not you
are afraid of, like, oh, but all of my friends
are using Meetup.com, it actually ties in. So when you make
an event on Bevy and
communities.unrealengine.com, it automatically propagates to
Meetup, which is really nice. I'm not entirely sure if the
comments go back and forth, but you should at least be
getting email notifications if someone is asking a question. Make sure you check
out our forums. There's a nice release channel. And that's a nice
segue into the fact that we do spotlight three
community projects every week. Do let us know about
what you're working on. And perhaps you'll see
yourself on the stream one day. It also goes on the launcher,
which is kind of cool. It sits there on the
right side for a week. Make sure you visit
Unreal Slackers, our unofficial Discord. There are a lot of
good conversations that happens there. If you're looking for just
feedback on something, or you have specific
questions where you want a more active,
real-time conversation around it, feel
free to use that. It's just unrealslackers.org. Make sure you visit and follow
us on Facebook, Twitter. We also have a LinkedIn
page with a lot of enterprise related content. Make sure you check
those out if you're interested in what's going
on in the Unreal universe. The countdown video that
we start every stream with, it's 30 minutes
of development sped up to five minutes. If you would like to
capture that content and have it as part of the
countdown for the stream, please go ahead and
send it to us together with your logo separately. Do not composite it together. Because we do want to add the
little countdown that we have to it in the right side corner. Like I said, make sure to
follow us on social media. And special thanks
to Kaye and James for coming on and doing
another Blender stream. I know people are very
excited about the tool. And don't worry, we'll get
to them when they're ready. That's sort of where
I should leave that. And I'd like to end
the stream saying that, remember, bones and weights. >>Kaye: That's right. >>Victor: Bones and weights. Next week, we will be having
Aaron McLaren and Ethan Geller talking about state
of audio in 4.25. There's some really cool
new features coming out, the synesthesia
plug-in, and there's been some really amazing
experimental work that's been done with the new
features in 4.25 internally. So we'll be showing that off. And I think, with that said, I
wish you all an amazing week. And we'll catch
you all next time. All right, bye, everyone. >>Kaye: Bye.
