Character Creator 4 - ThirdPerson in UnrealEngine 5

[Music] hello and welcome today i want to show you how to take a character creator 4 character bring it into ue5 and use it as your third person character [Music] create your character in character creator 4 go to file export fbx and clothes character in the target tool preset choose unreal fbx options mesh and hit export in order to continue with the tutorial you're going to need the auto setup for unreal engine plugin which is available from re-illusion leave character creator open for the time being but now we're going to go and open unreal engine 5. create a new project a third person project and name this project whatever you desire unreal engine 5 will open with the new project and obviously currently we have this in order to replace this with our characters from character creator 4 reopen character creator 4 go to plugins character creator and iclone auto setup go to browse files go into the unreal folder and look for this auto setup 1.23 or whichever version you have but unreal engine 5. in there you will find these two folders plugins and content select them both and copy and then go to your project folder here is mine and paste now we need to go back and restart the engine you can now close character creator 4. back inside unreal engine 5 make sure this plugin is enabled if for some reason this icon isn't here go to edit plugins type auto setup and you'll see it here simply enable it and restart the engine let's first import our character i'm going to go into characters right click and create a new folder and name this cc4 go into that folder and we're going to create a folder for our first character import again characters cc4 and your character folder i'm going to choose a leaker first and i'm going to choose high quality shader this all depends upon what you require during import you will be presented with this dialogue leave skeleton to none click advanced click update skeleton reference use t0 as reference pose import morph targets and import mesh lods uncheck animation and hit import with our character imported the first thing i want to do is do some cleanup there will be an fbm folder or which ends in fbm drag that into textures move here i now want to create a common skeleton that we can use between all our character creator 4 characters on the imported [Music] rename to cc4 skeleton then go to our main cc4 folder in content character cc4 create a new folder and call this common go back into our character folder and drag the skeleton into common move here save all you now have imported your first character and you've created a skeleton that can be shared between all your imported characters next i want to create an ik rig for each one of my characters this can be a lengthy process so we're going to cheat go to characters mannequin ue4 rigs and from here select all three of these and drag them to your character folder choose copy here go back to your character folder rename the ik rig the same as your character in my case a leaker and we'll set a prefix of ik next we want to rename the rtg ue4 money ue5 money so it's now called a leaker ue5 mana next go to rtg ue5 mani ue4 many this one is very important as this is the one we will be using for the third person project so rename this it is now called rtg ue5 money a leaker right click on our rk rig go to asset actions bulk edit via property matrix open display if it doesn't show you can go to window display go to import and skeleton expand come over here to these dots pick asset and from here i'm going to choose our character alika hit save in my case save all close now if we open up our ik rig a leaker is here but you will notice the goals are in the wrong places click on preview scene if it's not here you can choose here preview scene settings go to preview mesh hit clear apply to asset and save all go back to preview mesh choose a leaker hit reset to reset the pose and save again i'm going to do a save all now we have an ik rig for our character since this is a hack for now i'm going to disable the full body ik but we can may come back later and play with these settings although it's beyond the scope of this tutorial for now we can close the ik rig next i want to open up rtg ue5 money alika and this will give us this our source ik asset is the new ue5 mannequin and our target is currently the old ue4 mannequin from this target ik asset list choose ik alika and i'm going to set the preview mesh to a leaker hit save and now when we click on an animation as we can see it's working reasonably well again because the full body ik is disabled it's not perfect we can now close this retargeter in this folder i want to right click animation [Music] and i'm going to choose animation blueprint it will ask for us to pick a skeleton in this case we're going to choose cc4 skeleton and create and we will call this a leaker and retarget bp open up the animation blueprint and you'll be presented with this if for some reason you're not double click here on animgraph right click type retarget and choose retarget pose from mesh join the notes together hit compile you'll get this error come over to the details panel if it doesn't exist for some reason you can come up to window and choose details ensure that a use at attached parent is selected ik retargeter asset we're going to set that to rtg ue5 manet a leaker so basically ue5 to our character select that hit compile to show you what i mean in case you are lost if we open it up it's just the retargeter we just created now we can close this next we move on to our third person blueprint go to content third person blueprints and open up bp third person character currently it's set to quinn what you want to do is select mesh type visible uncheck visible come down to advanced visibility based animtic option and use this to always tick pose and refresh bones hit compile and save now with mesh selected we can go back to content characters cc4 our character folder and drag the character mesh on top of mesh it should now be parented to mesh hit compile select our character mesh make sure animation mode is set to use animation blueprint and from this drop down we are going to choose our alika retargeter bp that we created and as you can see we already have a retargeted character at this point we can hit play you can improve animation by enabling the full body ik in your ik rig but you will have to adjust these bone settings to get the desired result that is beyond the scope of this tutorial and i haven't had much luck doing it next i want to show you a common problem i'm going to import our second character eddie when the dialogue pops up i'm going to choose skeleton as none again this is because there is a bug inside the plugin that will break the import i'm going to choose all the same settings as before and hit import we repeat the cleanup process as before remember to save all after this process now at this point i would normally advise using the common skeleton we created but there is a problem eddie's skeleton has additional bones he has a gun here in this case we cannot use a common skeleton the common skeletal skeleton method only works if the character you import does not have additional bones so in this case we have to try something else and it's fairly easy we click on eddy skeleton we go to compatible skeletons first to avoid a bug we choose eddie skeleton as the first skeleton in our compatible skeletons list next i want to choose our cc4 skeleton our common skeleton hit save also i want to double click on cc4 skeleton and from the drop drop-down list i'm going to choose cc4 skeleton again there as our first compatible skeleton and i'm going to add eddie skeleton here hit save and again save all now our skeletons are compatible and we can use them inside blueprints i will show you that now a quick way of doing this is to go to our previous characters folder select the ik retargeters the ik rig and the animation blueprint drag them to our edit folder copy here go into our edit folder and rename the assets with the assets renamed we can now open up our ik rig and we'll be presented with our previous character because we've enabled compatible skeletons we can now go to the preview mesh hit clear find eddy hit save reset and save that is our ik rig done next i want to open up rtg ue5 manet eddy and this is how we had it set up before i want to choose our ik eddy and as the preview mesh eddy hit save and again from here we can simply test the animation it's pretty good but could be improved with a full body ik to avoid compatibility issues by this i mean character stretching etc we're going to use a separate animation blueprint for eddie this is not essential if your characters share the same skeleton but in this case we must change it so let's open up our animation blueprint it's still set to a leaker and if we try to change it to eddie because we now have compatible skeletons we will get this warning obviously we don't want to regenerate the skeleton in this case i'll hit no to fix this error go to class settings and actually set our eddy skeleton in the details panel under advanced target skeleton go back to preview scene settings and set the preview mesh to add a hit compile and save and that's it we now have an animation blueprint for eddie double click on the anim graph go to retarget pose from mesh and in the details panel we want to choose our rtg ue5 mani eddy retargeter hit compile and save again using a separate retargeter for eddie will prevent stretching and other weird artifacts we can now close this animation blueprint at this point i'm going to do a save all now let's change our third person character to edit go to content third person blueprints and open up our bp third person character go to alika and here i can show you the compatible skeletons feature we can simply choose eddie and it looks like eddie's working absolutely fine and in most cases he will the animation blueprint is working fine with him but we've created a separate one for eddie to make sure that the retargeting process goes smooth so let's choose our eddy retarget bp you won't see a change but that's fine hit compile and save and we're going to name this to eddie hit compile and save again and now when we hit play eddie is our character again the foot ik is not perfect and you will have to work on that by yourself if you would like to support the channel you can go to the link in the description and buy me a coffee from buy me a coffee.com alternatively you can click the thanks button underneath this video and help that way and that is it that is how you use a character creator for character as your third person character inside unreal engine 5. if you enjoyed today's tutorial please remember to like and subscribe it really does help i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jobutsu

Views: 15,093

Keywords: UnrealEngine, Character Creator, Actorcore, Iclone, Daz Studio, Metahuman, Mixamo, Quixel, retargeting, Blender, Unreal Engine, UE, tutorial, howto, how to

Id: c1l1mdYz9HA

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 03 2022