Cinema 4d to Unreal Engine rigging & animating a single mesh

let's do it rigging I have avoided it for years but now it's time this video is going to be one of several videos where we're going to cover different techniques for rigging uh for objects that are not biped or do not look like humans with two legs I'm briefly going to cover how I built this funky little hand model and then show you how I rigged it in Cinema 4D and then went through the binding process with this single mesh then I'm going to show you how we animate this with individual pieces and get all of this out into Unreal Engine we are specifically going to focus on objects that are not bipeds or full humans so for this one it's a hand which is part of a human but we're going to do other things like robotic arms wires cables all these strange things that will allow you to use the power of rigging inside of Unreal Engine uh we're going to do it multiple ways depending on what we need to do good luck starting off in Cinema 4D I'm going to walk you through the different stages of how I did did this I'm not going to go step by step through this because that would make for a pretty long video but I am going to just do some highle overviews so to start this hand I got off of sketch Fab and I can put the link in the description if you want to download it and follow along there was a hole in the back I kind of pieced this together and just made this one solid object and then kind of finished the UVS and whatnot but that we won't cover exactly to how to prep we start with his basic hand and I wanted to get something that's a bit different but this was a great starting model you can see there's nothing rigged down here there's nothing bound I just wanted to start by showing you the process of this and to create the version what I did started by using a voro fracture so let's drop this inside of this guy let it process for a minute and this as you can get a pretty good idea already started to get close to what I wanted so I started with these offset fragments let's okay way too high of a value so start pretty small so let's try 02 and that's about what I had I think something similar so if you wanted to recreate what I had done to get to this next version of the model uh went through did this I baked out a version of it so that I had my uh assignments here yeah and I try subdividing some of this early on but um as you'll see with the the density of this mesh like the starting off is fairly dense in general but by the time you get this fracture in here and then it calculates you can start to see like you don't get all that same geometry on the inside it's going to be horribly triangulated so if you do go to subdivide this and you want to smooth it out it won't work so with this version that we created I then went through and used remas on this and these are all going to be a bunch of islands which is what I wanted and I I played with the settings a bit which I won't go through in detail but as you can start to see now like I have all this U geometry that's even on the inside of these surfaces as well as wrapping around the outside so if I did go through and say I wanted to like subdivide this now um it's a lot smoother your UVS are still intact um but you can kind of play with some of that this is what I ended up getting afterwards so I broke up the voro I played around with the settings I pushed it out and then ran it through rasure and I was pretty happy with this there's obviously some additional density in some places and you'll also notice too that I didn't really use this for the final but it was nice to know the UVS were intact so you know if you get back far enough still seems to work but if you get up close you know kind of good from far far from good we had this hand but this isn't exactly what I wanted because I didn't want it to be all fleshy I wanted it to have these materials on here now you would probably want to condense this more than I did cuz if you see my list I wanted 63 materials because that's how many objects there were um this is probably more painful than it needed to be but I wasn't 100% sure what I wanted to do with it in unreal as far as material assignments would go and having a unique material assigned to each island with a selection tag pulls in all of these material slots in unreal now this is a bit painful to recreate so if you had six or seven of these it'd be way easier but I wasn't quite sure so I said why not we're going to do that and as you can see on this model if I expand it open all these material tags were on here so the way that I would go back about doing that quickly is select a little chunk I'd hit UW select all and then I would go pick the material that I want right click and apply and I think that's the same color you didn't see a change but now that material is applied to that section I did that over and over and over took a couple minutes but it was on the tedious side okay so that covers the how I made this model I went through and UV unwrapped it um just did an auto wrap did pretty good uh so the mesh is what I want great and I'm going to do a very quick and dirty pass because it's not going to be a huge rigging tutorial but I will walk you through the steps of what I did so you can see the process and then I will show you the finished result first thing I did you can use the joint tool let's pop open this character tab we're going to click this little top thing to dock it because we're going to keep coming back to it um a lot of times you can start with your multiple viewports and you could use the joint tool and if you hold down control you can come in here and start making your chains this way and adjusting it it's a little faster um the downside with this is you have to go through and I mean you can see like these joints didn't align to where they wanted them to be so I could come in and you know offset each one and then you kind of go down the line and do it I just didn't prefer that way so really all I did was I just make a joint uh drop it in this rout and now it just kind of manually positions so I started with the wrist yeah something about like that great and then I would just hold control get this little down arrow and make a child and for me this just worked a little FAS faster I could kind of just go joint by joint um if I'm doing this pinky it's a little rough to find this pinky knuckle the other great thing is if we don't want to stare at this thing and we're not binding it yet you can leave this original model this hand regular here so we got like knuckle uh yeah that looks about right and then same kind of deal here I would you're going to want to come back and rename these afterwards uh I mean you can do it later but it's better to just keep it clean and this kind of L these to where you want them so Finger by finger oops went through and just did my alignment I can kind of quickly check in the viewport to what kind of makes sense and kind align that there and then the last one down at this tip of this finger line that into place looks good there uh and that would create your rig there and then the other thing I had so we call this just the uh the wrist which I know is going to be my root we'll call it Pinky knuckle one or whatever knucklehead um I also wanted to have this thing have like a a tail uh which sounds very strange and it is strange but I create another joint and drop it as a child of the wrist my initial thought was that I would put this guy in here and I would have this hierarchy where it's separate so it's not completely uh an an FK chain going all the way down the line um but my goal is to have this be a tail and I could kind of Wiggle this thing and I don't know wagging tail but whatever weird stuff look at this so as you can see I've got this piece now I'm not going to go through and do the entire hand but I will show you the binding process and then where we got to the next step so what we're going to get to is if we turned off this hand regular we want this guy so let's hide these original bones so this is the section and this is pre- Bounce I'm going to kind of bounce around a bit but just so you can kind of see these are the bones that I went and put into this thing so Wiggly tail and then I've got my knuckle system all the way down and this I set it up so that we could do FK or ik but this is where I wanted to be so I'm kind of back up a minute let's pull this back out and let's do our hand fractured material so this is the model that has nothing bound to it so say hey this rig is great we're ready to move forward I want a hand with only one pinky that's exactly what I want so to do this first thing we're going to do is I'm going to go up to my root bone here and I'm going to middle Mouse click down on this to select all of its children and then I'm going to hold control and select the mesh that we want now we come over here to our character menu and we're going to hit bind all right did its thing this is now bound so we're going to look at this I've got our weight tag here this shows which tags are bound and then I'm going to look at the weight tool so I'm going to go in and investigate what I've got here so I'm going to dock this guy over here we're going to go up to the rig and we're going to start looking at the weight binding now I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this one because I'm not amazing at it and two it's very tedious and timec consuming but I'm going to go down the line and start selecting these bones now if you have more joints in in here um like I said your your ring middle and index finger these would color code a bit better and then sometimes you're just going to get some leaking that goes over the side but we can check and see how these are all bound and uh yeah so that gets your binding so like I said it's not in-depth overview I get all of the joints on here and the only thing I really did is I'll use this smooth function so if you see like some hard lines in the rig um let's actually look at the finished product so we're going to select this guy now you can start to see on this rig where I've got all these pieces okay some of this stuff starts to overlap and you can pretty much go through bone by bone and start to look now some of these had like some of this yellow was coming up over the other side the two I used the most were smooth and subtract there's a lot of stuff that really goes into this that I am not very good at but using absolute you can paint the weights on and get it to work really well subtract was nice because the weights were already there and I could just kind of remove stuff that I know I really didn't want it to be on this bone but I'm not overriding or affecting everything else which gets some weird results so subtract and smooth so at this point you have a bind your rig is bound great we have this thing moving and I've already gone ahead and put this ik tag on it slide this up so I can show you what the FK looks like and here's this pinky that we've been focusing on so now as I go through um and you don't want to go nuts because that's a bit on the gooey side for what I want this to do but if I go down through here and I start bending each bone you can see that it's doing what I want it to do so okay everything looks like that's correct and the last thing before we get into creating an ik tag and then we're going to get into animation is you're going to want to select all these bones and I've gone ahead and done this already but it's going to show you its point and space wherever it's at now if you start moving these around and you want to get it back to this pose you could set a bind pose but the easiest thing to do is just select all these bones and then freeze your transformation so at least for this pinky I've gone through and Frozen most of them but now if I want to just go back and zero everything out they're all zeroed and if I want to move it later you know I said it's weird offset but zero these out and then you're kind of prepped to start getting into going further now the last step we're going to get into before we start animating is I put an ik chain on here so to do this select the top bone that you want in this chain and you're probably not going to want to go from your wrist all the way down I just want the chain to go from pinky knuckle down to the tip select this tag rigging ik and then that's going to bring up this tag so these will be empty to start you're going to have your main uh first joint that this is on your last joint that you want to be the end of this uh you drag this guy down and drop it into end and there is no goal on here so I just went add goal that dropped in this null all the way at the bottom I brought it up added a shape to it and gave it some color just to make it slightly easier but now you should have a oh boy and I wasn't paying attention I switched this over to FK bring it back to ik uh let's see go to this pinky goal problem solved so now we've got this ik chain that we can move around and there's no pole vectors on here I didn't go too in depth but I really just wanted to go through and give this basic functionality so I could get it to animate which then leads us to our last section so when we export this out we want to have animations uh animation sequences inside of unreal and I want to have a bunch of these cuz I'm going to use this like motion Clips in Cinema 4D I want to have these that I can just attach into sequencer and blend between and stack and do all the fun stuff so to do that I have to go through and use the take system and this is pretty handy because now what I would just do for this and you can set POS morph tags in here which I ended up doing but it's not required you can just go in and start animating I'll come back to this posor tag oh yeah it is set up no we'll just do it now POS morph time so this tag I've got this idle uh animation here it's not really anything I've just kind of set this default State I went in and I set the parameters to just have a you know uh no movement but this is kind of just the default state that I can drag and extend and I have something I can kind blend between but then I went through and just animated and set these poses so as you can see all my poses are in here I select fist and then I go and move the ik points to exactly what I want them to be we've got other stuff in here too I think yeah so I went through and just set all of these and now is I'm just kind of scrubbing and turning each of these uh morph states on I can animate in between these so the ideas I can kind of go back and forth between these two and make several animations that we can export out so Point uh bird if you need it uh flat I just want to straighten it out like a lot of these are just uh just helpful and then you can mix them so we can either animate these if we want or we can just animate on their own but we're going to go through and make a new child take and this one we're just going to call finger animation and I'm not I'm going to do this just once and that will be it so to do this in takes this lock needs to be on took me a while to figure that out but that needs to be locked in and this is going to allow us to I guess unlock animation properties so let's say I want to use this PO poror I'm going to drag and drop up here and now you can see these are activated so let's kick open our timeline so we can animate and let's just do flutter so I'm going to start with 100% yeah we'll do 100 here and we'll end it whatever 100 we're going to make a loop out of this so 32 we're going to set this to zero and then I want to just kind of blend these for you know it's what I want to [Music] do all right so these guys kind of go back and forth and say that's my animation that's what I want to have just looping over and over and I can kind of mix this in and that's done so if I go back out you can go through and do this for as many of these as you want I think I created a take for each one so I had it to export at the same point if you wanted to continue doing this we'd make a new one and I'll show you how to do this outside of takes so finger rig animation and now what I would do is take all of these goals that control everything drag these into takes and drop them in and now it's telling me these are what we can access to animate so if we start with come back in here each one we're going to do the position going to animate there and let's say we just want to clench this into a fist bring it up we're just going to animate all these to the spot that we want them something like that that's a pretty weak Fist and set the end goal for all of these and hopefully they don't all go back all right so now I have key frames for all of these you can see we're just moving those nulls around which are the goals to get from State one to state two and that is actually animating in here so if I go back from take to take you can kind of see the animation stored and we've got that in there great and our main take has nothing animated cuz we're not animating in there we're trying to contain each take that's going to export out into an animation sequence and bonus if you're wondering what the finger flapper is that's this guy super creepy but I had a finger and I wanted to do something with it so this is what it is and same thing here I have a finger flapper on here I have the ik chain as well but this null I used a let's see a line to spline tag and I just have it going around the circle so if I activate this one you can see that it's just going around in the circle and it's like a little creepy fleshy bat um I don't know why I thought of that but I did and the other version of this as well was I tried two of them just to see how what would compare this one I just use cappuccino I click this guy down here uh set it to start and then just kind of did a quick circle with my hand and trimmed it up so this one's a bit more organic and the other one's a little more robotic and I kind of tested those all right enough of finger flapper and the hand so this is the model that we want to leave we have all this other stuff but we don't want all of this other stuff now if you bound any other meshes like I did I originally have this entire roote with my whole rig and this hand but I also wanted to export out the skinny one and the regular one so these ones I pretty much went through the same process but I selected all of the bones that I wanted and I just bound these as well so these have the same binding as the other ones but you know you don't have to do it so really it's hand 4 I'm going to middle click on this this gives me everything that I want file export fbx the little gear and you want to make sure that you have selection only selected otherwise you're going to get all this other junk that you don't want this is just what's selected and what I was saying with the other ones is you could select these other ones as well that have the same binding and you'll they'll all be bound to the same skeleton so you could do all three in a file if you wanted to and they'd all share animations and stuff everything else looks good we're going to go through and Export it which I've already done and we're going to go into unreal almost done so we're in unreal you can see that this is the version that I've brought in I will walk you through all of these details but when you select your file and drag and drop it in so I have my hand rig pretty sure that's the one you don't have to do the import to level you can just drag and drop it in it will give you your import and you want to make sure that skeleton mesh is checked um this will do all the work it'll make sure that your actual skeleton is brought in I usually keep import normals on here because uh the normals were set up in Cinema 4D and I want those to come in too and then animations you may have a bunch of these at different times and by default I think these come in at exported time now two things to keep in mind with this if you're doing something where you want everything to be from like 0 to 30 and even though you may only go from 0 to 15 if you do export at time it's going to be this whole range now this can be helpful if you don't want to plan on doing revisions to your animations or you want extra time it'll give you exactly what you want but for this one I had some animations that were 15 frames and some that were 2 seconds so I went with animated time and this will trim down each of these animations to be at that exact time and and the rest of this stuff good enough so I would hit import and I don't feel like doing it again but then it's going to bring you in the skeletal mes it's going to bring in all of these animations that we had done each one of these was one of our individual takes if physics acid which I don't really need and then the skeleton and we're going to go into more of this in depth later um but just to kind of cover what this stuff is if you have questions and how unreal does it differently than Cinema here's all those ridiculous material assignments that I had I only ended up using a few materials for this but um like I said I have options later if I want it to be all wacky and sorts of stuff so this is the hand imported and I assigned all the stuff it also has the skeleton connected to it now this is nice because if you want to get into some control rig stuff which we will do in a different video um your skeleton's in here you can kind of go in and modif and tweak some of the stuff separate than your mesh it's not completely all bound together which is kind of nice so that is all of that you can see all these extra materials that imported as well which we just got rid of but this kept the assignments in place so not the most efficient work ever and that point it's pretty uh straightforward so let's drag this guy in going to zero it out move him over here and let's make it a lot lot bigger go king size so this is nice and big and now you're saying okay how do we how do we animate our stuff and now we're just into the basic of a sequencer so grab this guy we can drag this in and now it's just a matter of clicking this little animation you'll see all of the animations that we have that are bound to this rig will pop up here and this is also helpful because if you also brought in those other two hand models that I was talking about you wanted all three you wouldn't have to bring in individual animations for each mesh all of these would work on all three so it's kind of helpful so let's do hold and now you can see that that hold that I had animated or better yet let's do the flutter cuz you saw me animate that one and now this animation is in here we've got all of these on and we can play with these so H kind of creepy and if you extend this out and just drag it out it's already set to Loop so this guy will just repeat the loop that you had and and I'm looking at this I'm like eh it's a little weird it's kind of choppy I don't know if I love it but that's all right we have other things that we can work with so I'm going to do another animation we're going to do hold yeah hold and I'm going to show you how I can use this as well so now now if we twirl these down just to show you I'm going to set the weight of this to zero and now this whole animation timeline is not actually being active um but this hold is so if I drag this guy out you can see it's going to repeat the loop because I didn't create a seamless Loop in cinema but that's okay too I'm going to let's see hold down alt and drag until this snaps to the end so I've got two of these now going to right click go to properties and for this if I want to make a loop I'm just going to reverse this and now I've got this opening and closing and I can you know for the time being just manually drag a bunch of these so this is kind of looping with it great it's you know squeezing or honking a horn or whatever and if I flip this guy back on now you can see that these guys are kind of overriding with each other and I can go down and set the weights of this so say I want this to be a little bit more like that you know I don't know what you'd ever use that weird motion for but it's there and you can stack all these up along with these as well to override these animations you can also bump your play rate up to make this like really quick so you can see how it sped it up but now like I said you have full control over in stacking these and it works a lot like motion Clips in Cinema 4D and really if we need to go back and update it we go into our take we activate the one we want we change our animation and when we reexport this out and come back in all we really have to do is select the pieces that we want rightclick and reimport which is that one and that will update all these animations to Cinema 4D it's not going to break everything um because all these are individual pieces so it's more procedural and it's pretty handy and that's the bulk of how you're going to get Cinema 4D into animations inside of unreal so you know bye-bye thanks for watching hope you found this helpful if you did subscribe really helps us out and if you have any questions please drop them below we'll do our best to answer your questions that we can and if you have any ideas or things that you would like to see please leave comments and we will do our best to see if we can do that thank you

Channel: Cart & Horse

Views: 984

Keywords: Cinema 4d to Unreal Engine rigging, Cinema 4D to Unreal Engine rigging and animating, c4d to unreal engine rigging, c4d to unreal engine rigging and animating, c4d to ue rigging, c4d to ue rigging and animating, cinema 4d rigging a mesh, cinema 4d rigging a hand, c4d rigging a hand, cinema 4d creating animations for unreal engine, c4d creating animations for unreal engine, c4d animations to ue, cinema 4d animations to unreal engine

Id: mnitDWKer1E

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023