Create a playable Daz Character in Unreal Engine 5.1 (Live Retargeting)

let me show you how to make a dash character the playable character in a third person project like this one here this is an Unreal Engine 5.1 and it'll work in future versions of Unreal Engine just the same I can walk around with a third person character here and I want to turn this into a playable Das character let's see how to do that the first step that we need to do is in Dash Studio I've just installed the dash to Unreal plug-in with the install manager I'm going to need to close my project down I've already done it just you know so that you know what what you need to do you need to close the project down then come up over here to file send to dash to unreal then open up the advanced settings here pick your engine version and then go and install the plugin into your project directory you can also install it into the engine but keeping it compartmentalized into your project means you can have different projects with different versions running at the same time just in case you ever need that so you go and navigate to wherever this is like Das demos and this is my top folder here for that project and then you just say select folder and then it'll go and install itself in there I've already done it you need to then go and close Unreal Engine down and reopen the project so that you can send over the character so that I can receive it so I can go and disable this again here and I'm going to go and in fact select my character here so this is mirror 9 one of the new characters say hello mirror how you doing I'm just going to send over the body and the clothing she's wearing the Nocturne outfit and I'm not going to send over the hair because the hair is a card based hair that was made for Genesis 8. so I'm going to deal with that in a separate video notice that it is not parented to mirror it lives outside this hierarchy I'm going to make it invisible because we're just focusing on the character for now so select the character head over to file send to gas to Unreal and then give it a name like in my case it'll be mirror 9 and it is a skeletal mesh so that's exactly what I need I'm going to hit accept and assuming that Unreal Engine is open after you restart it can now go and start receiving the files it takes a moment for that process to happen this is what that studio will say at the end export phase from that studio complete now switch to Unreal Engine moves for the import phase and that doesn't work with alt tab you have to go and literally minimize that studio and then if unreal engines open it starts receiving all the bits and pieces there we have it that's done it thousands of windows open is totally fine including this one here we can totally ignore that don't worry about these they're going to disappear in a moment if you now bring up your content browser you will see that we have a new directory called das2 unreal inside of which we have a new directory for our character which is Mira 9 so it's the name I've given it in the bridge so here we have some relevant assets here skeleton physics asset a control rig and we also have mirror so we can go and left click and drag mirror into the viewport and then go and rotate her around and see if the mesh looks okay and there we go she is wearing everything some things are looks like they've been separated like this little belt buckle thing here but we can go and fix that in blender likewise the materials if that's a little bit too shiny there's a way to fix that I'll show you that in upcoming videos so for now let's turn her into the playable character so that is made possible let me go delete her by the magic of an included retargeter asset let me go and bring up my third person player character here just go double click this in third person Blueprints and when you double click it it opens it I'll go on dock it up here let's go to the viewport and we know the navigation is already working fine on this character so what we need to do now is not actually replace the character here I mean we can do that but that's a lot of work a much easier way is to use live retargeting and that means we're going to go and add a new skeletal mesh here and I'll parent that to our current playable character which is called mesh I'm going to call mine Daz mesh so I have a separate skeletal mesh that will be attached to this character and for this we need to supply two things one is a skeletal mesh which in our case will be mirror that is essentially a character parented to the mannequin and we also need to supply an animation blueprint and currently we don't have one so we need to make one just for mirror and there is something so we're going to go make that in our mirror folder here right click in that head over to animation and to animation blueprint we're going to create a new one but that we're going to base on the mirror skeleton so depending on what you've called your character it'll be something else here but whatever your name underscore skeleton is that's what we want to base that on so it's essentially this asset here that's been created in your character's folder select that give it a name I'll call it ABP mirror in my case and then I'll go and double click to open that and animation blueprints can get quite complicated but thankfully we only need a single node and that needs to be connected to the output Port so this is essentially what the blueprint is delivering as a pause we're going to left click and drag out of this and attach something called retarget oops retarget pause from mesh that's the one and this node will need an input namely up here we need to specify an ik retargeter asset and thankfully the dest unreal Bridge comes with several one for Genesis 9 one for Genesis 8 and 8.1 and one for Genesis 3 and the way to do that is to just if you don't see it here it can be sometimes it looks like this and there's no drop down menu just left click and drag this out here so that this drop down comes up and have a look in the list and find it from here so mine shows up as G9 retargeter there's one for Genesis 9 one for eight and one for three here if these things don't show up have a look in either with this icon here or even in your content browser where it says settings here if you click that make sure that both show engine content and show plugin content is enabled here if they are not enabled this was very confusing to me when I first got started with this these retargeters don't show up so anything that is supplied with the plugin that needs to show up in in the content browser on the selection list that needs to have that enabled so let's go make that happen engine content and also plug-in content and then these things show up here so I'm going to pick the Genesis 9 retargeter and that's it that's us done with the animation blueprint we can go and compile and close that and now back in our third person player character let's go and provide that here animation class it's B it's going to be ABP mirror there we go and now we can see that she has the same idle movement as our mannequin already that's perfect so all we need to do now in order to walk around with her is to make the Quinn mannequin invisible and then we're good to go let's go do that it's as easy as selecting that mesh and under the details panel type in Vis for visibility and then just disable the visibility in rendering and that turns that off we need to do one other thing if you forget that then the character is not going to be able to walk around you need to change visibility based and in tick option from always tick pose to always take pose and refresh bones so the top option in the the drop down menu and you can say compile I might also just for visual purposes here go and grab my camera and just go drag that slightly closer to my character maybe up a little bit so I can see her a little bit better and then go into your viewport again hit play and boom there we go she is working just fine now I can see a little bit of pork through here on her legs and I'm going to show you how to fix that in blender there's also the issue that one part of her accessories this seems to be sticking out so we need to go and correct that we'll do that in the next episode but for now yeah this is the so-called live retargeting process

Channel: The WP Guru

Views: 15,118

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Id: bIfMFawYtwU

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023