Creating Easy RPG Characters In Unreal Engine

hey what's up everyone this is Mark here at dev slopes comm and I'm really excited about this video actually we're going to create some RPG characters using free assets from some popular games or rather a game called Infinity Blade and so let's just go ahead and get started I'm gonna call this project RPG character I'm just going to save mine on the desktop I'm gonna select mobile just for fun because we're gonna use some mobile assets you can leave it on maximum quality if you want no big deal and then what I want to do is I want to click the top-down template here we're not gonna use this perfectly per se but I want some of the logic that comes with that clicking and all that kind of stuff so let's click create project alright now what we're gonna do is we're gonna launch the unreal marketplace ok with the Epic Games launcher open here I'm gonna go to marketplace and then what I'm gonna do is going to go to browse excuse not browse free epic games content and then these are all assets created by epic games amazing stuff here all free you can use it in any game commercially or free so long as it's on the Unreal Engine you can't use it on unity or any other engine I'm going to click three to go to the very end and you're gonna see Infinity Blade adversaries and Infinity Blade warriors ok and there's also some other cool things here as well to weapons affinity blade effects etc these are all free you should you should use these are amazing now let's go ahead to our Infinity Blade warriors I already own these and so it would probably say three here you just want to click that and then once it's downloaded you can say add to project which is what I'm gonna do I'm going to add it to my project and you may see something like this no compatible user projects found so what I'm going to do is click show all projects and then I'm going to find the one that I just created RPG character and it says asset not compatible with version 4.2 too so select the closest alternative version so I'm going to say 4.20 and now I can add it to my prod okay once that's done it's in the project and I maximize this here and we can now see in the content folder here that we have Infinity Blade warriors and if I go into these characters here you're gonna see a bunch of skeletal meshes now this is interesting because we have these really really cool models here but there's actually no animations included and I see a lot of comments on this asset and other assets in the marketplace oh this is completely pointless because there's no animations blah blah blah blah blah actually that's not true I just dragged one of these in here but I really like this guy here the Robo guy I think he looks pretty cool but obviously we can't do anything with it so let's delete him real quick and let's click play and this is the point and click adventure right so yeah you're like okay I want to make a game but this mannequin is kind of ugly looking just like a dummy it looks like a dummy a crash dummy you know I really wish I could use this robot well I'm gonna teach you how you can do that let's use these triple a game assets and just throw them here in the game how do we do that well we're gonna use something called animation retargeting so here's what we know we know that these Infinity Blade characters were created using the Unreal Engine skeleton and when you have an Unreal Engine skeleton in place you can actually retarget animations over to it in fact even if you didn't have Unreal skeleton you can still retarget a different skeleton to the Unreal skeleton you can pick you know the bones from the left side moved on to the right side ours is gonna work automatically though because these are all already ready to go so I'm gonna show you how we can take the animations from this character here this run animation and all this movement here and simply map it over onto the Robo and a lot of people actually don't know how to do this and in fact it'll work on all of these characters here and then you'll have triple-a game assets and nobody else will okay here we go so how do we do it well we have a mannequin here that came with the starter project okay and this mannequin has some animations and an animation blueprint now I could just retarget the whole blueprint and it would work out of the box but I want to show you the animation step first and then we'll move on to the blueprint so what I want is I want the character to be able to run our robot to be able to run and so we don't have a run animation for the Robo guy but we do have one for the mannequin which is also built on the Unreal skeleton so what I'm gonna do is double click this I'll bring it up here and now you've got this guy running and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just make sure my route here selected just so I can make sure I have everything in place here and what I want to do is I want to retarget this skeleton effect I need to move back though to this skeleton here so clicking the skeleton tree I'm just make sure my route is selected so I can make sure my guy selected here and then you're gonna see something here called re target manager okay so click skeleton retarget manager this is the skeleton of the mannequin and if you can't see the retarget manager here you can open it with this button here and what we're gonna do is we are simply going to retarget this rig onto the other rig and it's really easy all you have to do all you have to do is click select rig and click select humanoid rig and because this skeleton is identical to the skeleton on the other characters of the infinity blade characters this is gonna work out of the box and if it wasn't perfect here's where you can actually start mapping things you could you could change around you know the route of this is called you know base route on the other one and you could play around some things here but in this particular case here this is what we want to retarget so that looks good to me here I'm gonna click Save that's all we have to do literally all we have to do I know I'm making this longer go into this Gallatin of the of the animations that you have retarget manager and then save it okay and then it's like humanoid then save it okay now let's go over to our Infinity Blade character complete characters okay and let's go find our Robo this guy right here double click it drag it up and then on the right hand side click skeleton like we did on the other one okay now you may be thinking to yourself wait a minute what's going on this is the wrong mesh this is not the right well they all show the same skeleton so you can actually change them here and they're all gonna work the same out of the box okay so what I'm gonna do is on this guy now I'm gonna select my route here go to retarget manager I am simply gonna select the humanoid rig on this robot here and this is important if the if the bones were slightly different this is where I would actually make sure I map them so on the left hand side I might have like on the original mannequin I might have something called a route but this guy could have could have a route called base route and this is where I'd actually say let's map the route to the base group and you start mapping bones to each other and this becomes more of a thing that you would do when you're working with a non unreal skeleton so if somebody made a skeleton from their own skeleton you could actually map to the unreal skeleton here and then start getting it to work out of the box which is really nice so with that done here we're gonna click Save that's it okay that's it open up your skeleton and select humanoid and then it's gonna map those automatically they have the same names because it's the same skeleton just different meshes really so that looks cool I'm gonna save my map here now what I want to do is I want to go find the animations that I want so but be like well before I do that let's actually click the character here so in affinity blood characters I'm going to right-click and do a new folder we're gonna call this animations because we want to store some animations and make shins all right here we go looks good to me and now I'm gonna go to content mannequin animations and now we can go ahead and see this third person run I want you to right click it go to retarget atom assets and duplicate atom acids and retarget and sure enough you're gonna see your infinity blades of skeleton here now if you didn't actually open up the infinity blade skeleton like I just showed you and if you didn't select the humanoid rig this would not be here it would not be here because it was not mapped so it's important to understand and so I'm gonna select the Infinity Blade skeleton and I am gonna give it a prefix because I don't want it to have the name third-person run because it'll confuse it with the other one and so or it could I'm just gonna call this IB underscore and then it'll say third-person run IB for Infinity Blade okay actually let's call RPG RPG underscore and I'm gonna change the folder to the one that we just created so Infinity Blade Warriors character animations and I'm gonna click retarget alright that's it check this out now check it out so if I let's go find this Infinity Blade war character animations we now have an infinity blade character that's running it's doing the run of the manikin and I can change the preview mesh to our Robo where's the Robo there you want and look he's running - how cool is that so we've officially taken a skeleton has no animations and we've stolen animations from another skeleton and we just mapped him on to it that is really cool and a lot of people just don't know this trick which is kind of funny just based on the negative reviews I see and comments I see I don't think people know how to do it and so now that's it I mean that's really it but let's take it a step further let's get the rest of our animations working like our blend trees and stuff so let's go to our mannequin animations and let's look at this animation blueprint here so an animation blueprint of course does a lot of cool stuff like you know maps like based on motion the speed you know should we jump should we run what's going on and if we go look at our what is it our animgraph I believe okay there's a state machine in here for animation so all this is pre-built and I don't want to rebuild all this I don't wanna have to do this manually for for all the animations to make our our Infinity Blade character look nice so what I'm gonna do since I've already mapped the skeletons I'm gonna right-click this blueprint here retarget annum blueprints and we're gonna duplicate it and retarget it on the same skeleton here how cool is that and we'll call this RPG underscore and I'll change the folder over here to infinity blade warrior and then we're gonna say character and animations like so and we're gonna retarget it and there we go so we got all those animations and yes see how there's a third person run number one it actually duplicated that and the reason why I did this because we already had one in here but I did want to show you the manual process as well not just the blueprint cuz sometimes you actually won't have blueprints you only have the animations so that's cool we've got all those running animations now and the jumping so let's go look at our character here that's already in the scene this is a top-down character what I want to do is I want to edit top-down character and I'm going to click viewport and what I want to do select the mesh and instead of the SK mannequin let's go ahead and grab our Robo pretty cool right here's our Robo and for animation blueprint let's go ahead and select RPG third-person and blueprint and compile and save let's close out of this here and check this out look at this we've got like this is like magic we didn't really have to do anything we got this cool triple-a asset that is just working out of the box here alright so we've successfully used a skeleton as no animations from a triple-a game which is called Infinity Blade if you haven't played it on mobile and then we took some existing logic from a starter template here with their with their mannequin animations and we just retargeted them over to our character and it worked out of the box because they have the same skeleton and so a lot of the assets on the unreal asset store have the Unreal skeleton in fact it's kind of a bad practice to put assets on the asset store that have their own skeletons the unreal really wants you to put their unreal skeleton on these guys here that is really cool right what we just did now what I want you to do is go to the marketplace and here's the really cool thing this is the whole point of this here's the whole point of this message if we go to browse and go to animations right here these animations are all for the most part and they should be but they're all built on the Unreal the Unreal skeleton and so what this means is maybe you've passed these before me like I don't know how to use these well now what you can do is you buy this product here okay with with these animations let's go to there's one that I think is really cool let me go find it here it's x-act it's actually by this guy right here let's go to the Frank climax 1 and I'm going to select the warrior for instance right here and what we want to do is open up this promotional video just to show you ok just show you what it can do so you're gonna see these cool animations right like in a pack like this any packet doesn't matter these are all built with the Unreal skeleton and so when you get these when you buy this pack you know I may have some example scenes and things but literally all you have to do is take this guy's skeleton ok and retarget it over to whatever skills do you want to use so the same exact process we did right now if you wanted your infinity blade character to hold this sword and do these things like that all you'd have to do is the exact same thing that we did in this video and that's the point that's how you get all these animations working so onto your games and then now you can have a professional looking game so really cool stuff here the none of the characters infinity blade for the heroes have it the the enemies do have some animations which is nice I'm not sure why they pulled out the animations for the heroes but the but the enemies do have animations which is kind of cool and you can actually even take multiple animations and skeletons and map map or multiple skeletons and map their animations on to a single skeleton take some work in time but really cool stuff here this is basically done that's it make some RPGs see you next time

Channel: Devslopes

Views: 62,083

Rating: 4.8819094 out of 5

Keywords: unreal engine, rpg game, game development, ue4, unity, game dev, build rpg, code games, how to rpg, game animation

Id: HDxlFBkyvtw

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019