Easily Make Animations For The Unreal Engine Mannequin - Cascadeur First Look

recently I found out about this animation software called Cascada it allows people to easily animate characters and it works very well with critic animations for the Unreal Engine mannequins so in this video I thought I'd share it with you in case you have never heard of it and I'll just walk you through it it's free to download so don't worry and when you boot it up it comes with a bunch of sample characters that you can use including the honor Engine 5 and the honor Engine 4 mannequins I'm just going to set this underage and 5 mannequin so if you're used to any other 3D modeling software such as blender or mayor you may find the controls a bit weird you have to press the o button and the left Mouse button to move around and to zoom in and out you have press alt and the right Mouse button so I found the controls a bit weird but it just takes so I'm getting used to so the main way this works is by using something called Auto posing which allows us to quickly position our character in order to set them up for some animations so in my character you're going to notice that there's some green points and that there are some Blue Points these blue points are set by me the animator and these green points are automatically calculated by the machine if I select this blue point and move it all these green points are going to move my character automatically based on the positioning of where I move this blue point so if I move this blue point here we can see the rest of my character's body kind of moves to kind of fit where I need this so using this I can quickly position my character into points that I want to so for example if I select here this will become a Active blue point and if I just move this here then all these green points are going to move towards wherever I have moved this I'm just going to undo all of this so I now just want to go over how quickly it is for people to set up animations using the software with the interpolation tool so let's say I want to make a quick animation of my character doing the splits I'll just do that because it's very quick for me to do I'm just going to move my timeline to around frame 15 press the F key and then if say I just position my character so he's doing the splits like this and I can just go back to frame zero so fm0 this is where my character is positioned if I move this all the way to frame 15 we want him to do his splits animation we can use an interpolation tool so that the software will automatically calculate how my character should move when it positions itself from this animation to this animation sorry from this Frame to this Frame to do that we can just click here and I think we want like a bezier and this will basically make it so it will fill in the gaps between those two frames and make my character do his split animation there are other curves and these can do like different things but so far the main one I've been using is this one they have a whole documentation of how to get set up and use it I've roughly looked into it for like an hour and 30 minutes it's pretty fast to learn although there's a lot more you can do with this tool I'm just scratching the surface so if I just make this 15 and go play so over the course of 15 frames I make my character do the splits so just like that I've quickly created an animation for the honor Engine 5 mannequin character and if I wanted to export this we can just go file and then you want to go export fbxda and just select scene and I can just call this splits and I've exported an animation on my character doing the splits so I'm going to create one more animation for my character and it's going to be of some jumping jacks to help me I'm gonna use this image as a reference so I'm going to create four poses one of my character here here here and here and then I'm gonna let this software interpolate and handle the transitioning between my characters different poses so I'm going to start off by creating pose a where my character has their arms part of their sides and their knees are a bit bent okay so this will be the starting pose of my character the second pose their feet are a bit above the air and their arms are a bit to the side so we can do that okay so I've done the second pose mine kind of looks a bit funky compared to bears but I'm just gonna stick with it for now so on to the third pose seems their feet are a bit more apart and their arms are kind of like touching each other so I'll set that up now okay so here is my attempt at Point C so are my character's hands are in the air and their feet are a bit more spread apart so then I have one more frame where it's D where it seems oh teams this is kind of point B so I'm just gonna copy my animation from my point B and make it the animation for Point d okay so I've added Point D and I've also added Point um another point where it goes back to my character's starting position so now I'm just going to add those interpolation nodes so that it will automatically calculate how my character should move when it transitions between these different frames okay so here it is and I finished it although the animation looks a bit funky although there's some cool things that we can do with this tool to kind of make it a bit smoother so right now we can make it to our character can use FK animations when it's transitioning between certain poses and that'll kind of make it look a bit smoother and I can also add in some frames in between to kind of make the animation a bit smoother and I can also make this a bit shorter because if this happened a lot quicker then I think it would look a bit smoother and look better so I'm just going to make some changes so here where the hand kind of like flip it looks a bit weird in order to prevent this what I can do is go to this point and make it use FK and that way you can see the character's arms move around kind of like a star instead of bending if I turn off the FK and make it use ik then it kind of just like bends and looks a bit weird so by just simply clicking this button it makes that animation a lot better this one also looks a bit weird with my character's arms move down a bit so I'm also going to add FK here that way it looks a bit smoother so I've reduced the frames between each animation and also added some FK which has made the animation look a bit smoother it kind of still looks a bit clunky so maybe I could have made some better poses and maybe edit some more interpolation keyframes between these poses but in a nutshell I've managed to make a quick animation for the honor Engine 5 mannequin quickly with this tool and it even has even more tools that we can use I've not really used it but it has this like autophysics tool so I'm just going to click it and as you can see it's automatically applying physics to my character and this already makes the animation look a bit better I know this looks a bit dodgy but I'm still just going to apply these changes to my animation because I think it will look a bit better okay so I've now made it so my character is using this autophysics I can still polish up my character's animation but I'm good for now so I'm just going to export this so I'm in Unreal Engine I'm just going to briefly close this project and import my star jump animation when I import it I can just select the SK mannequin the default one I don't need to import the mesh I'm just importing the animation so I'll just import this and then I'll also import my split animation in the same way okay so I'm just gonna position my splits and my star jump animation and now if I just go simulate my play character is gonna do those animations so I have my star jump animation which I made pretty cool and then we also have the split animation so I just thought I'd share this Casco deer tool because it's super cool and super powerful for creating animations in general and it also just helps if you use Unreal Engine this tool will allow you to quickly create animations for the Unreal Engine mannequin that's all for this video If you enjoyed like And subscribe and I'll see you guys next time bye foreign

Channel: Unreal University

Views: 49,630

Keywords: cascadeur animation, Cascadeur, unreal engine, ue5, animation, unreal engine 5 animation, ue5 animation, mannequin, unreal engine mannequin animations, unreal engine mannequin

Id: 9crfoVLSmdE

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2023