Easy animation retarget in 5.4 - Unreal Engine 5 tutorial

[Music] welcome back in this tutorial we're going to be looking at the Unreal Engine 5.4 streamlined and upgraded retargeting uh system essentially it is an improvement on the retargeting system that we already have just building upon it making it much easier for us to make use of and as you can see it's incredibly easy to use many different types of skeletons for this for your retarget purposes as well so let's check it out so here we are inside of under Lon 5.4 this is the preview version uh you can find it available on the Epic Launcher today if you want to U the actual full 5.4 release will probably happen somewhere in the late of April this year uh so if you want to wait for that that's approximately when it will be arriving I believe um in this case we have a third person template we're going to be choosing that so we have some third person characters to uh Target around with and uh essentially what we're going to be doing is we're going to be going to mixim them you'll find a link to this in the description if you want to go here and we're going to be going in here and just picking something uh to make use of for our um tutorial here so if we go in here you can browse around for different kind of categories of um animations that you want to make use of uh there are a bunch of them available here and they're all for free if you're not familiar with Amo um in our case we're just going to be taking something that looks a little bit uh acrobatic I guess so we have this run to flip here and this is an animation of a character running towards a wall and then making a back flip out of that wall section uh we're going to be importing this animation inal engine and we're doing that by clicking download and then having it as an fpx with skin 30 frames per second and key from reduction none will be fine for our purposes right here so we're just going to be downloading this and going back into the engine now that we are inside the engine we're just going to be creating a folder so we have something to place this in so we're going to be calling it mixo we're going into that folder and we're going to drag in our run to flip animation that we have uh downloaded from the mixo uh website in this case we are going to be importing the skeleton mesh here and that's because we want to have the skeleton and we're going to be checking in import animations also so we get the animation so uh all in all we're going to be getting H the one animation and the skeleton that it belongs to so this is what it creates so we close down these windows there's nothing really of importance here we're going to make sure to save all of these now the problem with importing like this is that the skeleton mesh is going to get the name of the animation so we're going to be renaming this to skm mixo just so that it's clear what it is and we're going to do the same with the skeleton SK mixo so now we have a skeleton skeleton mesh and an animation here and if we open up this animation we can see that the animation is playing fine here for this character inside of under engine now the easy step of actually retargeting the animations now is that we just go right click and click retarget animation and from here we need to pick a source mesh which we can see up here that's going to be the skeletal mesh that we renamed renamed and then it's going to need a Target skeletal mesh and in this case we can start off with doing something like choosing the UA mannequin which is the unreal engine four mannequin and you can see that immediately what it does is it tries to create a pose for the character that matches the characters this is so that the the rigging will be as accurate as possible so uh both of these are standing in a t POS even though you can see here on this thumbnail that the default pose for the Unreal Engine mannequin is an A Pose but the source over here is a TST so it's trying to match that so that's why it's doing this so just creating a retargeted the animation from here is pretty simple uh you just choose an animation in this case we take the flip animation miximum we can double check double click to see what it's going to be looking like and then we can click export animations and we can take it in the same Maxima folder here just for Simplicity and Export it and we'll get an animation that is now retargeted for our under Engine 4 mannequin character right now that's the easy part but now let's try and understand what is actually going going on here because uh this system here if we go retarget animation this is not a new system this is an improvement upon the ik rig retargeting system that we have gotten already it's just a quality of life essentially um so what's going on here the magic behind all of this is essentially this button here uh autogenerate retargeted if we were to run our animation and and uncheck this you can see that our character go goes back into the a poost I was talking about and it's not doing the animation in this case we need to have a retarget asset ourselves to do the retargeting now I have done a video previously on how to create a retargeter on under Engine 5 I'll leave that in the description if that is of Interest or for reference but to explain what's going to be happening here is when we click in the autogenerate retargeter it is creating these assets temporarily for us to make this animation retargeted what we can do is we can go to export retarget assets and choose the mix themo so that we see that they are all together you can see that it creates an ik rig uh for the unre 4 character an ik rig for the mixim character and a retargeting asset which is going to be the retargeting from mixim to the Unreal Engine character so opening up one of these assets we can see that this one is set up with all of the chains and everything like that like we did in the retargeting tutorial that I have done previously so what this new Improvement or quality of life is doing is essentially saying it's creating an ik rig like this for the two different skeletons that we want to migrate between and then it creates this retargeting asset and this is what is being used when we actually uh click the retarget over here so so th this is what it's Auto regenerate autogenerating to make use of if we were to deselect this for example we could still choose the the rig here now that we actually exported as an asset and have it export the animation just the same and if we wanted to tweak our uh retargeting asset either by going to uh the ik rigs and changing something there or the retarget asset itself which looks like this by default and we could do that if we wanted to tweak something if this Auto generated preview if we go here if this preview here of our animation uh does not live up to to what we want it to do so if we click like so because over here when we have it as the auto we don't have a lot of control here right we get what underland gives us automatically however this is a very powerful tool and it handles a lot of different skeletons just out of the box for us H we can have a bunch of different skeletons like mixo we can have DOS we have the Unreal Engine mannequins I also imported a a character from the CN Studios asset packs and just it just works right so epic has put in a lot of effort to make sure that we have a bunch of different skeletons that will work just automatically without us having to put in the effort to create these ik rigs ourselves now we can still create all of these assets uh like before even though they're also even easier now uh in this case we have an ik rig for uh the mixim character we don't have to set up all of these chains anymore if we don't want to we can autocreate retargeting chains and autocreate ik and this will essentially be all the button presses that we need to have this ik rig completely set up and that way create these assets as well so they have really streamlined the whole process for us to um have our animations uh being usable between different kinds of skeletons so yeah uh that's essentially it now we have a very nice way of being able to get one kind of Animation to a different kind of skeleton and with very little work for it hopefully the explanation of how this works and everything like that also gives you the the Insight of uh what this tool does and how it can be useful for you anyway that's going to be all for now keep on learning take care a big thank you to all of you who like comment subscribe and share my videos or through other means support this channel you are what makes this channel grow and become a resource for other people to learn from

Channel: LeafBranchGames

Views: 9,555

Keywords: learning hub, unreal engine, tutorial, unreal engine 5, blueprints, game design, game dev, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 beginner tutorial, ue5 beginner tutorial, building user interfaces for unreal, engine ui design, user interface, design ui, design tutorial, building user interfaces, unreal engine user interface, Leafbranchgames, Good habits, Best practice, How to build menus and UI for Unreal engine 5, the right way, UE4, UE5, Reuse, be a better game dev, Retarget

Id: K3J_RqCiABI

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024