Easy rigging for UE4 Mannequin in Blender with Uefy 2.0

[Music] hello everyone in this video we're going to rig the epic mannequin uefi 2 has some tools that will let us get this done really quickly we start by going to edit preferences go to add-ons and then click on install and navigate to the zip file that you downloaded for uefi 2 and then just click install add-ons and then you can enable it over here now i can clear the scene and set the unit scale to 0.01 this is needed for unreal engine to work correctly and then i can also set the clipping distance to 50 meters so we have a better view now we could do file import fbx navigate to where the mannequin is i will select the mannequins file turn off animation and then in armature we want automatic bone orientation and import fbx with the armature selected we can go to viewport display and put it in front and i'm also going to take this to the top so we have a we have a better view here and then scrolling down we will go to the uefi script panel and set these values so this is going we have to hit refresh list first so this is going to be the armature of the character that you're rigging this is the armature for the unreal engine mannequin and we haven't brought in a metal rake or a generated rig just yet now when you import a mannequin there's usually a problem with the with the foot so we just hit fix mannequin while the mannequin's armature is selected and this problem goes away then we can select the mesh while in object mode and then scroll further down here to uefi extra tools and click on extract mesh so this is going to separate the mesh from the armature so there are two completely separate objects now i can create a new collection move the mesh into it and we don't need this anymore while in object mode we can do shift a armature uefi script and bring in the mannequin meta rig and we can also put this in front from viewport display now this meta rig is already pre-configured to work with the unreal engine mannequin so you're free to make any changes if you want but we can also just click on generate rig to get the generated rig out of this now we don't need the meta rig anymore for the time being and then we can click on the generated rig and also put it in front and we will also click on refresh list so all of these values are up to date so now we have a meta rig object and the generated grig object listed right here now i can select the mesh shift click the rig then do control p and armature deform this is going to join the mesh to the rig and with just the rig selected i will go further down here now because our meta rig was already pre-configured we don't use the character operators or the meta rig operators we'll just go right down to pre-process and then click this once you have to run this one time on the initial pass and then i'm going to make sure that the mode is epic skeleton so it works with unreal engines mannequin and then i'm just going to click on build skeleton and give this a moment and that is basically it we can select item here uh turn off transform layers to the top and remain properties right underneath this this character is now basically ready for animation and we can start animating with this all of the controls are working before we export this character we have to make sure that the rig is named armature building the skeleton automatically renames the rig to be armature there are also dedicated buttons here that will rename the currently selected object as appropriate which may seem a little excessive but it just avoids any typing mistakes to export this character we could go to object mode select the mesh shift select the armature go file export fbx and then select the name of the your export file we want only selected objects so this is going to exclude the camera lights and whatever else might be in the scene and then in armature we want only the deformed bones and we don't want to add any leaf bones and we're not really dealing with animation right now so we can just turn this off and then export fbx now we can go to the engine do import select the file we just exported do open now i'm going to leave skeleton to be none this is going to create a brand new skeleton for us and i don't change anything else i just do import and give it a minute we can then open the mesh and go to the skeleton tab and we can confirm that this bone hierarchy actually matches the original unreal mannequin now there are a few steps we have to take so retargeting and other operations become easier later on so don't skip these we first have to go to show retargeting options and these will all be set to animation initially which doesn't work very well so we're going to right click on this and set it recursively to skeleton we'll set the root to be animation and the pelvis to be animation scaled and we'll go down here and set these to be recursively to be animation as well so this is going to pretty much match uh the same translation retargeting options that are on the original mannequin and then i can just turn this turn these off and i also have to click on apply to asset and this is necessary as well for retargeting and the last thing that i have to do is go to retarget manager and select the rig to be the humanoid rig and this is also necessary we don't have to do uh we don't have to fill out any of these values because they're already accurate and our poses will be accurate as well okay now we're going to retarget some marketplace animations that i've purchased onto this new mannequin so i'm going to select all of these animations right click on them retarget duplicate anim assets and retarget now i'm going to select the skeleton that we created when we imported this new mannequin and i'm going to change the location of where i want these files to end up so i'm just going to create a new folder like so and then do ok and then do retarget and give this a moment to finish when it's done i can go back up here and check that folder and all of my new animations are going to be over there so i can just play something and you can see it is working uh just fine when we imported this mannequin it created a new skeleton uh this one right here you could obviously name this whatever you want so the next time i rake a character in blender like a custom character and then bring it in i'll do import i'll find the character that i want to import that was rigged for the with the epic skeleton mode and i'll do open and this time i'm going to select this the skeleton here i won't leave it at none so it doesn't create a new skeleton i'll select the mannequin skeleton that i created in blender and then import it and i'll do import and i'll just give this a moment to finish now if i load the mannequin again and go to its animation tabs uh i can just do a drop down on the preview mesh and select this second character and without retargeting anything or creating a new set of uh new copy of these animations it just works so this is one way that you can rig a mannequin and blender and then use it as a base for sharing animations across various characters because i can just continue importing more and more characters onto the same mannequin and at the same time i have the rig in blender where i can create my own animations to fill in any gaps that i have in my purchased animations there will be a link in the description and in the corner on how to create animations with a rig like this and export them to unreal engine now this method does have one shortcoming if i wanted to use third-party blueprints or a hardware interface type thing that only works for the unreal engine mannequin uh the original one like uh you would find in every any third person template like this uh this this mannequin is not going to work for us any of the blender rigged characters won't work for us because we try to import them by selecting this original unreal engine mannequin skeleton it'll come in all twisted so the way to fix that is to go to blender and go down here to the export panel now you want to make absolutely sure that you make a backup of your blend file because this next step is not compatible with blender or with rigify once we're done with this we can only export the character we can't create new animations with it so i'm just going to click here once and then i will select the mesh and then shift click on the armature then i will do file export fbx i will select the export file name a different one and i'll indicate it that it it is with the unreal engine bone rolls and then i'll do the same thing here again selected objects only we want only the deformed bones don't add any leaf bones we're not dealing with animations and this this particular armature can't export animations anyway so just do export fbx and then back in the engine we can go uh back up to our asset folder and i will just create a new new folder here and then i will do import and i'll select this file that we just created open and now i can select the original unreal engine mannequin here as you can see i bought a lot of uh animation packs so i have quite a few of them but i need to pick out the one that actually comes with uh the third a third person template so it's this one it'll be in game mannequin character mesh okay so now i can do import and then give it a minute now as you might notice it didn't create a skeleton here because we're using the original unreal engine mannequin skeleton so if i click on this character i go to skeleton it'll show me the original mannequin you can see it has its materials attached to it and then in animation i can i can just pick out the one that i rigged in blender and and you can see i didn't retarget these animations they were retargeted to the original and they just work and this will work for any character that i rigged in in blender now it'll work for that lava knight character that we just saw it'll work for anything else and if you use a third-party blueprint system like als and you'll see a link in the description and in the corner above where we can just rig a character in blender import it using the original mannequin and have those third-party blueprints just work instantly without us having to do anything at all now the downside to this is that while every marketplace animation will just instantly work uh the animations that i create in blender uh can't be exported with this with this method so uh you're going to need two blend files and two exports to the engine i just usually do control z to undo that last step we did so i can continue using this armature but you're better off having two separate blend files and then the the way this works is that i will create my animations bring them in with my blender based mannequin and then retarget them to the other one and that works out uh for me because i can use both systems at the same time but that's kind of an extra step for me so my default is just to use the blender based mannequin as my as the base for my projects and all of my characters go on top of this and i only need one copy of my animation sets and everything works for everybody and i can just directly import animations on them onto this so it's simpler for me but if you're if you're really need third-party blueprints the other method works as just as well if you found this video useful hit the like button and consider telling other developers about this project that's all for this time thank you for watching

Channel: Rakiz Farooq

Views: 40,231

Keywords: uefy, uefy script, uefy2, uefy 2, ue4, unreal engine, unreal engine 4, blender, b3d, rigify, animation, rigging

Id: 8Ad4v7x41RA

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020