Export to Unreal Control Rig

hello and welcome to another advanced skeleton video in this video we are going to take a look at a new feature which is export to unreal control rig so we'll hop over to advanced kitten and show you how we can take a advanced gun rig and export it into unreal and with the unreal's control rig system and for this demo we will be using the demo character called conan so to access this you will just go to demo section choose conan and hit open so traditionally the workflow for creating games has been to do all rigging and animation in maya or other 3d packages and then export to the game engine the deforming mesh with animation recently unreal started introducing its own rigging system so that allows for users to start using other works flow meaning the ability to apply animation in unreal or for just fine tweaking of animation now it should be noted that as the control ring system in unreal is fairly new it is not yet have all the abilities that uh maya and other 3d packages uh have in terms of rig functionalities particularly when it comes to various deformers but i'm sure the upcoming versions of unreal we will see further improvements upon the controllering system also i would like to note that this is the first version of the advanced skeleton to control rig exporter so it is not exporting all the parts of the rig that you have in maya for example the phase setup is currently not exported likewise the fk and ik blending systems are not exported now it can export both fk and iket but it will export whatever you have currently set so for this character we're see we're going to end up with ik for the legs and fk for the arms if you wanted to export f i get for the arms you just make sure to switch the iris the arms over to ik before running the export now as new versions of advanced gun will be coming out we'll likely be seeing more of the advanced skeleton functions and features being able to export to control rig all right so let's go ahead and get this conan character exported over to unreal along with a control rig so first thing we're gonna do is export the fbx and we'll do that in here the export sections we'll hit fbx export now we can see we did get a couple of uh warnings here in the export uh one of his complex animation is big that's quite common basically that's just telling us that the uh constraints on the deformation system are baked into animation curves now this other one is skin definition it has some information in it trying to describe the issue but basically the bind post information is not stored in the same way in maya and in fvx so whenever you do come across this issue what i recommend is that you run this function here called rebuild dag post nodes so let's go ahead and do that and again run the fbx export i'll overwrite the file and we'll see that this time the skin definition warning is gone all right so let's jump over to unreal and import this fbx and we get a various input options i'm going to keep this at default and say input all there are some warning messages here on the input now these are mostly related just to the smoothing settings on the polygons and not to worry much about this so we'll just close it so here are all the nodes and we could see that if we grab this one's got mesh we could drag and drop that into the scene and we would have our character in unreal now i'm going to delete that from the scene because that's not what we're after we want to have the control rig version of this now to get that the next thing we're going to do jump back into maya here and next to fbx export there's another option here that says control rig export again there's the question mark button that will give you additional information and help now let's go ahead and run that control read export that's gonna bring up dialog and ask us where to save it and give it a name and if we look in that folder now you see we now have two files we have the fbx file and we have a py python file so the next step is going to be to execute the python file to create a control rig here in unreal and if we jump back to maya we can see that on the help image it says the next step is right click on the skeletal mesh object and choose create control rig all right this is a skeleton mesh object if i right click on this you see there is no create control rig option that's because the control ring plugin has not yet been loaded so that's going to be the next step to load this it's uh under edit plugins now there are many plugins so to find the right one it's a quick way to do it is just to type in control and it finds the one called control rig here so we want to turn on and enable that now in addition to that you also need to load the python plugin so we'll type python and make sure to turn on the enable checkbox for this one as well and then for these plugins to take effect we need to hit the restart now button and now that unreal has restarted we can see that now we can right click and we'll find create control rig now that creates another node which is the control rig node next thing we're going to do is double click on that to open it up and we'll see that by default the rig graph has no nodes and there are no rig controllers it is just the geometry and the deformation skeletal system that's in there now before we exit out of here here's a step that will make the python script execute a lot faster so i recommend doing this by default there's an option that's turned on called autocompile so we'll turn that off and then we'll close this then we're going to execute the python script on this control ring node so we'll make sure it is selected and then in the tools menu we'll choose execute python script a quick note if you are in unreal 4 this option is actually located under the file menu so it'll be choose file drop down menu and then execute python script unreal 5 the menu is under tools so let's go ahead execute python script we'll browse through a python script we export it from advanced button and run it and that should run within a few seconds since we turned off auto compile and we can now open the control rig node and we have a control rig that very much resembles the advanced skeleton rig and we can go ahead and test some of the controllers so we can see that we have fk on all of the arms as well as on the fingers and we have ik legs like when we can move around and they have these pole vector objects where the knee is pointing and if you want to go ahead and start animating with this you can just drag and drop that control rig into your scene which automatically generates a new sequencer and you're ready to start setting keys and animating and that's it we have our advanced skeleton rig brought over to unreal here as a control rig and as usual i hope you have enjoyed this video and i'll see you next time

Channel: AdvancedSkeleton

Views: 28,966

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Id: klr3yFDuoVM

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021