Free Mocap Animations to use in Unreal Engine 5.2

how's it going everybody and welcome back to the channel in this video we are gonna talk about some free motion capture resource that has been out for a while I haven't talked about it because of a reason that I would explain explain later this is a totally free option now let's get started so what I want to talk about is uh this is from Neutron the company that makes a motion capture suit that I own by the way I'm not sponsored and this is totally free for you guys to use so what you have here is a lot of motion capture data that you can use with Unreal Engine without any restriction so it's basically like mix amount the difference between this and Maximo is maximal animations are more geared towards games and these are these are motion capture performances so these are a little bit more realistic they do have a little bit more weight and this is the only place where I've seen this it also has sign language so if you want to have your avatar with sign language this is amazing I've never seen this in any other places let me know in the comment section below if you've seen this somewhere else because I haven't and and you got some good things here you also have daily live you know work movement you also have medieval and fantasy okay so you can see you know running from fire I I don't know but you can see the difference between some of these uh mode cap actions you even have some spell casting here is the fact that these are made by real actors the only caveat of these animations is an I don't know if neutron has something about this but I have not seen animations that are loopable usually it's because livable animations are animations that have been retouched it's pretty hard to do a loopable animation when you're doing motion capture unless you're something like on a treadmill and even then you have to retouch it so these animations are raw this is raw data um that they capture on on their Suits now to the part and the reason why I haven't discussed this before even though this has been out for a while is if you click on them uh you see that you have two options you can download the fbx which if you want to use that you can but there's also another download here and it's the mbx the one that we're gonna talk about today the FPS it's good you can get it into unreal the reason why I don't like to use this solution is because you have to do some retargeting uh because this isn't the mannequin skeleton and it takes a little bit to get things retarget so the way that I'm going to show you today you will be using the mbx which is the file that goes into the nordem software and then you're going to get it into unreal that way you don't have to do any retargeting whatsoever by the way uh there is a free version of their software that we're gonna use today all right so let's look at the things you're going to need for this to run first of all you're going to need their software because like I said we're going to be using their software files not the fvx so you're gonna need the access Studio light you see here it says demo this is completely free for you to download so make sure you download this and install it the installation is straightforward it's just an exe that you have to just go through it select where you want to install just like any other EXE the other thing that you're going to need is the noidum plugin for this to work so you can go into the marketplace and it's this one right here it's a neural Life Link this also is free for you to use and it's compatible with 5.2 so you can use it with the latest iteration of Unreal Engine once you got those installed just open a project whatever project you want I'm going to be using 5.2 for this one once you have installed those two things all you have to do is go to plugins uh here on the settings tab look for neuron already have checked you just check it it's going to ask you to restart and you're good to go you I usually have this tab over here but if you don't have this is the lifeline tab if you don't have the live link tab or you can see it all you have to do is go to Windows go to Virtual production and click on live link and you're going to get this tab right here so let me pull it out so you all can see what it is all right and it's time to test this out so let's pick an animation I like this magical spellcast so I'm just going to click on it and you can see a preview of the animation right here um like I said before we're not going to use the fbx we're going to download the mbx so click here I'm sorry one of the things that I forgot to say is you do have to make an account it's just a free account so just make an account log in and you should be able to download the the mocap it's just like Maximo so once you've downloaded this you need to go and open your access studio now once you open access Studio you're going to be presented with this little window right here um yours will only have some project these are my particular projects so click on Sample project now you should see something like this and in this project what you need to do is click on import this is going to open the browser and you're going to see that I have it here on my downloads folder I have other several animations that I've downloaded so I'm just going to click on this one click on open and that's going to instantly add it to the list once you have this in list that is all you have to do in this window you go to the editing tab just click on the editing tab before we do anything else we need to set some options so we can make this function so all you have to do is click here this three lines and it's going to give you this menu go to settings and in the settings menu you go to bvh broadcasting now over here you're just going to this one is going to be locked for you I think uh this this is the full version that I have on my desktop but this one down here is the one that you're interested in now you will only have access to the Unreal Engine one which is fine that actually works so once you do this make sure that I have this IP address it came default with when I installed this this is my IP address by the way just in case um it's just an IP address that it assigns also the port it assigns it automatically and I'll leave it as it is I have not touched any of these so all you have to do is Click ok and double click to load your animation here is our animation by the way the way you move in this software is you scroll to zoom in zoom out you click the scroll wheel to hover around okay so if we go back and we just scrub the animation you can see how smooth and how cool it looks we can actually play it and there you go so what we're going to do now is you're going to click this little sign right here this little sign says repeat and if you click it if you click it this will constantly Loop the reason why I'm doing that is because you need it constantly looping for this to show in Unreal Engine now if we go into Unreal Engine and we go to Source we click on axis neuron live we uncheck this UDP checkbox and it doesn't matter that it says 704 here because that's the UDP for we're not using that we're using the receiving address which is this one and as you can see it's the same as the one we saw in the access Studio application which is the IP blast support and you can see that it is online so over here if you've used like link before you probably know this but in case you haven't used live link before you're going to see here your source with that P and the status it says online and over here you're going to see the name of your character and this little dot means that things are working so the fact that isn't green means that everything is good to go now what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab one of the mannequins and Let's do let's do the ue5 mannequin we're not going to do the the ue4 mannequin and we're going to create from the skeleton a animation blueprint by the way you only have to do this once uh what I'm about to do um and just import as many animations as you as you please I'm just going to double click on the animation blueprint and all you have to do is right click look for live link pose and the subject name is the character that popped up over there in the LifeLink window so I'm going to click on Hope you go here and we're not done yet over here you have to click in the retarget asset this drop down menu and all you have to do is check the one that says UE mannequin even if I'm using meta humans I always use this one it works fine so compile and you're going to see that she goes a little bit through the floor I'm not gonna lie that's one of the issues that I've seen with all of our animations I don't know if it has to do with where the root motion is at and this way you can just use this animation right out of the box without having to do any other retargeting now there is one thing that I'm noticing and this usually happens with the meta humans when I do my own motion capture is that the first post is not looking like the first pose of this one because if I pause it now you can pause it while it's linked you can see where the arms of the character are versus the arm of the mannequin there is a way to correct for this we're going to do that just now I'm going to double click the skeleton go to characters bones or hierarchy we're going to create a corrective pose I believe I've done this in a previous video but hey let's let's just do it right now again so all we have to do is I just go to the places where let's say make sure the angle is not to angle is on let's do 20 and 20. it's a little bit of guesswork create asset create animation from current pose just select where you wanted it to be I'm going to name it corrective and once you have that corrective all you have to do is actually open that blueprint and let's get that corrective in just drop it in there connected compile it's actually not going to do anything right now you need to close it and open it again I don't know why but now you can see that the arms are where it's supposed to be so if we play the animation and you can see that it's a much better look you can see the whole animation and just doing you know something really cool and now you have some nice animation and she's not even going through the floor anymore so you see how sometimes this corrective pose is really important and like I said the good thing is you don't even have to retarget this that being said we haven't recorded anything I mentioned yet we need to use Tech recorder I do have a tutorial for that but let me just make something real quick here now once you add the blueprint you're gonna be you're gonna see that your mannequin stays in just one pose and doesn't continue the animation you need to add the live link component so live link component skeletal animation and you can see that it's animating on scene after that all you have to do is scroll all the way to start to the starting pose uh give it a name a little tutorial make sure you add the source so over here source simple and again I do have a tutorials on this if you want to go deeper I'm just running real quick for just demonstration purposes and I'm going to click the big red button three two one just click here and it's going to start recording now whatever you have the camera it doesn't matter because it's only recording the animation so I'm just going to stop it right there I know the intervention didn't finish but just gonna stop it right there I'm gonna browse to where that sequence was recorded and you have your animation right here and there you go so that initial setup will be only once and all you have to do is download animations add them to access studio and now you don't even have to retarget anything any character that you have that is compatible with mannequin will work with this and I know what you be asking right now does this work with many humans so let's give it a shot I have my meta human right here and I'm going to go to body I made a custom blueprint for this meta human so and you should too so I'm just going to go to blueprint that I have and there he is animating I'll call Life Link and there you go so same with the meta human you can do the same animations and you can use these animations with your meta human this is exactly the same thing that I did for the mannequin is just create a animation blueprint and use the UE mannequin live link remap asset because again that I think that's what will work for me if anyone from neuron is watching this video and I'm mistaken please let me know but that's the one that I've been using I also added a corrective because this had the same issue as the one with the mannequin but you can see it works and you can use these animations with whatever characters you have on real engine plus you can also use them with the meta humans now the reason why I think this is fantastic is because for those people who just want to do an avatar a talking Avatar and only have the iPhone for live link phase but don't have a motion capture so you can actually just download one of the idols there's several Idols in the mocap Market you can download and just pair them with your talking head and there you go you'll have a character with actual animations and you can use it as talking head or if you need for background characters this is amazing too or even for your hero characters if some of the animations go with what you're doing with your video game or your short film are you ready that is it for this video thank you so much for watching as always and thanks to all my patreon is right here on screen thank you everybody to don't that donate to the patreon if you can't donate leaving a like and leaving a comment goes a long way for the YouTube algorithm subscribe if you haven't and uh let me know how this goes with this uh let me know in the comments section down below I'm usually there to help you out if not there's Discord follow me on Twitter for some more cool updates I'll see you in the next one

Channel: MR3D-Dev

Views: 19,351

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5.2, noitom mocap, free animations, mocap market, perception neuron, mocap animations for unreal engine

Id: onwH5PDNhvQ

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023