Getting Started with CC Control Rig for UE | Unreal Control Rig Plug-in Tutorial

hey everyone in this tutorial we're going to take a look at how you can import your character creator characters into Unreal Engine and manipulate them using the dedicated CC U control rig this process allows you to do further key frame motion editing and refinements without the need to send your data back to Ione or other motion editing software to get started head over to the RL control rig website where you'll find a link to download the demo project click download log into your account and after a brief informational video you'll end up with the zip file which contains two separate project folders one for Kevin the default sample character and one for Nia we'll load up Kevin's project first to go through the basics when you first open it you'll see your character in the scene and you'll need to load up the level sequence to see the animation set up if you click on the crcc body track you'll see the control rig displayed you can play back to see the idle motion assigned to the model and also use the control Gizmo to test out character pose adjustments notice the human ik and foot contact settings are all set up in this project you'll also find a folder titled CC rigs which contains a CCC picker which is a UI widget used for easier control of your character in this panel we can toggle the ik FK checkboxes at the elbows to keep them locked allowing for ik manipulation of the limbs fingers can also be moved in unison or individually based on the control Gizmo used there is also a dedicated facial control panel that is optimized for use with cc3 plus character facial composition you can mess around with this on your own time to see which controls correspond to which facial features okay those are the basics of the demo project let's look next at how to export a character from Character Creator and set it up manually here we have Nia all set to go so let's choose export clothed fbx character from the file menu and choose the unreal Target to a preset here we're only exporting the mesh and be sure to choose delete Hidden faces to optimize the exported geometry keep in mind that the auto setup plugin for unreal only supports models that utilize a reill usion skeleton such as cc3 plus actor core or ACU rig characters ACU rig is a free tool that can be used to conform your rig to the reallusion standard if your character doesn't meet the aforementioned requirements after downloading the unreal Auto setup plugin and running the executable you'll be presented with a number of folders corresponding to different recent versions of unreal what you need to do here is copy the relevant content and plugins folders to your unreal project directory like so you'll also want to add the ccue control rig to your project via your library then run the project after which you'll see both plugins successfully installed all right now you're ready to import in your character I'll create a dedicated tutorial folder and then click and drag in my fbx from Explorer being sure to select the HQ Shader for best visual results you'll want to ensure use t0 as reference pose and import morph targets are both selected and import animation if you have any included which isn't the case here okay once everything is imported in go ahead and right click on the skeletal mesh and select create CC control rig this will populate a rigs folder with a blueprint class named CC rig BP which we want to drag into our scene position and lighting is all up to your preference next let's create a new level sequence and add our blueprint class we just brought in to our scene from there we want to add in the CC body rig under our blueprint class track and you'll see it appear in the viewport you can also add a body component here but it's not necessary in our workflow here so I haven't done it we also want to add in our face component from there you can mess around with the various control gizmos for both the body and face to see the results you'll notice the transform values appear for the body components and the blend shaped strength values for their corresponding facial components we can also find the cccr Picker widget in the rigs folder and activate that which will give us the reference dummies for the body and face that we can also use to more easily pick and manipulate individual components and features you can toggle between the body and facial rigs in the drop- down menu again you can toggle the ik and FK modes for the knees and elbows for different movement Gizmo options next let's just put our character into a nice pose using the various body movement gizmos that we've just explored from there we can customize the facial expressions as well if we enable the face GUI follow head option it will allow the facial controllers to move along with the head which helps to more effectively adjust facial expressions once we're satisfied with the pose and expression we can select the relevant body controllers and save the body pose via the poses in the animation panel you can do the same thing with the face controllers as well just be sure to get a good camera angle in your viewport that is focused on the face now that we have those poses saved under their respective control rigs we can clear the previously added sequencer tracks which will take our character blueprint back to the default values then read our face and body components and their respective control rigs after that we can easily apply the saved poses to their respective control rigs by clicking select controls and then paste pose since all CC characters contain the same skeleton and expression system pose assets can be applied and transferred universally to any other CC character this allows us to quickly and easily create a custom CC character animation Library within the unreal ecosystem speaking of Animation let's lastly look at the animation editing pipeline between Ione and unreal using our new control rig here in iclone I have an exaggerated jumping motion and I'm doing some Quick Clip editing along with some key frame transition refinement using the curve editor please refer to the dedicated tutorials for more in-depth on these specific tools once I'm satisfied I'll simply export the character mesh along with the animation to fbx format using the unreal Target tool preset with the proper frame range for our unreal import settings we always need to have used Time Zero as reference pose selected but in this case I'll skip the morph targets as we're not focusing on facial animation however we do need to import the animation with the exported time option that will give us this animation sequence that we can preview in unreal with the same imported mesh we'll start by right clicking on the imported skeletal mesh and selecting create C control rig then click and drag in the CC rig blueprint class that was created feel free to reset the world position and set the lighting here next I'm creating a new level sequence which is where we'll do our editing once again in this sequencer I'll add the CC rig BP actor track and I'll clear the other autogenerated tracks for now since we're only doing the body here I'll add in the body component and under that add our animation asset that we just imported now we can see the animation complete with that sweet UI motion blur what I want to do next is right click on the body component and bake a control rig selecting our crcc body rig this will add that track populated with key frames which will allow us to do our editing in order to avoid altering the original animation we can add an additive track from there you can utilize the control rig to transform rotate and even stretch body parts to add a level of dynamic exaggeration to The Landing for a more detailed walk through on key frame editing and unreal using your control rig please check out the dedicated tutorial you can see a quick before and after of the subtle edits here when you're finished right click on the body component track and select bake animation sequence to bake in your edits after which you'll be prompted to export to a new animation sequence this will generate a new animation sequence in your selected folder which you can then preview that's a basic walkthrough of how to get your CC control rig set up and utilize it to edit your body and facial animations in unreal after import keep in mind that there are tons of Animation assets included in iclone as well as in the content store that you can easily apply and utilize in your Productions thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 12,909

Keywords: 3D character creator, rigged 3D character, video game development, character maker, custom character, avatar maker, animated character, rigged character, create a character, make your own character, make a character, character design generator, Face Rig, character face, expression, 3d modeling, character creator, cartoon character, realistic character, free character, ue, unreal engine, unreal engine 5.4, ue 5.4, control rig, metahuman, free 3d model, free plugin, ue 5.3

Id: TrxBXlnEg9k

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024