How to Animate Car in 3ds max for Unreal Engine | Tutorial | Craft Director Studio | Automotive

hi and welcome to this tutorial on how to get a four wheeler extended animation over to unreal engine we have three steps that were to do here first off it is to basically set up the project in unreal engine and second is to rig the car that we want to have an animation on and the third step is how to export that and import that into unreal engine so first of all this scene here or level is from epic games and you can get it from the mark place of unreal engine and type in automotive beach and there you have it this level is totally free i will also add it as a link in the description below so you quickly can access that so you can buy that for zero money and then it will end up in your library vault in the bottom here to add it into a project you can just click add project and select the project you want to add it to in my case i've added it to a blank project before we continue in unreal engine we're going to jump over to three student max and once we're in 3g to max we have our car model and what we want to do here is to read this up however it's slightly different than usually how you rig a car model inside of three student max our recommendation usually is to place the high poly objects as children to each moving part of the four wheel extended however in this case when we're exporting to unreal engine or any other engine i would suspect it's better to use constraints so let's begin opening up craftrickstudio creating a four-week standard and then scale that and rig basically rig up the car that you have i think that's a good starting point then we take the wheels align them to the center of each tire like so and then we select all the wheel meshes scale them and select local that looks good and now we come to the rigging part in graphics studio we can open up later but what i've done here with this model is that i've prepared this one as you can see i created layers for each movement to make it easier to rig so if we take the front wheel basically it's everything here besides the brake calipers they those are supposed to be moving with the center meshes here so what you do animation constraints link constraint and then add it to the wheel and then we have the break animation constrained link constraint and to the center mesh here and we continue down the road break animation constraint link constraint to center one and the rear wheel to the wheel of the four-wheel extender animation constraint link constraint to the wheel one thing to have in mind also is that all these parts as you can see when i'm not looking in the layers section they're just in a flat hierarchy so nothing is underneath anything else and this is kind of important because it can get screwed up when you import it into unreal later on so there we go uh we are to use the body and animation constraint link constraint to the body of the four wheeler and we also have a steering wheel in here that needs to be rigged as well i see i've forgotten to align it but align the four wheeler once to the high poly object then take the high pole object animation constraint link constraint to the steering wheel and that should be it make sure to save this and now we don't have any ground in here to drive on and that we are to export from the scene in unreal and of course if you have the scene in 3d max you don't need to do this you can just export that to unreal later on in the scene we are to select the ground that we are to drive on in this case it's a couple of them these three and to export them we go to file export selected and i will overwrite this one with the default settings export then go back to 3d studio max then file import import and then navigate to the file that we exported we have create animations unreal projects unreal tutorial content beating maps and there we go and no need to really think about anything here just click okay and as you can see there is six different objects and we really need just the top ones these three can go delete and these are the ones we want to use for the four wheeler to understand the four wheeler can only be attached to one ground or mesh and as we have three different we need to combine these into one mesh and we do this by going to the modify panel change it to be a partly and then use attach and click on those that are to be included in the same mesh so that's done perfect let's make an animation of this car i'm not gonna do anything very fancy but something like this i'm going to place it as starting point and then you were to select the graph direction mesh grab direction mesh and then you link that so that one is placed underneath the ground hierarchy and now the four wheel extender who knows which ground it is to drive on next thing is to animate so we open up crystal studio set up an input device i'll just use the keyboard for this one there we go animation go in okay so now when we have the animation the ground we don't really need to have at this point so we'll just hide that one and we are now to export everything else a good thing to do is to move the timeline back because that's the starting point that will be shown inside of unreal once we have imported that then go file export export select the unreal data smith type and if you don't have this in a drop down you need to install the plugin in order for it to work the link to the plugin can be found in the description below and then give it a name and hit save what you want to select here is depending on what you have of course but you can also use just the selected objects but in our case we have hidden other ones so visible object and to get the animation over you need to set the active time segment click ok and it will do its job and once that's done we go over to unreal and once we have opened unreal engine we're going to use the deus myth plugin to import the exporter file that we just did it might be that you don't have this button here then you need to check the plugins and enable that in unreal engine and possibly also add it from the marketplace click on the datasmith button and then navigate to the exported file select the file click open choose the import location and then hit ok we are then to select what we are to include in the import and we can deselect cameras and lines as the things we want to include is the geometry materials and textures and animations then once selected click on import and there we go it's in so it creates a folder with the same name as the file that you exported and in the folder you have different folders for your model the meshes materials and textures are placed in different folders and also the animation and you can try out the animation by double clicking that and just roll the timeline as you can see the animation is in there pretty nice another thing that could be of interest for you guys is of course uh what if i remake this animation well one thing you can do if you don't want to have this at all you can just go into 3d max make your new animation then export and overwrite the same file and then in unreal you go back to the imported file and model and then you have the datasmith scene here you right click that and then pick reimport one thing however here that is good to take note of is that if you just want to update this and you have already done some modifications to the materials and textures to your model make sure to unselect materials and textures because otherwise those will be overwritten and all the work you have done will be in vain geometry and the animations those two you need to have in here and sync the datasmith scene actors and then you hit import and it will overwrite everything the thing you want to do in here if you want to keep the animation you already have here is to just make a duplicate right click and then select duplicate and just give it a name first just to demonstrate however this initial one will be overwritten next time we're gonna jump over to three student max and then make another animation there's a short one like this hit stop so let's export this new one yes replace active type segment there we go jump over to unreal and then right click the date smith scene and re-import unselected materials and textures if that is selected and then hit import and there we go so now in animations you have your first animation still in here still functioning as it was before but you also have the second one you can use great so that's basically everything that we were to go through this time around if you liked this tutorial please give us a like and subscribe for more content coming in the future if you have any questions please post them in the comments below we're happy to help out and in the description we will also post the links to the models so one for the scene and one for the car model however the car model is not free but it's a great model from squire so i urge you to check them out so thank you and see you later

Channel: Craft Animations

Views: 2,095

Keywords: 3ds max, unreal engine, automotive, car animation, 3d animation, ue4, craft director studio, autodesk, automotive beach

Id: Ux4ZTmVMX2k

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021