How To Animate in Unreal Engine 5 | Part 1

so you're seeing all these new cool features from a real engine and want to make your own short film animation or fight scene but the problem is that you animate in another program and sometimes transferring over data from one program to another can get pretty tricky well up games has launched control rig and ability to animate your characters directly in the game engine now you can make a character Punch Kick and fight like those you see in your favorite show or game but it's still a little scary the first time you open up a real engine this is going to be a step-by-step t series on how to animate a quick fight scene directly in engine with the control rig my name is Cliff and I made my own fight animations in un real engine for over 7 years and this tutorial series will help you get started the plan is that at the end of this series you will pick up the knowledge and tools necessary to create your own fight animation to start things off I have created other fight scene tutorials for Maya and blender and I'll be breaking down those same tips here as well in the blender series I created a slightly more complicated short fight scene than the one in Maya but for this one we're going to go back to the symol combo even though I will be breaking down how to create an animation unreal the principles here can be applied to any program this is not a beginner Unreal Engine course I will go slow and explain everything that I'm doing but I wouldn't consider this a how to an onreal engine tutorial I'm also not planning to go into any deep Advanced features just yet like creating your own control rig I really wanted to do something simple that anyone can pick up the environment I am using is the stylized Boxing Club from leard Studio one of the main reasons I transitioned from rendering in my in blender in strictly using Unreal is the environment finding quality assets that fit together creating in the environment and then lighting that environment to make it look professional and then is a huge Time s no matter which animation program you prefer not only do most if not all Unreal Engine environments come with the default stage that you can use to start your environment it almost feels like playing a video game when it comes to building your own custom environment and there's no best place to start than with the series sponsor Le Art Studio they offer a wide range of game ready assets including environments characters props materials and threein models so leard has hooked us up with own discount code Round Table animation 30 that you can use at checkout from gumro for any of the assets in the store for 30% off on top of that they're running a limited time Mega Discount of 19 high quality packs that include the cyberpunk lab a Roman Street environment and even a tutorial on how to create levels each one of these assets is probably going to go for 50 to 60 to even $100 the entire pack all included they practically give away for $100 for the entire thing but they reached out and really like what we're doing over here with on real engine and prepared us with our own crazy discount code that doesn't take only 30 but actually 70% off the entire pack so you can get this entire thing for just $30 make sure to use our discount code rtsa 70 at checkout and get some really high quality looking AAA style environments not only do you guys benefit but doing so supports the channel the boxing club environment I am using is a part of the pack but of course you can use any environment for the tutorial if you are Dow your environment make sure to unpack it in your un real projects folder double click on the scene file select the engine version and open up the scene okay so once you have your environment opened we need to go ahead and get some rigs here so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to open up my epic games Tab and I'm just going to go to the marketplace and I'm going to look for control break now I have it already but what I want to do is get this control rig pack which is a sample pack which is free from epic games I'm going to click on it and I'm going to add to project right so when I click add to project I'm going to pick the project that I want to bring it to and add all right and once everything is set up our rigs or at least our basic rigs is automatically going to be added into the into the file so you can see now I have my environment and my control rig right in my file so from here as great as this sample look of our assets is we probably want to make it look more like a scene so in most files or most environments that come within real engine they come with like a sample version of how that environment would look with all the assets put together um so from here I'm going to go into the boxing club folder go into maps and then pick which one you want so the overviews I believe was what we have open here anyway right you can see overview editor which is what this is so you have a level day and level night now you can pick either or I'm sure the exactly the same besides the fact that one's probably a lit different but I'm going to pick level day so from here you'll see that our environment opens up and looks a lot better than the overview look of what I had before now you'll see all these little um I guess buttons or different icons and these are just the icons for whatever is attached to the the asset to the field so this means that it's attached to the floor this one is the lighting um well the the reflection capture this one is another reflection capture so every single one has a little icon attached to it um I believe this one that's probably the the ring so so for here in order to not necessarily see them right away I'm going to click on um this hamburger icon go down to the game menu and just kind of click that so now that we have our environment set up it's time to go ahead and bring in our characters so from here I'm going to go to boxing I'm going to go back out and I'm going to just search actually come back out to content now I can go in here and look into my characters now we have a couple of characters right like you saw that sample pack that has the mesh um so you can go into your Rigs and look for the control rig so this is one I'm going to pick right so I believe there's a couple of them but I believe this one has more detail than the other this is more of a basic version of it and this one has a lot more details which is the one that we're going to need for our fight scene so I'm going to click hold and drag and bring it out to ourc right so now when I have placed a character to the scene now that you see him here uh a few menus popped up right we have our secr menu which is going to be um our way of kind of is our is our dope sheet if you're from blender um in a way to go ahead and see all of the keys that we have so all of our controls are down here and we'll be able to go ahead and kind of see exactly where the keys are on the tit line so that's what the sequence and menu is here this is our outliner just in case if we wanted to go ahead and mess with mess with controls or anything like that this is usually at least from what I've used so far um used in the rigging process I'm sure it has some use with the animation I just haven't got a chance to see that yet everything I've seen is just using the dope sheet um and believe our outliner just showcased that this is now onto the into the into the scene so from here I'm G to do a few things in order to go ahead and start the animation process um the first thing I'm going to do is we have at least in this environment outline situation here cuz look the 2D effect I'm going to remove that uh it's a post process I'm going look post and there there it go so it's going to have an outline uh this takes care of some effects but this is the one I wanted to remove um that's the first thing then I'm going to change this to 24 frames per second right and then we're going to set our character up for animation so in order to set the character up for animation um what that also entails is when I removed the icons for game view that remove the controls as well so once I bring it back you'll see that all the controls are are back but it's still kind of messy R is still a little messy and I want to clean it up just a bit I haven't seen a way to go ahead and just remove the other icons and leave the controls as a way to go ahead and remove um the control rate controls and leave everything else out but not necessarily reverse but I found a little workaround for myself that works for me what we're going to do is we're going to just kind of put this away a bit just bring this down bring this out it kind of gives a little bit of a better view uh we're going to animate right here in this area and I'm going to take this viewport is very similar to how I would do it in blender or bio and I'm going to combine the vi the viewport the same way I would if I was animated to be side by side right so from here now I have two views two camera views to see the character I'm going to bring this one up a little bit closer to our character this is going to be my working file I'm be going in and out with this file and this is going to be exactly what I see after the fact so I'm going to add in a camera so go up here cinematic and we're going to add us a camera right so once we add in a camera that gives us another view of of actually changing up what we see through that camera and much more customizable than the perspective view cu the perspective view is going to give you just a plain view of everything whereas the camera view can actually give you a little bit more a lot more actually control than what you can nor see so from here I'm going to switch from camera from this perspective view instead of the other views down to my camera view which going to show the some of the other cameras that came in with the scene but I just want to use our camera view and moving that over to the side here to look for my character there we go so now you can automatically feel that it feels a lot more cinematic right it's given like a little bit more of a uh we're actually looking through a camera lens because of the um because of the uh the camera setup so from here I'm going to now remove everything and I'm still that crazy about um the lighting so let's see if we can even increase the light a little bit that's go to our directional light to our details let's see have bring up to eight nothing so directional light doesn't change anything all right so our Skylight has a little bit more control all right there we go that's what I was looking for so sets of four at first so let's change to six 10 that's a little better that's enough to give us a little better view all right so another trick that is going to be good at least for me another trick that's going to be good to be able to kind of view everything is I'm going to activate the depth of field to kind of just uh blur out this background I'm going to go back and I'm going to find my camera if there's a lot of assets here and you're looking for your camera I would just type it in instead of looking for it let's look for our camera The Cinematic camera that we entered we're going to switch back to our Focus settings and we're going to change this Focus setting to about 55 now it looks like we just zoomed in but what we did is kind of give the option to go and separate the background from the for ground this right now is set to the standard of I believe a million cm of f Focus I'm want to bring that all the way down all the way down there we go so a good way to also see exactly how to separate the forward from the back especially on real engine is to kind of draw this debug thing um this debug frame and what that does it actually gives you a um like a little plane that kind of of crashes and let you know exactly where the camera is registering um this Focus or not so if we do ref from right behind the character and then you you know change it it kind of gives you just a better view it may not be too too diff different if you can want to see it stable it's a little bit clear manual may not necessarily see too much of a difference um if you want to CH more of a difference you can try to come in a little bit closer right and then bring it more as you can see a little bit Focus but that's not going to be our working animation view but for me it gives a little bit um a little bit more of a clear look of what we're going through so now from here before we start actually animating and now that I have my character here let's go ahead and start animating so I'm going to start with my fighting stance but rotated and this is also so you can see how it's snapping here we want to remove that by just un unchecking here so that no it no longer snaps so you're going to have a nice clear look and you can see it automatically um updates on both sides so we can see exactly what's going on so I'm going to start my fighting sance I'm going to start with my legs here oh same thing here that's let's go ahead and remove this now open this up send and we're going to start our fighting stance just bring the character to bend a little bit and that's it's not so bad at starting to POS that in Onre engine I think it's it's a pretty intuitive system for the control rig you can definitely get the same type of feel as you would if you were animating Anaya or blender let see let's get this down got angle to where our point would be bring our shoulders up ah hello sing in here okay so now we should have a little bit of a good look before we go attack those fingers of our pose of our first pose but I'm going to get a little bit of a stronger stance it's a little bit of a stronger stance here to go to that fighting po now from here we're going to go ahead into the fingers get a little bit closer there and these green controls control the whole finger curve so it's going to rotate in or we can combine the rest this gets a little bit of a wonky rotation that should be good oh man so first one is done and I think it looks pretty good if you look at over here looks pretty pretty good here and then we're going to do the same onto the other side and we'll go ahead and curve this in I actually don't like do it all curves like that I might just I may just do it individually man not sure why on this one it's curving at a different angle there but once we kind of get it adjusted it should be fine that one I wanted C up this thing just make sure it looks pretty could before moving forward good okay perfect and that's our first pose in un real engine than standard fighting pose you know you can go ahead and tweak it up a bit more you know it can bring this um bring this up closer to his um to his face if you want but right now it's pretty it's pretty good like this switches back to 24 good as s i that before but all right so now we have that we going ahead and set our keys so I had auto key I didn't have auto key on um this is our auto key button so once you click this at least now going forward it will be able to go ahead and kind of automatically place our keys once we move a control so the first thing I'm going to do is going to click on this um going forward that way we can have our keys automatically placed but you'll see here that not all the keys are placed all the ones that we moved already um any the the finger ones but some of the ones don't have keys and we want to have keys on everything at least on a starting frame because if we didn't move the character any sort of way going forward we don't have an established starting point so then move to the top and then you're going to see this master control here um that on top of all the controls and once you click that um it sets a key for the entire character all the way down so you don't have to worry about that for now so now what I'm going to do is go at least go by five frames all frame five take it here I believe can make this a lot small we don't need all of these uh all these these frames here let's go down to here 50 so so now we're going to go into our next post here will be our anticipation post I start with the feet kind of go forward towards a little bit rotating it CH so rotating feet just a bit and now that I have turned auto key on you'll see that it'll automatically start placing some keys there too Y no sit home fire so we have a little bit of a drag there just do it to a bit more and then that way we kind of can really space out out to get this punch pose and let's bring up the arm a bit rotate it bring it back just another that character kind of has a little bit to convey uh what he's about to do it's so arm there I think look pretty good if you look at it from one side to the other we start from our first framing going to here you see that we have a little bit of our poses here jumping from one to the other right okay so then from here we're going to go I personally will just lock in all those poses and do another um set there and then go to frame 10 to do the last P which is the actual punch pose so we're going to have a full rotation hit and we're going to do everything to really kind of get that job right across back a bit keeping his head forward all right now here we now while we do have a standard looking punch we're going to go ahead and just give it a bit more exaggeration onto the poles really get this Bend in here and rotation sl's hitting more of the center kind of get this out the way and then now we have a much more of a solid punch posst here all right and look at that anticipation punch and then comes back see it it's very smooth like now I now I know you can see some particles there if if runers um and that's just my graphics card and i' be able to keep up but if you even have it on unlit has a much more of a clear way of showing the pulse and even you can use this as a working model but for me the depth of field kind of brings it out a bit or it's kind of cool to see exactly what it looks like at the same time but right there you go now so what we're going to do to finish this pose is just to kind of copy the keys that we have here and just kind of bring it back so even though right now I'm kind of just dragging it back but what we get do is have the same idea for those poses um to do it on its own so from here we're going to collapse all of this to bring it up to these just three key posers right one two 3 right so if I wanted to do extra keys in the middle there I can but we're going to keep these key poses we're going to take this middle one and duplicate it and just drag this out so now if you look he brings it back a bit right um we'll do 15 for now but I feel that it's going to be a very uniform look or it could be pretty Snappy actually depending on the look of it actually it's a pretty Snappy punch and for the final po duplicate click drag made to frame 20 so that's a very and if we bre it all the way to the top I would say that is a very uniform looking pose and to Loop we click here to loop our Playbook so even if I at least gave it a little bit so from here if you're familiar with any other animation programs you will know that you can be able to adjust the speed and timing depending on the keys here so if I want a quicker punch right I'll move this up one I'll bring this up one probably keep this here and then bringing it low so that way at least the launch is quicker and then it comes back and this is kind of more of how to do in fighting games right you kind of want to give the opponent the least amount of time to be able to recover so you kind of have those poses come pretty quick and that's how I love how look I already love how smooth it kind of looks right you kind of bring it back so even if I want to bring this up one he kind of can as well and that probably looks the best right boom comes back pretty quick back to the star and post all right and that's our first pose all right and that's our first combo in Unreal Engine in the next video we're going to add in more moves and to make this a full combo I'll see you guys there

Channel: Round Table Animation

Views: 46,441

Keywords: fight animation, how to animate a fight scene, round table studios, fight animation tutorial, animation, how to start animation, fight scene, animate, how to animate, how to animate a 3d fight, how to animate for beginners, how to animate in unreal engine, unreal engine control rig, how to animate with unreal engine control rig, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, how to animate in unreal engine 5

Id: kxu6QHeEa0Y

Length: 35min 18sec (2118 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024