How to CHARACTERIZE the Unreal Engine 4 Mannequin in Motionbuilder

what is up guys matt here i just wanted to do a really simple and quick video today something i came across a while ago when i started working with motion builder and unreal engine 4 i just wanted a solid base to start working and by that i mean that i wanted a a proper character that would be fully compatible with the with the engine so of course there are tons of great characters out there that are going to be compatible with the hierarchy the the naming convention and everything regarding the unreal engine skeleton the problem if i call con this a problem is that they're gonna most of them will be uh paying my solution today is fully free because it's using the unreal engine 4 mannequin we're going to be able to export it from the engine import it in in our case motion builder characterize it so that you can start animating with a control rig on it and then start exporting the animations back to the editor let's see how it goes all right so the first thing we want to do is obviously to start the engine uh it doesn't matter if you already have your own project in my case i'm gonna just start a new one so that we're just to have a fresh start so i'm gonna do this really quickly i'll just use a third person next using blueprints i think i can just leave this uh all i want my project three is good enough create project so what we want just have to access to the the character itself nothing more so if if you have your own project you just have to make sure you have access to the unreal mannequin and then it's just going to be a matter of of a few clicks to start the export so the best way to do it is just to find the mannequin in your content browser so you will have it in uh go back to content and then enter mannequin character mesh and then you have a [Music] a bunch of elements over there the one that is uh the one that we want is the sk mannequin over here so you have the female version these are the physics assets uh so specifically for the editor and then the skeleton definition but what we want is the sk mannequin which embeds the bone hierarchy along with the along with the mesh itself so just select this right click on it and then you will see something called asset actions and then down here under move you will have export just click on this select your uh destination projects i'm just going to leave it the way it is my project 3 content sk malikin and i just call it export so that it's clear for us leave the fbx by default it's the the format we want click save i'm not really sure this will make a difference uh the compatibility of the exporter i'm using motionbuilder 2018 so i could technically chose this one pick 2018 but i'm not even sure i've changed this the first way i i did it for myself so you can just i mean you can try and maybe let me know if if it makes uh if it makes a difference uh and then you can leave the everything else let me see yeah no you don't have to change anything here export review i will do this right now but i'll just uh open a new file uh so if i remember correctly that was unreal projects my project three content was it yeah there it is sk man i can export click open i want to save it because i don't have anything uh you don't have to import it because it's it's empty anyway but you can you can open everything else and there you go you have your uh unreal for mannequin here and as you can see with the skeleton as well the problem is we have at that moment is that it's not uh you you you cannot start animating because you're missing the a proper character you're missing the skeleton so using that hierarchy we're gonna start characterizing uh the the character by assigning it a new creating a skeleton for motion builder so let's do this right now under uh your character's control here you just can click on define skeleton click on define here now one thing to remember is that unreal uses something that is sometimes called a a pose but motionbuilder requires your characters to be in t pose in order to properly um detect the axis as part of the of the of the software constraint to have your character in t pose every time you set set them up so what we'll do here is just uh so it's prob already facing the proper axis but the the arms are gonna have to be higher pretty straight so horizontal uh we're gonna do this now [Music] so a couple of uh of tips here uh once you switch to rotation just switch to local and then what i would suggest you to do is to uh enable the uh the snap here snap rotation but to use a snap of 5 degrees so if you don't have that i recommend you do this you create this here so if you click on settings here if you have a rotation snap angle so the one i have is 45 but if you if you press something like uh just for you to have the example let's say i'm going to press 15 press ok it says uh that some parameters are going to be updated only if you restart the program but this is not part of these parameters so you don't have to now if you right click on this see the 15 that i didn't have before i have it here so every single time you add a new snapping angle like a parameter it will be available in in that drop list which is very convenient i'm personally using a lot 45 mostly at work just to make sure i have proper orientations based on the axis um and five is also pretty cool and especially for that character you'll see that it's increments of five that will give us a perfect t pose so just uh create if you don't have it the five degrees and then select it now what you can do is select both upper arms and uh having in mind you're in local rotation here if you start rotating them then they will both rotate at the same time which which will prevent us to do this twice for both arms and make sure they are at a perfect line and then do the same thing for the um forearms and that's basically it no i still have to make sure this is properly aligned so that would be that direction same thing for the forearms backwards or the other way pick all right that's a perfect t-pose and now what we want to do is uh it's going to be a bit tedious we need to define each single bone from the the skeleton we have here so the hierarchy i have here and define them on the motion builder definition now from from here you have different options it's mostly based on your preference i usually so what i would suggest is to start from the uh the front view you can you can as well use the schematic view to start selecting the bones and assigning them here but uh it's it's it's just you know it there's no good or bad it's just uh new way to work if you're using the the front view i would suggest to remove that selection uh to the um on the remove the deactivate the geometry selection so to do so uh have in mind that the character comes with uh four loads so you know level of details so what you want to do here is select them four and just under properties here just uncheck enable selection and then you won't be selecting the mesh anymore which means you can um really easily select bones only and now what we want to do is just to assign each bone to uh where they're supposed to go so i will start with the uh with the hips here well you have two options you can select the bone so say the uh the uh the left leg here right click and then uh assign selected bone what you can do as well is uh double click on a on a bone here it will enter some selection mode and then just click and select the bone you want to assign to it and that's it basically okay now for the spine always start from the the bottom up so see you you have more than than one spine here you have actually three so these the other ones are going to be defined over here but start always start from the the bottom so spine sorry spine one here point two that's it then shoulders left arm [Music] then the the the football uh you have here tow base or you can use the schematic view to select the ball it's going to be easier i think and then same thing for the red foot okay if you want to assign the the root it's going to be on the reference here uh but you don't have to assign this as long as you you don't you're not using a root motion uh it's optional if you if you just use the the regular system which is code driven but you know assigning it to make sure you have a proper template is is is good now only thing we have left is the uh the fingers it's the uh the most annoying part because you have a lot of bones to to assign uh so what i will do is just i'll uh speed up the video because it's pretty straightforward you have four knuckles uh sorry three and so let me show you really quickly what you can do is just have for example a uh i usually have a perspective view and then i zoom on the hand that's one of your options and then you select all the um the finger fragments from there or i'm using the schematic view which is going to be a bit easier so this is the the left hand and starting from here so it's in alphabetical order unfortunately uh but you know the naming convention is pretty it's pretty clear so index middle pinky and so on uh so i'll do this really quickly i'll speed up the video because you'll see that it's pretty [Music] straightforward [Music] all right so that's it we're all set now uh two things the first thing is that you probably have noticed that i had the mirror matching enabled here which is supposed to when you assign say the the right arm it's supposed to automatically if the naming convention is correct detect that the left arm is called you know l underscore upper arm instead of r uh for some reason uh it's not always working for me so if you have find the reason behind this uh it's probably it could be that motionbuilder broke something maybe in some version it could be a a bug so that sometimes it works sometimes it does not um i have personally never found the reproduction for this so if you have any info please share it in the comments one thing to remember here is that you can for the future save the skeleton definition which means every single time you would have um to define a new character coming or that has to be compatible with unreal you don't have to redo everything from scratch so you can save the uh skeleton definition and the next time you want to redo something for another character for example that you've just bought you just load the definition and then with a one click everything we've just done will be automatically assigned okay and then the last thing we have to do is just to lock our character create the control rig and we're gonna be able to start animating so just to do this under definition here just lock your character uh must be instance pose facing the positive z-axis it is click on biped you have your character ready and then just to create a control rig it's under create control rig fkik boom you have your character with a control rig ready to be animated everything's working the hands the fingers whoops everything is ready for you to go you can start animating do really cool animations and export into the engine all right guys like i said really simple really easy if you have any trouble any uh questions any information on that mirror matching problem please let me know i will see you very soon bye

Channel: Matt Courtois

Views: 969

Keywords: motionbuilder, tutorial, game animation, gameplay animation, autodesk, motion editing, matt courtois, unreal, unrealengine, ue4, unreal engine, characterize, characterization, mannequin, root motion

Id: 6D8ElnuA350

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021