How to get BETTER Animation Results in Unreal Engine 5.4

Happy Star Wars Day Joy I didn't even know it was Star Wars day I just happened to be wearing the shirt and somebody pointed it out so happy Star Wars day but with that what's up chbe you welcome back to the plot Coalition YouTube channel today I'm going to be sharing my two tips to get way better animations in Unreal Engine 5.4 which if you don't know right now I am working on a short set in the Red Dead Redemption universe so if that's something you're into cowboys Outlaws that fun Jazz then go ahead and subscribe because we're making a short film about it animated in Unreal Engine 5 but before I go any further I do want to quickly shout out roko who sent me this head rig for this project uh it's an incredible piece of hardware and if you want to get into map animation you're into V tub and stuff like that definitely go check them out this head rig is pretty fantastic very lightweight very well balanced you don't even realize you're wearing it once you've gotten used to it so check out their Link in the description they sent me the for this project so huge shout out to them check them out all right and with that we are going to get right into it with what you would probably use the head rig 4 that is facial moap specifically what we're using is metahuman animator and this tip is one that I have never seen online I came across it on accident while doing my metahuman animator sols and when I did it I was like oh my word this is so much better so if you don't know metahuman animator is kind of Infamous for having that OV exaggerated or rubbery look when you do the soles this is mainly because it's interpreting things that it thinks it should be doing and it's usually pretty accurate and the solves still look really good but Unreal Engine prioritizes being very very fast it wants to be able to turn around things very quickly which for like previs and stuff fantastic but if you want to get better saws this is how you're going to do it so this is not a metahuman animator tutorial I'm going to assume you've already basically gotten to this point or have done a solve before if you want full-on tutorial on doing that definitely let me know looking to pushing out more tutorials and stuff for members so you can definitely see about making one around that specifically but you stay away from me you sick bastard once you have your performance asset prepared what you're going to do is you're going to scroll down and there's a little box that has been checked that says skip per vertex solve and this takes a considerably longer time to solve the animation but essentially what it's going to do is take the metahuman DNA that you've set up and it's going to use every vertex of that face with what it's trying to track on your face and solve it that way rather than do everything approximately it's going to try and do it exact and when you uncheck this it does take quite a long time I did a take that was probably about 6 minutes it took about 4 hours to process so it definitely takes a while but the results are amazing so definitely definitely start using that in your animation workflows because it looks so much better than just doing the traditional solve if you just need it for previs or whatever do the traditional solve it totally looks good it's totally fine but if you're looking for that really close accuracy I highly recommend checking off that box so it does a per vertex solve and you are going to get much much better metahuman animator animations number two tip number two has to do with retargeting your animations of your body Mo cap so in the case for this project that we're working on the actors came and they did the full performance with the helmet on with the motion capture suit on and we were able to capture everything that they did and it looks really really good but there are a few housekeeping things you want to keep keep in mind when you're recording your performance capture use actors that's always going to bring across a much better performance unless you're doing something like V tubing and like you are the character but an actor is going to bring a lot of believability to a character that doesn't exist and there is no truer form of like a character that doesn't exist than working with these digital characters in Unreal Engine because they only exist in the computer it's time for everyone's favorite work but the second part of that is going to be making sure you have precise blocking and you're directing the actor's movements because how they act and come across on screen will be imperative to how the performance capture actually looks so if you have a character who's just standing still the whole time and they're not interacting with anything like that's going to end up looking pretty stale and pretty Loop but making sure they have very intentional blocking and movements is going to make it feel much more alive and that's just in general for film making but specifically when you're doing this kind of Animation being able to have something a motivation for them are going to go a long way in one immersing them in it but two also just making that animation look that much higher Fidelity but in that same vein do not overact that is something that I see way too often in motion capture scenarios is some get a mo cap suit and it's really really cool because it's new and you know different technology but they overact it it looks like somebody who just put on a moap suit for the first time and they're super excited about it and whatnot and like as exciting as it is you really want to dial it back and focus on the subtlety of the performance and then finally you're also going to want to capture reference this can be from anything like a phone or if you just have a spare camera setting that up just to record it so you have reference for when you're animating if there's anything that the motion capture maybe didn't pick up or that you want to try to work on more in animation having a reference is fantastic and with all that when you are recording make sure that you are double-checking every single take make sure everything runs smoothly during the take but then especially double check it after the fact to make sure you got a clean take because nothing is worse than getting the moat back and it's all jacked up so always be done double checking before your actor gets out of the seat super duper important oh I'm being shadish I'm being shadish and all this brings us to the tip number two which is auto aligning bones when retargeting an Unreal Engine 5.4 so originally the retargeter in Unreal Engine 5 it used a process called ik retargeting and it did an approximate job so you could really apply the motion capture to any kind of skeletal mesh now for at least bite fetal characters you can actually Auto align all of the bones from one character to another and chances are if you're doing Mo Camp of a human character and the character you're trying to put it on is humanik then this will work so what you're going to do is you're going to go ahead and create an ik asset for your character Unreal Engine now does this automatically you click two buttons you go boom bang you have a rig just make sure everything is scaled properly or else you're going to have problems and then you're going to create your retarget asset throw it up put what you want to retarget from in our case we're using the Unreal Engine mannequin since that's what I exported my map as I can set that as the retarget source and the retarget target is going to be our character and then right over here you are going to stop running the retarget you're going to go into the edit mode and you are going to drop down this bar you're going to go to auto align bones and it's going to take your character and put all the bones in the same position position as the Unreal Engine mannequin now when you run the r Target the moap that you get on your character is exactly what you recorded it's not approximate it's not trying to do something that's kind of like it it is exactly what you recorded which means when you blend these two tips together you are getting one to one what your actors recorded not something that is kind of like it exactly what was recorded that is inane now one thing you might notice is sometimes the I targeter doesn't do a fantastic job now you can either offset these ik or you can turn off the ik entirely when you're doing the retargeting process and if you're using Roco then you already have your foot locks and everything translating so you should be all set and finally I do really quick want to touch on modular control rigs because they're super cool but I don't know what happened in the latest update of Unreal Engine 5.4 because it broke all my control Rigs and now now they all look like this you don't want to be like this this is disgusting this is awful in every way and that's after I tried to fix them so I don't know all right but that's it for now thanks for watching if you like this video or found it useful go ahead and let me know in the comments and give the video a like really really helps I know you hear that on other YouTube videos and it sounds really stale because everybody says it but it's true and we we all know if a bunch of people say something on the Internet it has to be true if you're interested in being a part of my projects in the future consider joining the Discord that's where I kind of announce all that stuff and hey you know what you made it this far in the video maybe consider subscribing who knows who knows what kind of crazy stuff might happen I might even do I think it's time for my workout seamless but look at that it looks amazing

Channel: Plot Coalition

Views: 2,363

Keywords: Cinematic, Breakdown, Game Engine, Animation, Cinematography, filmmaking, commentary, metahuman, metahuman animator, control rig, unreal engine, unreal engine 5.4, rokoko, motion capture, smart suit, retargetting, sequencer, video games, red dead, red dead redemption, red dead redemption 2, red dead redemption Ii, short film, cgi, cgi short, mocap, tutorial, how to, UE5 tips and tricks, Animation tutorial, UE5 animations, Unreal Engine tips, Animation techniques, Animation workflow

Id: nO9MaKyhk2w

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024