How to replace the default mannequin in Unreal 2023

do you want to be able to change the default character mesh in Unreal Engine from the mannequin to something more fun and exciting I got you let's take a look for starters bring in your new skeletal mesh if you're new to this make sure that you've got none selected if it's a new kind of mesh open advanced settings turn on import morph targets and also make sure that you're importing your normals instead of computing them make sure it's set to import animations as well as materials if you want those imported I don't have the animation so I'm going to leave it unchecked I'm using this little cat lady mesh as part of a cute and cozy game I'm making in my free time it's a little work in progress at the moment all your model needs is working bone hierarchies and a skinned mesh give it a quick check to make sure there aren't any major malfunctions go back to the blueprint folder under third person and let's duplicate the blueprint that has the mannequin so that we can start from scratch with a new one let's right-click and press duplicate let's open our new blueprint and change the mesh component click the mesh component and then change the mesh asset to our new mesh now if your mesh looks really funny that's probably because you're still using the old animation blueprint which doesn't work with this model however if your model is rigged to the default skeleton you might already be good to go for now let's select none under animation blueprint this will make our character use their default reference pose this character has a t-pose now we need to test our character a really fast way to do this is to change the world settings and override some of our game modes although to avoid bad habits you should also make sure you've made a game mode and change the pawn there as well we can drag our character over and place it on the default Pawn slot or we can find it in the drop down now when we press play we have our t-pose in character but it's not animating we gotta fix that now in older versions of unreal we would typically try and copy all the stuff that's in the mannequins animation blueprint and bring it over into our new animation blueprint but using Unreal 5's retargeting tools we can actually copy over all the animations and the animation blueprint itself all at once using an ik retargeter that's what we're going to do next if you're new and not sure what that is just hang on let's find the folder with our character and right click to create a new asset it's hard to find asset types sometimes so you can start typing in ik to find the ik asset inside the ik asset let's set our character to the preview mesh let's open another ik asset now as much as possible we want to match what's going on in the default mannequin you can see this has a bunch of different chains that are all set up in the lower right and we want to be able to match them as much as possible but for this character I really don't have that many chains to match let's create a solver we're going to create a full body ik next we need to create bone chains and add ik goals to the skeleton I'm going to select my hands and the balls of my feet right click and create ik goals let's set the pelvis bone the first bone independent from the root as our retarget root we also need to set it as the root of our full body ik solver remember for bone chains that you want to start at the beginning of the effect of the ik chain and you want to go all the way to the bone that is being directly moved by the chain so for example in your right arm chain your upper arm would be the start of the right arm and your hand would be the end of the bone chain you should also make sure that the balls of your feet are declared as the end of your leg chains this will make sure that you're getting all the foot roll animation carried over from the unreal mannequin this is what my final bone chain looked like notice that I have my goal set up under the ik goal column in the same folder as our ik asset let's make an ik retargeting asset and we can start typing to search for it again to save time it'll show up with a dialog box that'll actually appear twice select first The Source being the mannequin that we want to copy over and then the target being our custom character we are now in unreal's retargeting tool inside our ik retargeting asset we can drag on the x-axis in the preview offset to be able to see the two characters next to each other now you may notice that the comparison looks a little weirder first that's because my character is in a t-pose now if I stop the retargeter I can enter edit mode and this will allow me to change the default pose of my character for use in this retargeter the pose affects how the retargeting asset exchanges animation from one skeleton to the other and as you can see here you can make presets and save as many different versions of the poses as you would like I'm going to select some of the bones on my character in my case this is mainly the arm bones and I'm going to rotate them so they look more like the apos on the mannequin now if you find that your character looks a little funny here or it's jostling around too much it's time to go back and edit your ik asset make sure that your pelvis is set as the root but make sure it's not declared in the spine chain and if you're unsure of this just check out what's going on in the unreal mannequin now if we go into characters and under mannequins in animation we can find ABP Manny now this is the animation blueprint that we want to transfer so if you right click on it and go up to retarget you can actually send the entire animation blueprint over to another character and it'll just clone it and create a new one let's select our retargeting asset and pick a folder let's go back to our blueprint and in the animation blueprint section we can add our new asset that we've just created now we will need to edit this animation blueprint there's just one quick thing we need to fix in order for this to look right let's go to the anim graph you're going to need to remove this control rig node that's in the middle of the animation blueprint if you notice that your feet are sticking to the ground it's because of this thing and this is what it should look like when it's all done [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: WoodyDevs

Views: 42,887

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Id: l27_nz7UYaY

Length: 6min 8sec (368 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023