How To Rig a UE5 Skeleton in Blender

[Music] hi everyone PA here welcome back to the channel where I make how to videos time to share what I've learned and I'm back with a new blender and Unreal Engine tutorial this is part of the character animation howto series in this video we're going to learn how to rig the ue5 skeleton in blender we will cover the basics of what the Unreal Engine 5 skeleton looks like in blender how we could rig our character created in blender to the ue5 skeleton using an add-on and using the add-on we would learn some Basics about rigging and weight painting then we're going to export the blender project to an fbx file and import it back to Unreal Engine we will test our new imported character by replacing the third person character mesh with our own wig mesh it's a bit to cover let's go so first off we need to understand what the Unreal Engine skeleton looks like and how it differs from the normal skeleton that you would do on blender so if I go under my condent drawer here go under characters and mannequins this is for the ue5 mannequin it has uh four mannequins here I'm interested in the skm man symol I'll click on the character menu here and select bones and select all hierarchy this is the structure on how the bones is created for the uh u5 mannequin it's on an aost and and then it has this um ik bones and all the other hierarchy for its um normal bones so if you want to create an or character and rig it to the Unreal Engine skeleton you need to follow this um naming structure and Bone hierarchy so let's go back to the content drawer let's try to import this character in blender so right click on the scal mesh select asset actions and select export and let's export that again um it's going to give you this uh fbx export option so go under the advance and make sure the level of detail is unchecked so we just want a normal export and if we go to blender here I'm just going to select everything and remove it I'm going to import that fbx so file menu select import then fbx go to my desktop and import that and this is how the Unreal Engine um mesh looks like in blender and the skeleton you would see the orientation of the bones so this pointing things are the bones the Armature are the bones so if I uncollapse this and just hide this and just expose this route and this is the structure of the rig for the Unreal Engine character it doesn't follow the Armature that you would get from uh blender so there's a special add-on that would allow us to recreate this um bone hierarchy you could go to I'll drop a link on this tool it's called a game rigs Tool uh blender add-on it's a name a fair price um model so give a fair price and then you could grab the add-on so inside the game rig to add-on there are several modules here uh the one that we're interested is the game rig unroll engine module so depending on your version grab the version that you want I'm using blender 4 so I'm grabbing this uh version so let me close this out and open another project so this is a project I've been following on a skillshare tutorial for character modeling uh get a discount when you use my refl link below so I have the character set up here with different body parts I'm just going to disable everything and just uh have the body so I want to do is rig this to the Unreal Engine so let's do that using the add-on so first let's install it so go under preferences and go under install and search for the game rig tools add-on that we just downloaded once that is downloaded make sure uh if you search for game rig tools make sure it's enabled you have some options in here uh to to rename the panel and all of that uh right now the documentation is broken so I'll try my best to tell you how this um add-on works so if I hit the n on my keyboard here I should have this panel for game rig tools so the way it works if I click on initiate manic in Here If You observe the um my collection here it's going to create create um some hidden folders here and it's going to create Tre rigs once's the root which is the unal engine route so I could hide the others here and it follows the unal engine bone that we were just looking at and the other one that created is this deform U uh rig and this rig uh tweak rig so this rig is the one we'll be working on when we want to uh adjust the bones of the character so I could go ahead enable that and use this uh setting on the add-on um to hide those so I'm going to hide the deform and the unreal and we're just going to work on this so there's some options here as well so when it's highlighted in blue that means the setting is uh enabled and this would hide the the scul down so we need this enabled we need the body parts enabled for now I'm going to show you how it works so let's start adjusting so when you enable that it's automatically going to put you in post mode so when you're in post mode you could adjust the bones and all of that so first thing I want to do is scale this to the my character size so if I go here adjust the P point to the 3D cursor I'm going to select everything and then scale it down and scale it till the shoulder is about shoulder length to my connector now it has these handles for the body parts that you could rotate so right now it's rotating on the pivot point for the cursor so I'm going to change that to medion point and now I could rotate it to the position I want here so roughly position your character the way you want so G shortcut to grab and then just drag it so I'm going to drag it on the x axis here then you could adjust this joints later on the next uh section so if I go to uh side view here select everything GUI and move my character like so and then maybe a little bit more cool so then do a top view and rotate this arms as you can see my character only has um four fingers so we're going to deal with that as well and show you how that works uh now that you have this rough position for the body parts you could click on joint tweak here and you'll have a new control that you could select so when you select that you could uh grab it and move it along the mesh to make it proportional so I'm going to grab that actually I'm going to grab this I'm going to scale this a bit longer like that so I'm going to start probably let's start with the with the feet here with the legs so I'm going to grab this make sure this is aligned the way I want cool and size [Music] view going to select this two and position like that and this one move it so I'm going to speed this up but you get the point adjust the uh position to the way um it's proportion to your mesh uh just grab the handles and adjust them so once you're done with the main body parts you can see there's no handle for the fingers here so there's a there's another button here for the fingers and you can start moving moving those around so I'm going to grab this rotate it and position it like so and this one's for the pinky and I'm going to get the ring finger because my character only has four fingers I'm going to grab that and move that away from the mesh so that later when we're doing weight painting it won't uh affect our mesh so just grab the handles sometimes it's hard to grab the handles what you could do is select a a bigger bone that's uh obscuring the selection and hit H to hide that bone you could unhide that bone later so let me make sure I'm on the right view here cool and now you can see there's no joints you can you can't select the joints of the finger so this is where that um next button is for the finger tweaks when you select that you should be able to select the bones so right now if I go to the front view the placement of the fingers is not right so I'm just going to quickly move those so once you're happy with the tweaking of where the bone should be uh you need to apply the you need to hit the apply rig button here what this would do is it would adjust the other two rigs the root and the deform would follow the tweak uh deformation oh it would follow the tweak transform so there you go when you hit that it would adjust U everything so now I could hide the tweak bone I could also hide the Unreal Engine bone here and we could try doing the weight painting So for the weight painting what I do is I un hiide everything thing I'll select everything for the mesh and then select the bone L as you can see here that's the last selection sh shift click to select it and then I'll go under object parent Armature deform and then select with automatic weights and this should create um groups of vertices so if I open this I under the modifier it created Armature and I go under data it would create this vertices for me and this should also kind of be rigged so if I select the bone and go back to post mode and select one of the bones if I move that you can see the um mesh is following along uh let's do this so it's more visible and so this rotate so there's some adjustments that we could do like for example there I could see parts of the body if I select this rotate and you can see some of the parts haven't been weight painted correctly so those are the things that you could adjust so go back to object mode um the bone is still selected what I'm going to do is click on the object that I want to weight paint which is the body and I'm going to select weight paint menu here and from here there's a few options that you could uh check or adjust to make your weight painting easier so first is the brush make sure front face is UN thick so what this would do is allow you to paint uh through the mesh and for the fall off make sure it's projected and then also take this enable mesh symmetry on the x axis so when you paint one area it would paint on the other side so with those two with those options adjusted I could hold the ALT key or option key and click on the bone that I want to that has the influence on those vertices so you can see here the blue parts are not properly weight painted so I could go now and start Weight painting this as you can see because the fall off and projector is um enabled it painted through the ears so I'll eventually also want to paint the ears but keep note that that is the behavior when the fall off and projected is um enabled so I'm going to color this I'm going to color the eyes make sure the weight pain is correct and also going to do the ears and side here go to the back all right that is looking better um going to hit the r key to test that out in here so uh that's good enough so to keep this video short yep that's good enough I'm going back to object mode here and and next that I want to do is I'm going to change [Music] the uh Armature for each one of these to point to the um Unreal Engine Armature so I could select all of these and I could go under I believe object parent and then clear parent so if I just quickly show you what this looks like if I open the UE man defa here you would see there's a child here reference child so if I go if I select everything all the mesh and go under object parent and then clear parent that would remove it from there now I need to select everything again and hide the Unreal Engine and hide the deform rig and open up the Unreal Engine one which is the one that we want and select that bone and go under object and then parent and select Armature deform that should reparent them to that bone so if that we could also check on that by clicking one of the objects and go under modifier you would see that the object now is pointed to root which is the Unreal Engine one so now if I go here select the rig go to post mode and r rotate this you would see that it's now working and let's zoom in a little make sure the fingers are working yeah you can see it's deforming the fingers when I pull it down so everything is okay for now you could adjust this later so I'm going to save and go back to object mode so I'm just going to select everything and select the rig and now we're ready to export so go under file menu uh select export select fbx I'm going back to my desktop here um for the options make sure the limit to selected object so it doesn't export the rest of those and if I go down to I think Armature make sure add lift bone is disabled and bake animation is off cuz we don't have any animation then hit export and that should export now let's go back to Unreal Engine so back to Unreal Engine here I'm going to create a new folder I'm going to call this uh blender and right click I'm going to select import go to my desktop and select that uh fbx the we just exported and then hit import and I'll have this import options now for the skeleton because it's based on U E5 mannequin I could select the SK mannequin skeleton here everything should be as is um create new material yep and then import if everything looks good uh you should get this so let's open the skeletal mesh so as you can see it has all the same um ik bones and all the bones that you needed plus an extra bone floating there which we're not using cu the character only has four fingers now to test this out if I go to the condent drawer back here on the third person folder under blueprints let's open the BP third person character here I'm going select the mesh let's also go to the viewport here and I'm going to replace the mesh asset with a our new character so if I select that you would see it's um working we're still using the animation blueprint for Quinn which should work fine and now if I hit play I have my character imported and all the animations that are on the ue5 skeleton should be applicable to him you could see there's some bits of cleaning up on the weight painting but you could do that on your own time so you can see it's working great some of the weight paints on the eyes doesn't look right um the foot um ik also works because it's the same skeleton cool there you go so there you go how to rig a u5 skeleton on blender and use it on a real hope you like this tip thumbs up thumbs down please subscribe to the channel cheers bye for now

Channel: Just Another Dang How To Channel

Views: 742

Keywords: blender tutorial, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine rig in blender, ue5 blender

Id: HZdbgxDzcQk

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024