How to: Stylized Mesh to UE5 Metahuman Character and export to Maya for Animation

hey youtube let's make this together create a meta human character that is stylized and you export it from bridge into maya you can use the chapter icons below to jump to whatever section you want but i am going to warn you this is for dabblers right you're maybe a professional animator already so that's good for you but most people online watching youtube videos are not professionals and they're kind of dabbling if you want to go beyond dabbling with youtube videos and you actually want a career in 3d animation i have free training for you and you can find that in the link in the description where you'll also get a free animation rig if you stay the entire time let's get started with the rest of this animation tutorial and if you like it please consider like commenting and subscribing to this channel so it'll encourage me to make more content like this so in real recently released mesh to metahuman where you can take any scan or geometry really and apply it to the meta human creator kind of ecosystem and i thought it'd be interesting to take a stylized character and apply it to the realistic meta-human system and let's see how it turns out so first things first you need unreal engine 5 and first before you even open unreal engine 5 you need to download the metahumans plugin from the marketplace so first things first we want to search metahuman and we can find the plugin that we want to install the metahuman plugin so we can just click free and that will take us to the install to engine button which we can just click we want to make sure that we add it to 5.0 and that we have unreal engine closed it's half a gigabyte so we need to download it install and then we can get started i'm also going to show you how to take this quickly into maya so you can animate it if you wanted to and that is the software that all professional animators use don't listen people online talking about blender um that's not used in big studios the stylized model i'm using for this example is from david diaz you can check out his stuff on our station so first things first we need to open up unreal engine so we can open up the launcher and then jump over into unreal engine 5. i want to make sure we have the most up-to-date version of unreal 5 before we get started so now that we have unreal updated we can launch it and begin by bringing in the model into a new unreal scene it doesn't really matter which one we choose i usually just use some of the default out of the box presets to get a new project started so in the unreal project browser i'm going to go to games i'm going to choose a third person just in case i ever want to take this further and apply this character to a third person locomotion or something and i'm going to hit create now inside unreal engine i'm going to right click and choose new folder and say stylized character open this folder and i want to drag and drop my fbx folder or obj into this folder so i'm clicking and dragging it from a folder window and i'm just going to drop it here and all i want to make sure i have on is to actually combine the meshes so i'm going to check that on and import all i'm going to ignore these error message because they don't really matter to me in this process we're going to end up using the textures and everything that comes from metahuman so none of these textures really matter all that much and this character hat actually had no textures it was all just shaders now before we go any further we want to make sure that we have the plugin actually turned on that we're going to need for the next step so we can go to edit plugins type in metahuman and we can see we have this plugin not turned on so we need to turn it on hit yes and then it will restart unreal for this plugin to take effect so let's restart now and then we'll jump back in i'm going to save everything that i just did too okay now that we're back in unreal we can right click in this area and go to metahuman this is a new category that we have that we didn't before we turned on that plugin and we can create a new meta-human identity we can just leave it as new meta human identity double click on it it's going to open up a new window where we're going to choose a components for mesh and we can choose our character but first we want to make sure we're signed in because that's going to help us with the quiksil bridge that we're going to need to use after this so from this window we want to go to components for mesh click this and we can choose our mesh which should be listed down here we can see superhero geo and we can click that and it will be loaded in and we can navigate down to where our character is and what we'll want to do is position the camera straight on and we can choose a lower field of view so that the character is a bit more flat we can choose the neutral pose here and promote frame we can do it from here or there's a little plus button down here on the bottom left as well so i'm going to click that reposition a little bit hit click track active frame and we can see down here it's loading trackers so it's trying to kind of approximate the proportions of this character and it looks like it got it pretty close as we zoom in you can see the tracking markers stay relatively in the same spot and we could also try with an unlit model that could help but you can see that because we don't have a texture on this character this method won't really work that great because it won't have any features to detect so i'm going to keep it on lit but just know if you had a character with a bunch of textures you'd probably want to use the unlit method only when you have textures since we don't have textures i'm leaving this on the lit version and then i can just move these tracking points into place because we can see that it didn't accurately capture the shape of the eye which is going to affect how it's going to apply this character onto the metahuman so we can pick these individual points we can also pick the curve itself and move the entire curve but i'm just going to since there's such big changes here i'm going to make sure that i'm only selecting just the little circles so i can get the shape of the eye to be a bit more accurate and i'll do this for the other eye as well we can see the corners of the mouth maybe aren't exactly where they need to be so i'm going to pull those out as well and make sure the corners of the mouth are exactly where we want them to be now before i go any further i do want to make sure that i am actually logged in to the qixel bridge and so i can click here and see that i'm not actually signed in so i'm going to go ahead and sign in to that as well because this is going to connect through bridge so that we can access the character on metahuman creator online so because i was already logged in through the epic games account i just had to click sign in and now i'm already signed into bridge so now back to this we have the tracking on there and we can click metahuman identity solve it's going to take a second and it's basically going to apply and wrap this character's head onto a metahuman so now that we've done that we can toggle to the b view and you can kind of see the mesh topology that is going to be applied to this character from the metahuman essentially kind of template now the next thing we want to do is choose our body so if i click body down here i can actually choose from the meta-human body types that they have available there's three for men three for women and once you've done those steps all you have to do now is click mesh to metahuman and that's basically going to send this through bridge to the metahuman creator account that you would have when you log in through epic on the metahuman creator web page so once this runs we can actually access this and tweak it on the web application of the metahuman creator so let's wait for this to finish and then we can jump into that it says your metahuman is now available in creator and bridge in the metahuman section so i'm going to click ok so now i'm going to navigate to metahuman.unrealengine.com and i'm going to launch the latest metahuman creator that works with unreal engine 5. so because i will be logged in through my epic games account it will have tracked the fact that i sent that character from my unreal engine through the metahuman mesh to metahuman creator and it's going to be available in my library of characters once we get logged in so now that we're logged in you can see the first attempt that i've done and now you can see the one lacking a thumbnail is the one that we've just put in so this is the character that we've just exported from unreal engine and we can make these adjustments in this web application by choosing edit selected now we can navigate around by right clicking middle mouse dragging and we can adjust each one of these attributes and the first one i'm going to go to is the custom mesh because you can see there's some a bit of warping here maybe around the mouth and the eyes if we didn't put those tracking markers exactly right but this is essentially how we can adjust these kind of wrinkly areas by selecting different parts of this kind of thumbnail image representative of the face so i'm going to start with the mouth and we can just say region of influence how much is what we contributed going to influence which is at one versus you know the meta human kind of topology and uh blueprint kind of template there so as i go back and forth i can see whether the influence is strong or not i can stop this so maybe i can see it happening a bit more clearly so you can see where maybe the tracking markers weren't perfectly and maybe we want to dial back the region of influence to zero on that so it's a bit better then we can just kind of work outwards from there and tweaking the region of influence from what we contributed which is this model to you know maybe something closer to that's a more neutral look more realistic depending on how far we want to go with the attributes of this character so i'm just going to dial this back a little bit and i'm going to go to the eyes because i when i did this test last time i saw the eyes were kind of a bit warped out so you can see how they're adjusting here so i'm going to dial these back just a little bit and do the same thing probably for the outer eyes so that's what you can control from your perspective on your stylized character going to metahuman this is where all of that control exists everything below the custom mesh attribute is all the normal meta-human attributes that you would find and you can apply to your character so we can assign a skin texture so that we can actually apply a color to this person and it will load up and we can adjust this color however we want and then we can go through each one of these and give them you know different teeth makeup head hair all these attributes that are available to us like any other attribute in the meta human creator kind of ecosystem so this is really powerful that we can get a groom onto a character very quickly adjust the color of the of the hair and basically have this stylized character export it with these high resolution textures and grooms so once i'm done with this character i can just jump back to the home screen on the metahuman creator and it should save all of your changes and maybe even update this thumbnail here in a second when it reloads so you can see it's updated the thumbnail and because i've i've already done this once and i've chosen clothes and all these other attributes i don't want to bore you with you can go through and choose for your own character we can continue with the one i've already done which is this guy right here and we can actually export this into maya now the one kind of limitation i noticed was around the neck that my character had a pretty big neck and the clothes of the metahuman don't really adjust that well so i had to choose this shirt because i found it have the best neck and maybe this will change and improve every iteration and update they do but that was one limitation i saw so far so now to get this into maya we need to open up the kind of desktop application and bridge not the one that exists inside of unreal engine so if you don't already have bridge installed on your desktop then you want to go ahead and install that and then we can open up that separate application and because we have our account synced it will actually sync up with the metahuman creator and this character should show up in our bridge window here so if we go to our metahuman category here we can go to mymetahumansue5 and we should see both of these characters appear one issue i found when i was trying to export this into maya was the fact that when i originally installed qixel bridge i installed the maya plug-in when i only had maya 2022 installed now i have maya 2023 installed and the install plug-in button over here is no longer there because i've already used it and it's already finding maya 2022 on my system and that's where it's going to send it it's going to send it to maya 2022 so we would want to open up the version that we have or we need to uninstall bridge i'm assuming and completely reinstall it and because this is a free tutorial on youtube i'm not going to take the time to do that and test it maybe you can try that and let me know if that works for you that's my guess is that that should work if i wanted to use this in my 2023 or i could just export up my 2022 save out a file and open up that maya file in 23 after i've got it exported and saved in a 2022. so if you have installed bridge for the first time you want to make sure that you have the export settings selected so there would be an install plug-in button right here but because it's already checking that i have it installed in my 2022 it's not giving me that option to reinstall the plug-in and to other versions of maya so that's one little limitation you want to look out for that you're using the correct version of mine that you have installed that's associated with this now you might also have seen the download settings for this and so we would want to make sure that under models we have mega scans fbx and metahumans we have the u asset and source asset so that it can actually export the real deal into maya so those are the settings that i've chosen and i've already downloaded this one so all i have to do is just click export but if you haven't downloaded your character yet just like this one you can see we can't export yet we first have to download and then we can export to maya all right it's going to export to the program based on your export settings right if we wanted to export this to unreal engine or some other program we could do that as well but right now i'm just showing you maya so i have maya 2022 open and then i can jump back to bridge and say export while double checking that my export settings are going to send it to maya i'm going to click export and it should export it into maya successfully and it says it has so we can jump over here and it's going to ask us are we sure we want to import the metahuman we can say yep and it's going to go through this whole process and actually create a face rig for us and we can actually animate that inside of maya and then export it back into unreal using the quick selection sets for the geometry which is the controls of the character i have another tutorial about that if you want to take a look at how we actually round trip from maya to unreal with this character's facial animation so you can check that out it hasn't changed since i've done that tutorial it's the same process all right after about 10 minutes of waiting we now have the character inside of maya and it's loading all the textures and now we have the face rig available to us which we can adjust right here so that is how let's see if i can puppet this so that is how you create a meta human character that is stylized and you export it from uh bridge into maya and then if you want to learn how to bring this back into unreal if you animate this then i have another tutorial that you can watch for that while this is all well and good to learn stuff like this this is really just kind of dabbling into little technical things if you want to actually work as an animator in the animation industry it's going to take a lot more and i created an entire free training to show you the path it takes to become a professional 3d animator and not just dabble with youtube tutorials because that's only going to get you so far which is not very far so if you're tired of dabbling online with youtube tutorials and you want to take a deeper look at what it actually takes to create a career out of animation which i've done for the past decade i recommend taking my free training and you can also get access to a free animation rig that will help you get started as well so i'll see you in that free training the link is in the description

Channel: Animators Journey

Views: 34,542

Keywords: mesh to metahuman, ue5, unreal engine, metahuman, character, custom, create, rig, Maya, animation, face rig, tutorial, process

Id: Oyl2k-XX184

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022