How To Use Automatic Animation Retargeting on UE 5.4

[Music] he everyone Paulo here welcome to the channel where I make how- to videos time to share with I've learned and I'm back with another Unreal Engine tutorial this is part of the character animation how-to Series in this video we're going to learn how to use the new automatic animation retargeting with the Unreal Engine 5.4 I've previously covered the manual retargeting process on this series I'll drop those links in the description below on UE 5 4 which is now in preview there's a new automatic retargeting feature that saves time on retargeting animations to Common bipedal skeletons I'll be covering the two use cases we targeting animations from one skeleton to the ue5 skeleton and we're targeting ue5 skeleton to another skeleton like the one from miimo when you target to another skeleton there are certain limitations like the root bone and ik Bones which I'll uh also mention on how to fix it's a bit to cover so let's go so here I have a UE 5.4 project open so the first thing I want to do is import the skeletons that I'm going to use so I'm going to go under my character here and create a new folder called uh miimo so I already downloaded a couple of assets from miimo the skeleton the toos and an anim so first I'm going to import the skeleton which is this one um sometimes you may need to select this option use to as a reference post depending on the skeleton so for this skeleton uh I need to do that so it would not throw any warnings uh this no smoothing group information warning is fine so we could keep that so now I have this skeleton and the Tex T and materials uh imported so next I'm going to create a couple of folder here so I'm going to say one and two so the first one I'm going to import the animation so this is that hip hop dance that I downloaded I'm going to select the mixim mo skeleton here and then import so this animation is a hip-hop dance uh so we're going to retarget this animation to the ue5 um character so to do that simply right click on the animation sequence and select retarget animations you should get this new window so this new window is the new uh automatic retargeting so you define the source which is the miximum character that I have and then the skeleton that you want to retarget to so I'm going to select the skm Manning symbol here and this we targeter option is the one that autog generates it for you it would create the ik rig it would also create the ik retargeter so if I select this you would see that the animations are being retargeted to the ue5 mannequin you have a couple options here uh the export R Target assets and the export animation so let's go with the retarget assets first and I'm going to select the folder number one export and that should export this one so you could see it created an ik rig and an ik rig for the ue5 mannequin and an ik retargeter so if I open the ik rig first you would see that the the target chains has already been defined and even the full body ik has been defined and all of this uh mapping has been created for us and the same thing with the ik for the ue5 it created the same structure for us and now the retargeter here is basically just mapping from the source to the Target and all of that done for us by the new retargeting options previously you have to do this one by one you have to uh retarget each one of these chains and all of that but that is a welcome change for 5.4 so if we go back to the we targeter here now we could select the animation we want want to retarget and hit on export and I'm just going to add a prefix here and Export if I go back to that folder now I have the Manny hip-hop dance retarget it cool so that's the first use case so if you have animations from one skeleton you want to Target it to the ue5 skeleton so the next use case is I'm going to retarget the ue5 animation to the mixim mo character so let me let me actually save all with preview versions make sure you save a lot because it has a tendency to crash a lot as well so let me close that so now if I go to my content drawer here and go under the mannequins for the u5 I could retarget the ABP Manny animation blueprint so right click and select retarget animation so it would have the same options but this time I'm going to select the miimo character and I could click on export with Target assets as well and if I go under number two here second example you would see it created the ik rig for the ue5 and ik rig for the um mixim more character again if I dock it here you would see it created the uh Target chain and all of that but one thing is missing so if I open this one the ue5 mannequin you would see that the ue5 mannequin has some ik bones in here the miimo character doesn't have uh ik Bones on it so that's one limitation that you should be aware of because your uh skeleton doesn't have those ik bones so none of those would be retargeted um you could fix that using virtual bones which I have in a uh covered in another video which I'll drop a link in the description below so if we go back to the retarget options here so you could select the ABP Manu and then um control click all the other animations here and Export animation and same thing do it on the second folder it should create that it would create this for me so I'm just going to rename this to miimo so one thing that is going to be odd or different here is that the animation blueprint for the uh character that got autogenerated for us it will also have a control rig which fixes the foot ik but that is another problem that needs to be solved using um the ik bones because this character doesn't have uh ik bones this is failing so one thing you could do is just disconnect that for now and then fix that using a video that uh I talked about using virtual bones so if I compile here you would see it's posture is now fixed it's not head it's not dropping anymore um and then save that and now I could close this and I could go to the third person template here under blueprints BP and under the mesh I could uh swap out the mesh with that new character that I have and swap out the animation blueprint with that um miimo blueprint that I just created and compile save and then when I play this you would see the characters in the in the scene in the level but then there's a funny way that he walks because this particular mixo character doesn't have any root bone so in order to fix that there's a couple of options you could use a tools like blender to add a root bone on the character and then import it back to unroll engine or you could also try playing around with the other feature which is now in beta which is the skeletal editor on uee 5.4 where you could uh modify the the bones and all of that I might create a video on that but for now uh I have a video where I use I use a blender add-on to add a root bone and then import it back on Unreal Engine so there you go how to retarget animations uh using the new automatic retargeter hope you like this video thumbs up thumbs 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Channel: Just Another Dang How To Channel

Views: 992

Keywords: animation retargeting, unreal engine 5.4 tutorial

Id: Of7-TwNwzyA

Length: 9min 32sec (572 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2024