How to use live link face with your own characters

hey what's going on guys so one of the top questions i get on instagram and youtube is how do we control custom characters do we get from marketplace with the iphone live link face because you know i've been using it on the meta human so on and so forth but how do we use that with assets inside the marketplace well it's kind of tricky because for it to work on custom characters the characters themselves need blend shapes on the faces or morph targets so if you go to the epic marketplace and you type in blend oh my god oh oh my what blend shape you're gonna see a couple of characters right here now none of these guys look good so i ended up getting this modular elf archer girl because she has more blend shapes than this dude so this is on sale right now that's why i grabbed it so if you click on this person here and you look at the the seller i actually contacted her on arch station because i told her about the whole plan with blend shapes and hey trying to control it in live linked face because her characters majority of them do have blend shapes and as you can see i clicked on the less click baity one because i know you guys i know you guys don't like clickbait thumbnails so you know i got you so we picked this one and majority of these characters have blend shapes so what you need to look for is whenever you're shopping for a character that you want to control with the live link face app on the iphone you double click that character and you have to check here you actually have to read and it should say something about blend shapes more targets facial expressions without the blend shapes you're not going to be able to control this unless you make your own blend shapes but ooh it it doesn't look fun so look for characters that has blend shapes or morph targets okay so i have this open in my project already i'll have it open up right here so what i did was i created a new folder called anims and what we're going to do first is right click we're going to create a new animation animation blueprint okay and we're going to look for the skeleton that this girl uses she uses the game archer you can see the folder is game archer but she uses the ue4 mannequin skeleton so that's good that's what we want press ok and we're gonna type the name archer girl i cannot spell two so we have two blueprints ignore this one because this is the one i had earlier and i'm gonna show you why i kept it here because it's gonna be awesome for you if it works out so i'm gonna double click this girl and all we have to do is make sure first we have live link enabled sorry totally forgot about that live link live link you can turn all this on and you also need apple ar because that's what uses the facial stuff all right so right click the atom graph we're gonna open up a live link post and we're gonna connect this here and for the subject i don't have my phone connected yet so i'm gonna leave that blank for now and then i'm going to go to the event graph i'm going to drag this here and i'm going to go live link oh boy evaluate live link frame and again there's a drop down here for our phone but i'm not going to connect that just yet okay so compile save it's going to have an error because i don't have the phone yet but that's okay all right so the next thing we have to do is take a look at her blend shapes here so if i double click the skeletal mesh here are the blonde shapes for this character and what that really does is if i show you real quick i'm gonna move up right here gosh this mouse is so sensitive okay so let's see if i can get so the blend shapes are options pretty much whenever you create a character you can create these blend shapes for your character and the live link face app uses blend shapes to control the facial expression okay but the issue is her blend shapes in this character is different from the blend shapes in the apple ar kit so what we're going to have to do is oopsies take a look at these blend shapes and find similar blend shapes in the apple ar kit in the perfect world if you're creating characters from real and i know a lot of people are going to be doing this soon when you're creating your blend shapes go to this page and make sure you're naming all of your blend shapes similar to the apple ar kit because this is going to help you in the long run when you're selling your characters in the marketplace so people and buyers don't have to do this manually just do it for them so it would just be plug and play so as far as i know it has 52 blend shapes the apple ar kit all right so let's go back to the mesh and we're going to start with the mouth and if you look at this mouth o okay that's basically just her saying oh so if you go to the ar kit and you look in the mouth there's a jaw open or mouth funnel all right so look at a mouth funnel is actually going to show you what that is from 0 to 1. so that looks like the o and like i said you can mess around with this but i'm going to choose the closest one so for you to do this you have to go back to unreal minimize this for now because we're going to need that we're going to create a remap asset so if we're going to right click blueprint class and right here we're going to go remap live link remap asset select and we're gonna rename this asset do double click and it's gonna open this blank graph all right go to override get remap curve name and then to get remap curve name we're going to squirrely switch on name bop so that's good and i'm gonna go to switch on name we can disable that if you don't want and in the switch on name this is where we're gonna add the apple ar so we're gonna add a pin and we're gonna go to the apple ar kit mouth funnel copy paste enter for the return node we're gonna use the girls name head mouth o copy minimize go back to the asset or i could have just switched over this way sorry go to return node paste enter drop it right there save so you're gonna do that for all of these blend shapes that you can find similar in the apple ar kit but what i'm gonna do is for this character if you decide to get it and i'm not sure about the rest of our characters i don't know if they retain the same blend shape name i'm gonna let you download this asset that's remap asset so you don't have to rename them because i already have it right here asset two i already renamed all of these for you so all you have to do is download it and go back to your blueprint go to your anim graph go to the live link post click on that and change it to asset do but we're going to use asset for now because that's the completed one that's what i'm going to let you download is the asset so change it here okay so if i go to asset curve name the selection so that's good so this is all switched just pretty much i just skipped like 30 minutes with me trying to rename these for you so you don't have to do it and then to get it working we click on the skeletal mesh on the animation change the uh change the animation mode to blueprint and then choose the blueprint which is arch we're going to use actually let's use arch 2 because that's the one we just created right here okay right event graph is good but we just have to change this here right so on the girl we click her again scroll down there's one more thing that we have to click and it's animation and editor go ahead and check that mark check mark that and also add a live link component skeleton anything having to do with lifelink i usually add this skeleton animation all right now to set up your phone i already have a video uh check out this video i did uh i did a full tutorial on how to set up your phone for uh live link but what i'm gonna do is just turn it on right now it's the live link face app it's free and i'm gonna set the ip because i think i changed to ip so now you're gonna see that pop up now we have this here now which is good so we're gonna look at that blueprint we just created we're gonna change this to my phone that's the phone go to animgraph change this to the phone as well compile and save minimize and now you can see that i'm controlling this character with my phone but the mouth the facial stuff and i turned it off so the issue is the apple ar kit has 52 blend shapes and this character only has like 12 i think let's see go to mesh eins by dr iphone 56 so 9 10 11. this girl has 18 but i think not all 18 matches the apple ar kit so for you guys out there creating these characters it's if you believe that your character is going to sell and if it's really high quality i think it would be smart for you guys to start implementing majority of these blend shapes so the customers can use the live link face app because like i said like code miko is doing right now with the virtual cg girl streaming mocap suit with facial mocap this is where streaming is going so you know like kind of like a heads up guys this this this industry is about to blow up because to be honest for me as you all know i use majority of everything i use in the marketplace and that's why i don't have a lot of cg characters human cg characters in my movies because i don't have blend shapes characters you know so i'm sticking with people that wear masks it's cheating but unfortunately it's budget constraints you know for me to customize a character like this it's get and make it look extremely photorealistic it's gonna cost a lot of money so uh yeah i hope this video wasn't too long and i am gonna let you guys download this i'll put in the link in the uh comments below so you guys can just really plug it in but like i said i'm not sure if this is gonna work for other characters because all i don't know if they're gonna retain the same exact blend shape names but at least for this character you know that you can get some movement even though it's not as realistic as a meta human it still has some mouth movement and winking and blinking and stuff like that so you want to learn unreal engine 4 but majority of the videos out there are for video game creations maybe i can help with that i just created a beginner's course on how to make a movie inside unreal engine 4. in an hour and 40 minutes i'm going to teach you how to install unreal engine 4 to create your very first cg animation unreal engine is the future and this video is the perfect introduction to it [Music] you

Channel: JSFILMZ

Views: 39,192

Keywords: how to live link face unreal engine 4, how to stream like codemiko, stream like codemiko in unreal engine, unreal engine 4 codemiko, create blendshapes for unreal engine 4, unreal engine blendshapes, face mocap characters in unreal engine, live link face unreal engine 4, live link face tutorial, easy live link face tutorial, Live link face for beginners, How to use live link face with your own characters, live link face marketplace character

Id: bFVMd7pMb3k

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021