Learn to RIG and ANIMATE a static mesh prop directly in Unreal Engine 5. #unrealengine #animation

hey everybody in this video I'm going to show you how to take a simple prop like this it's just a basic static mesh convert it into a skeletal mesh add a skeleton and even add a control rig so that you can animate it inside your shots let's Jump Right In first thing you need to do is convert a static mesh into a skeletal mesh and so if you right click on it you'll see it says convert to skeletal mesh if you don't see this that means you need to add the experimental plugin so go to edit plugins and look for scale and grab this one here skeletal mesh editing tools experimental and you'll have to relaunch which is fine and get that plug-in added then you can right click go to convert to skeletal mesh and I'm going to go ahead and create a new skeleton go with it and now I have a skeletal mesh version of My Traffic post and the skeleton that goes with it that's not very exciting of a skeleton quite yet but let's go ahead and jump into this post and here is our post and let's edit the skeleton so I'm going to hit the editing tools here oops it was already open uh but there's nothing here because here's your toolbar down the side here and we're going to go to skeleton and edit skeleton and you'll see that you have the option to edit or to add I need to add some joints cuz right now I only have a root which is that little Red Dot at the bottom there so I'm going to go to add and there's an option here for how to place the points inside the object so I'm going to say within mesh and then I'm going to come and click as many times as I want some deformation to occur so maybe I guess I don't have to go crazy it's not that stretchy of a traffic cone before I accept actually I'll go ahead and accept and then it looks fine from this point of view right but let's double check and check from the left side and we'll say it's good enough and from the front Okay so it's going mostly up the center of my little traffic marker and so now the skeleton has been built here are the joints if I wanted to I could change their name but I'm just going to leave it as is for now let's go to the skin option and we're going to bind the skin and now let's uh let's it did bind let's double check the waiting though uh let's go back to perspective and and uh hop over here there's the roote with its waiting uh let's see up a joint looks pretty good and all right I think we're going to be okay coming up here I don't see much influence down on the bottom uh let's double check though let's do edit weights if you need to paint some weights if you're familiar with that you can come here to edit weights and here it'll give you for each joint you select it'll tell you you're waiting for each one uh a little on this joint and that joint say out it's a little gray here what that's going to do is that means when I move this joint the mesh down here is going to be affected and I probably don't want that to happen um let me show you what I mean let's uh cancel this for a second and go to the skeleton what that means is if I pick a joint and move it notice how the base is being affected as well I don't really want that to happen but you will see check that out I can now bend my bend my shape um but let's go ahead and go back to the skeletal mesh and edit the weights and what I really want to have happen let's very briefly talk about two ways to edit weights one is you can use brush tool and if you use the brush tool and set your strength this it'll default to one uh that means a value of white so this means it'll fully be affected by that joint but I don't want it affected at all so I'm going to set it to zero and paint and that means all of these vertex points will not not be affected by the rotation of the joint above which is what I don't want to have happen and see how as I'm painting it's might be subtle and hard to tell but these faces are becoming solidly black that means there's no effect on these from this joint but if I go down to the first joint not the root that's the root but if I go to the next joint that means if it bends here this will also be affected and I don't want that to happen so I'm painting black if you hold uh B and drag left and right that'll change your brush size all right so you can paint your weights another way you could work though and this might be handier here is you can go into uh vertex mode and then you can select your vertex points and flood fill so maybe I want everything below this point to be filled black so here's my flood value so one or zero and you can drag in between and I want to go ahead and replace so I'm going to hit replace and everything thing all those vertex points that were selected all the values now for the waiting is black in that area so the root looks fine that looks fine then we're just working our way up might affect there I think it's fine if it goes back a little bit I just don't want the base to move when I'm bending anything above it right cuz that would be kind of weird so here you see there's a little bit of gray here on that joint so I'm going to do the same thing just make sure the base um isn't affected and they're still selected so I'm going to flood so keep your eye on this area here see how it's gray when I hit replace with a value of zero it goes black so that means this area is not affected by the joint way up here which is kind of what you would not want to have happen so let's see joint three a little bit affected so I'm going to flood that and for while it's already selected I I don't think it is being affected all so let's replace that okay and accept so now I've added a skeleton to my little traffic cone here and now let's go ahead and animate it in the shot and go back to our map and let's let's swap this out this is the static mesh you can see way over here it says static mesh I probably should have changed the name that's a really long name but I'm not going to use this one anyway so we're going to delete this out of the level and put in the skeletal mesh instead looks the same but now this one has a skeleton in it I'm going to make a mess just right click and throw a level sequence in here and double click to open it and let's add our traffic cone thing our skeletal mesh and at the moment you don't see any way to animate it but if you want to get to the skeleton what you do is just right click and go to edit with FK control rig that's not the control rig you hear in the Press that's the that's the this control rig FK control rig is just a way to modify the FK controls for this and in this case that's probably all you would need but I will also show you how to make a fancy control rig uh if you want to be able to have handles and such to be able to change your traffic uh what are we calling this thing traffic delineator oh post traffic post we'll call it a traffic post so uh edit with FK control rig and go ahead and just bake every frame for now we'll clean it up in a second and you'll see it didn't uh there wasn't that much to change in the baking I guess what I could have done since it wasn't moving anyway uh you know what I'm going to do that let me undo that really quick because that just makes a mess I have to delete all those keys so let's do that again right click bake and let's go ahead and reduce Keys which means if there's no motion it's not going to put a key frame there which there is no motion so you're only going to get one single key frame and if I open this up all of my joints have a single key set on them which means that's perfect because if I now auto key then I'll get all the updates there so let's drag out to a little ways and let's go ahead and pick um as an example let's just pick a particular joint hit e and bump it a little bit next one bump it a little bit I'm just making a little subtle changes here I realize I have my snapping turned on so I'll turn that off so I can get a little smooth motion there that's just barely messing with the tip there but good good so now I have some animation of this little traffic post from here to here all right and let's go few frames farther and what you can do since I'm kind of bending them all the same amount I'm going to multi select all of my joints here and I'm just going to rotate them all together so they have the same amount of Bend there okay and then what I can do is let's select these keys and move them over and let's see how fast this plays I guess that's fine and then I'm going to goe and select the keys already made contrl C and just drop multiple sets of these same keys and hit play it's already in repeat so now I got this floppy traffic post animating so now you can animate however you want with these uh with these joints now what if you know it's kind of you know kind of a hassle it's not that big a deal in this case to pick your joints this way but what if you want to have controls like an actual you know animation rig for that we'll make a really quick control rig so let's jump back to the content browser and where is my skeletal mesh here it is I'm going to right click go to create go to control rig so the control rig let's open this this allows you to build uh controls for your skeleton so uh depending on what you came in with the defaults here switch over to the rig setting here and the quickest way is just select each of these joints and for each of these joint positions we're going to go to new and add controls for selected you'll see it says alt click for additional setting so I'm going to alt click and I do want to create a hierar key and I want all of them to end with the name uncore control so all the details here are actually just fine so I'm going to say okay and it created them uh down here I kind of thought I wasn't paying attention I kind of thought this would have put them all uh under each other so it's actually okay now it's doing it I don't know why it took a second to reset there but this is what I wanted so that there's a hierarchy uh of each of these and then for the shape of each of these let me make this bigger so you can see these are your controls that will affect how you select your joints and a big sphere is not that good in this case so I'm going to select them all here going to go over here to the shape and switch them to let's just do Circle thick and they're just barely bigger than the size of the um traffic post so I'm going to make their size a little bit bigger so I'm going to go to scale lock it and click and drag to make that a little bit bigger so you can see those circles getting bigger and red on red might be kind of hard to see so I'm going to go ahead and change that to Green so now I got these little green Rings here the one at the bottom the root is definitely to small so I'm going to just with that one selected adjust that one to be even a little bit bigger and since it is kind of the base of the shape I'm going to also change the shape type to be hexagon and the color to be that'll make red or orange red whatever and compile for a sec so now I have these shapes but the shapes are just sitting there they're not doing anything right if I select one and move it it has nothing to do with the skeleton now you do see the hierarchy is affected here if I move this joint all the rest because they are underneath it in the hierarchy here go with it as expected I'm going to put that back now I need to tie them together to the actual joints and it's actually easy to do it's just a little bit of work so for a forward solve what that means is when I grab one of these controls and move it I want it to be connected to and change the value of the actual joint value so I'm going to do two things I'm first going to grab all these controls and drag them into the interface here and I want to get the value of the control and it's just going to make a bunch of nodes here then for the actual joints I'm going to select all those drag those in and for that I'm going to be setting the bone position and let's just do one at a time here to get the idea of what's going on so this is my root control which is this thing right here that I just made that thing that just the hexagon when I move the hexagon I want that to be connected to like a remote control and drive the actual root bone so I'm getting the value from the root control and I'm taking the transform of that and I'm plugging it into the input of the set the bone position for the root so let's uh this line here this white line is kind of like a order of operation this just called a forward solve uh the backward solve is when we do kind of the reverse we'll set that up in a minute as well now that the control is hooked up to the Bone when I move this it moves the actual root joint which is moving the pole now we just have to do that for all of the other controls connect them to all of the other bones let's make some space here and I'll go through this really quickly you can just trying to make a little bit of order here and then coming in close here you connect transform to input transform to input and then you need to also connect the execution of these otherwise nothing will happen this is the the go line means do the first one then the next one the next one all the way through so let's connect those all right and let's compile and let's save and let's move this out of the way for a second and let's put our control rig object into the scene and when we dragged it into the level being a control rig I guess it automatically puts it into your level sequence here so here is our new pole and if we want we can go ahead and set it to additive it's a little easier to key frame that way so then we can come here and select part of our control set a key I'm just hitting S I may do it at the top level here set it on all the all the controls so now you have little handles that you can use to grab and move different parts of the object which you know if you're an animator you're used to something like this a little bit more so now I can grab the controls directly without having to go and find the actual joint and now you can see in this case it's not that bad to grab the joint either but the more complicated your rig the more handy it's going to be to have uh something like this but let's say maybe you have some animations already for um just to finish the control rig discussion um let's let's ditch this second one for a second and let's go back to our floppy one here that we have hand animated maybe we would output an animation sequence for this so that we can reuse it over and over but then we want to modify it with the control rig right now if you wanted to do a control rig version of this like these are all FK controls if you want to be able to have the control so Swap this out so that we can see all the controls on it you would in theory right click go to bake to control rig and then you would choose your control rig from the list here and it would bake all the controls onto the positions of the joints however our control rig isn't finished being set up for that so let's go back over to our uh control rig which is where here it is so this drives the control to drive the joint so this takes the control and drives the joint position but for the position to be turned back into a control handle we need to do what's called the reverse solve so hit Tab and type reverse to get it or backwards backwards solve and then we need to kind of do the same thing just the opposite way and what we're going to do is drag all the joints in we're going to get the bone position and coming over here we're going to drag all these in and they're going to be set so we're going to set the control position based on the bone position so same idea but kind of the opposite so let's organize this a little bit and same thing we're going to connect each of these so get the bone set the control position the controller like the little circle and then we got to connect these to the backward solve again so taking wherever the bone is during a backward solve find out where the bone is and then use that to set the controls position so let's go ahead and compile and save and come back here so in this case the pole is being driven from an FK control but we want to now bake in the control rig so that we can have easy easy to grab hand handles so you're going to right click let's let's Stitch this one for now so pretend this isn't here well actually don't pretend it isn't here now and we're going to select our FK driven post right click go to bake to control rig here's the control rig that we made for our post and we'll go ahead and just uh not reduce Keys we'll just let it grab it all and then I'll show you how to do an additive override so then create so you'll see that swapped out here now these are you'll see you have all the controls for your um for your post here so let's hit play so it's still animating if I hit stop then you'll see the controls so um they hide when you hit play mode specifically so now it's flopping around but let's say you want to make a change uh what you can do is you could change the actual keys but that is and sounds like a headache so what you can do is come here and say add an additive control and let me bring the playhead back for that because it's going to put it wherever my playhead is going to add an additive control and that lets me do um an override to any of the values that are here so for example let's say when it gets to here um I want to what do I want to do um well I'll just do something not very interesting I'll just give it a big harsh Bend there and set a key and let's go back a little bit cuz that's the only key I have so far and let's go ahead and put it back right and then so it goes way over and then I'll let it snap back a little faster right so these are just overrides so it's going to go way over and bend right there then come back let's say about here we'll give it a little nudge go all the way there and go with the same thing send it way over super overlap then on its way back let's go ahead and bring it back so now I've been able to just add a silly little extra overflod of layer onto my existing animation that I baked into the control rig so that's probably a little overkill for just a little post like this uh but it is good to know how to do because it's not that hard if you were trying to maybe animate a swing palm tree or maybe you were trying to make the palm trees for in and out and they had like a special bend that you had to put in them you could do that with this right you could bend that there and then come back and grab your handle there and bend it that way to make your In-N-Out Palm Tree and you could even leave them as static posed or you can make actual animations out of it if you wanted to as a grand finale here if you wanted to save this animation that you worked on so hard you have this amazing animation you think you're going to use it again just go and right click bake animation sequence and put it somewhere so I'm just going to put it down with my post how to say post anom and okay and Export to sequence so now the next time you bring in a post so I'm going to bring in my skeletal mesh and go to my level sequence and let's add that post so here's my second post which has no animation on it but because I saved that animation sequence for a post I can come here to the plus and here is the post animation that I just uh baked out and now it too has animation on it now you'll see it where my playhead was is where the animation gets added so I'd have to slide that back here if I want them in sync but because it has its own control I can spin that around and have them go in opposite directions so I think that that's pretty handy to be able to throw a skeleton onto a static mesh in unreal without having to bring it into Maya or blender and build a skeleton especially for little stuff like this if you just have very subtle things you know a full character I mean you could do it in here I think but you might have some tools already built in your other software for that but at least for something like this it's it's pretty easy so hope that was beneficial for you and you find a good way to use it in your shots cheers

Channel: 3D Education with JC

Views: 5,634

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Id: kKKYeMVvNvg

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2024