Make a 3D Character of YOURSELF (Unreal Engine 5 + Metahuman)

[Music] oh hey guys i know that you really love unreal engine and you know what i do too so that's why i thought for this week let's create a 3d character of ourselves inside unreal engine and i'll show you guys how to do that and you might think jordy that is way too complicated i'm just getting started we'll know where it is it's actually super easy and super fun to make we're gonna do everything on the msi crater z16 big thanks to them for sponsoring this video and more about this bad boy in a moment but first how can we make a virtual me well i was very busy this week hanging up all of these led panels so i asked lorenzo for some help before we start make sure you have unreal engine 5 and the quicksole bridge application installed next up we of course need to create ourselves or someone else in 3d if we want to animate it but as you probably know modeling and texturing humans is extremely difficult and time consuming to make them look realistic but i got a little trick up my sleeve and that little trick is called meta human which is also a free software from epic games it's still in development but everyone can request early access to it so i'll leave a link to it in the description down below the entire software runs on your browser so no need to install anything and you start off by just picking out a model that looks a little bit like you and that way you have a starting point and for me that's gonna be this guy right here etor simply select him and then click on next on the bottom we're now in the editor and i'm going to click on sculpt here on the bottom which allows me to change a couple of parameters now first things first he kind of looks like me but it doesn't have the same epic beard yet so i'm just gonna go over to beard and from there choose long messy beard that's maybe too messy let's pick something else long full beard is this more like me lorenzo kinda well you get the idea guys we get a ton of parameters here on the left side which allows us to sculpt and change the model in here we can kind of like rotate it around we can take any of these points right here it's kind of make adjustments to the eyes to my forehead to the lips anything that you desire you have so many possibilities and that way you're able to change the model to make it look like you and after some fumbling around you should get something that looks like you look at this beautiful guy right here you look so similar i mean it's never going to be perfect but it does look very similar to me it is saved within your library and lorenzo is going to explain to you in a moment how we can start animating this character but first let me show you guys what the z16 is all about this right here is a workstation laptop specifically designed for creators and as you can see it runs unreal engine super smooth and that is because of its nvidia rtx studio 30 3060 graphics cards we also get the latest intel 11 generation 8 core cpu insights we get wifi 6e a 90 watt hour battery inside which gives plenty of power we get some very good ports on the side such as usb 3.2 and thunderbolt 4. and the mini led keyboard is one of the better ones that i've seen in a laptop it just feels so good to touch these buttons in fact compared to the apple's m1 chip msi got a shared first place for overall satisfaction in the pc mac reader's choice award and i can definitely understand why i've been working with the creator z16 for over half a year now and it's been incredible i mean look at the beautiful cnc unibody design their slogan is tech meets aesthetics and we can see that back throughout the entire msi creator line the tech sits inside and the aesthetics well they speak for themselves and finally i'd like to mention that this is probably the best display that i've ever seen inside a laptop it comes pre-calibrated with a delta e under 2 and that is really good the ips quad hd true pixel panel covers a hundred percent of the dci p3 color profile making it perfect for color grading tasks so if you're looking for a brand new laptop this year definitely consider the msi creator z16 as well i'll leave links to everything in the description down below and now let's fire up unreal engine and give the mic to lorenzo now that we have made our meta human it's time to open up unreal engine 5. you'll be prompted with an incompatible issue for the mega scans plugin but that's nothing to worry about now let's create a blank project by going to film video and live events and choose blank with this created is now time to import our meta human so open up the quixote bridge application go to my metahumans and select your wanted model you can choose between different resolution settings and will go for 8k to get the best result possible simply press download once downloaded we need to export it but since the version of bridge is for unreal engine 4 we can't use the export button but that's okay right click on your metahuman and go to files choose 8k assets ui and here you can copy the metahuman then open up the folder where you saved your unreal project and paste it in the content folder then in unreal go to content browser metahumans common face and double click face animation blueprint you'll get popups of missing stuff but simply press enable on those and you can do this every time these popups appear shaders will also be loaded so wait until that is finished and with that done we can start with the face animation which is extremely easy to do now unreal engine has a free app for ios called live link face which as the name says is for facial tracking there is an additional option to use your webcam but that involves different softwares and is unfortunately more complex i'll leave a link to some documentation for it in the description down below but we're going to do it with the app so open it up tap the gear and go to live link here you want to add the local ip address of your computer so that the app can send over the information and that is all for the app now open up the face animation blueprint and go to default here you'll want to change the live link face subject to your phone so in our case cinecom iphone and enable the live link face hat checkbox once that is done tap compile and save this next we'll create a sequence recorder right click in the content browser go to animation and choose level sequence open this up by double clicking and now we'll add the blueprint in here so go to metahumans folder jordy and drag the blueprint jordy in the sequencer with this selected go over to the details tab and again set the livelink face subject to the iphone and enable the checkbox right underneath and the final step is adding a new component called livelink skeleton animation as you can see the facial tracking is working next up i'll show you how to animate your meta human body so that we can have some movement in there as well for this we'll be using adobe service mixamo which is free if you have an adobe subscription however just downloading these and importing them to unreal isn't going to work so we need a small workaround luckily terabila studio made it super easy for us on their website you can just download a miximo converter now let's hop over to miximo and upload our own character in the miximo converter folder you should find a rig specially made for this so upload this one then look for an animation you want in my case i'll just take a simple idle stance and press download now make sure that before continuing the skin is set to without skin and the keyframe reduction is set to uniform then click download and save it in the initial folder which we have in the miximo converter now we open up the miximo converter which we just downloaded and press this button and if you go look in the complete folder there should be a new file drag this file to the content browser in unreal from here go to the skeleton and choose metahuman base scale and press import all you'll again get a warning but that's okay since we'll be taking care of it go back to your sequencer and delete the metahuman control rig under the body then add a new track go to animation and look for your edit animation so in our case the idle stands and there we go it works kind of jordy is all stretched out looking like slenderman but that's because of the translation between our rigs so to fix this right click the newly added animation go to properties and double click on the animation thumbnail now go to details in the skeleton tree and enable show retargeting options right click on the pelvis and choose recursively set translation retargeting skeleton to change all the branches under it and again change pelvis to animation relative and now you should see your meta human having its animation now one thing you'll notice is that the face tracking doesn't work when playing back the animation and there's a really simple reason for that the face tracking is being recorded and shown live but once you play this sequence there are no keyframes for the face only for the body but don't worry of course i'll show you how to get both playing together go to window cinematics and select sequence recorder since we want to record our meta human we go to the blueprints of it and drag it into the scene now go back to the sequence recorder and click on add to add the blueprint in here now before we can actually start recording we can see in the blueprint details window one thing is missing the live link skeleton animation this is something you'll need to add again every time you add a character to your scene and with this added you can simply press record and start acting once you're happy press stop all this will prompt up a message on the bottom right where we can click on to open up that recorded scene when playing it back you can see something is weird and that is because we have two jordies in the scene when playing back a recording it will place the object back in the scene instead of using what's already there so quickly disable the visibility of the blueprint where there is no lightning next to it in the world outliner tab and now comes the final step the body animation click add animation under the body skeleton and look for your animation and if all went well you should have both working perfectly together you can now hit the render button from the sequencer and you got yourself a talking you oh awesome i'm a 3d character guys now hit that like button if you enjoyed the video and that way you're also supporting the channel as it helps in the youtube algorithm well anyways thank you so much for watching guys and thank you msi for the support and as always stay creative i'm just gonna run around a little bit more being 3d and all

Channel: Cinecom.net

Views: 31,703

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal engine 5, metahuman, how to animate characters in unreal engine, easy character animation, livelink, livelink metahuman, livelink face unreal engine 5, livelink unreal, mixamo to unreal engine 5, mixamo, mixamo to unreal, mixamo animation, epic games metahuman, epic games, motion capture, 3d animation, metahuman character creator, character creator, unreal engine 5 metahuman creator, unreal engine metahuman live face app tutorial, metahuman live face app

Id: -_B4fiuWwmo

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021