Maya to Unreal VFX Animation Workflow

hi there and welcome in this tutorial we will discuss how to transfer and export your animation from maya to unreal 4 or unreal 5 successfully without any scripts or plugins ok transferring animation between the two softwares depending on the first place on your reg chain derek that you did in maya and the names so we will discuss about tips and tricks about rigging for unreal and we will test on three project okay this is free 3d model we will drag very very similar to just explain the idea and this robot also will rig it very simple rig and transfer it to unreal with very simple animation and the third thing is this enemy school reg okay i did this shot on enemy school and we will transfer this to unreal okay so before i start i would like to clarify that all the steps i'm going to to say or explain are results for a big r d i did for vfx projects in egypt and i'd like to thank saint charlene he's a amazing unreal artist that helped me to figure out how unreal understand drinks so i would like to thank him very much so uh let's start with this project with this model first of all we will check the groups so we know that rigging depends on the first place on the groups for your model so let's group this car so we finished the grouping the car so something to note i won't explain every step i do in rigging so i depend on you that you already has a great experience ranking so the first steps that the grouping or the joint orientation or something that you should know so to hit the point i will start with the big differences between the normal rig and the unreal rig okay so we grouped our model okay and let's put it in one group so great let's start our rigging first joint always always name it root okay and if there's multiple rigs in the scene or you will import multiple rigs to unreal you can name a truth and the second rig name it root underscore version zero zero one and the third rig root underscore version zero zero two and so on okay so the first chain the first joint in the chain should be named root so now we have our root joint and we can duplicate it and let's on the transparent on joints and the bot the joint here and select the wheel for group and click match transition at batch rotate and now we have our joint here i'm sure that the orientation isn't correct but i'm not trying to fix it now it's not my issue i'm just explaining the idea so now let's do a chain also on the mirror to explain how to make something like with two joints and how to make it movable and transfer it to unreal so now we finished building our chain okay and i would like to clarify something that it's okay to build your controller's setup and constrain it to joint that's okay so we finished our setup our chain setup and i would like to clarify something that it's okay to both your controllers and constrain constrain it to joint so totally okay and we can transfer to unreal and now let's scan now we will start skin bending make sure that the skin is working okay okay so let's select all the joints all the parts i'm sorry and it's wheel forward joint and so now our car is ready to be animated and exported to unreal so let's make a just very very fast animation and make it like leave it like 30 frames per second it's okay okay that's our basic animation okay we can we're gonna transfer it to unreal uh another thing to explain it's important to organize your materials in maya because in unreal uh you would like to just replace the material name with your material in unreal so i don't like to like assign material and call it let's example let's have an example any name and another material and name it something like that okay that's a big wrong you should classify your materials well with names with names so the body of the car we can assign material we can exclude the glass okay and assign new material and let's call it body so in unreal try to uh categorize everything you want to export to be under understandable and unreal okay so this is material nude we're gonna transfer it as a material nude so the name should have like m capital underscore the name of the object m stands for material okay okay something like that and you can assign any material with a good name on the tires also okay the export settings first of all you should select let's save incremental so now we can select our chain and select our card jail and go to file export selection and go to option box and export selection okay from here we're gonna say animation and bake animation and about the time slide range from 0 to 1 and so after bake animation we can select constraints and skeleton definitions and make sure that we select also the format models and finally that's better and we choose like apex 2018 so we will test it in unreal right now and after that we will move on to the other projects so let's start unreal so we opened unreal 5 and i'd like to organize my file so i will need to make folder call it and we can import it in it so here we're gonna choose some options so reset to default and we're gonna choose geometry and scanning weights and import animation the exported time convert scene for sure and now import so now we imported our fbx file so let's explain something else here every animation we import and unreal has some nodes so that he has something like static mesh and that's geometry but has no keys and the geometry with joints and has keys so the object with geometry with no keys we call it static mesh so we have it here something like that and we can drag and drop here in the scene okay so first thing is to zero our translate and make sure that the rotation is here also okay we can hide this okay now we have our car here so let's make sequence level sequence and name it the default name okay and i'm gonna bring it here so s m stands for static mesh underscore car okay with selected static mesh car we can drag and drop to our sequencer and press s key select it and press s so it bought here a key animation and we can go for track animation import animation and now we have our own animation okay that's it it's pretty easy right and we now have our own animation here in unreal okay so this is the first successful transfer let's do the same with another projects so now we have finished our grooving and let's start with our joints and organizing them and their names basically we did our joint chain now we and we named it uh root underscore version 01 as we explained before to import with the same rig here that the main chain called root only so root only and root underscore version zero zero one and now let's have a cool time with the scanning and now we have done our scanning and rigging so let's make very speed animation to just clarify our idea so now we have this weird animation just for test our workflow animation bake animation from zero to one the time slider range and the format models this is very important with the scanned geometries something like this and constraints for of course now we can go to unreal and make another folder to organize our work as we said before and robot underscore version 02 and we can import our robot and check our settings something like skeletal mesh port mesh geometry and skinning weights and all it's okay so import now it's imported we can now as we said before we can drag and drop our static mesh here in the scene and we can zero out our transformations and we can come here and hide our car okay and we can bring our sequencer drag and drop our robot and just click s and from track animation and select robot version to animation that's already imported with it and now we have our cool animation or weird animation and now we have our weird animation or it's weird really but we have transferred successfully our animation okay let's go to the third test so now we will start explaining some tips and tricks and scene like this scene that has environment static and have its own character with its own chain rig that we won't be able to change and some external stuff that like that shield that we won't be able to change also so how trying to transfer this whole scene with the static mesh something like environment something static and like the character shield and the camera animation also so first of all we should know that unreal doesn't understand any only mesh so in unreal there is no only mesh we should have rigged mesh we have we should have a skinned mesh okay so we have this environment this we can call it something like static mesh that it hasn't any keys or animation but we need to transfer this environment to unreal so we have to rig it with only at least one joint and scan it to this joint to make unreal able to read this mesh so unreal doesn't read only mesh it read only the skinned mesh even if we want animate this mesh okay let's transfer this environment first so uh for this environment we will make joint any place i won't focus on this so this is the joint and we can make it bigger something like that and of course call it root okay and let's zero it out and let's bind it to the environment okay so we have now rigged our scene and that's important so let's transfer it first and export selection of course bake it you won't lose anything if you bake it even if it wasn't unimitable how we transfer this rig okay for enemy correct i always love to use geometric ash in unreal because it's chain it's a little bit tricky and disturbing very much so it's not joints and constraints as usual it's locator and nervous and there's mesh inside and something a little bit difficult so we have to cache it first but before we cache it i need to hide joints and i need to select drag and select and assign only my material we select this visible mesh and we select our armor our shield okay and we can go for cache alembic cache export selection to alembic time slider from 14 and we can choose right visibility that's important and uv right stripe namespaces world space and export selection and we can make it here version 2. so when unreal let's make folder call it enemy school underscore version 2 and let's import first of all let's import our okay now we have our scene so now we have our our scene let's import our character let's make another folder call it character and import it but here we will import geometry cache or olympic files so keep focus on this open and i will choose skeletal skeletal okay and our animation starts from 14 and that's very very important to make the preset autodesk 3ds max not maya 3ds max not maya so now we have our static mesh and our animation we can check our animation to see it that's our animation okay cool first of all we have to drag and drop our static animation here and of course john 0 our attributes and we can open the sequencer and let's drag and drop this enemy school version 2 squashed and weird thing don't worry just drag and drop in the sequencer go to the first frame it's 14 the shot starts from 14 and you can and now you can go to animation and about your animation here right so after that we have geometry cache used in the scene and we have a static mesh so we have to play now to see first our animation and that's our animation great right so maybe in some things it will show like squashed something like weird like that but don't worry when you come to render it will render okay we just need here to expand our animation a little bit and we can play and that's it that's our animation right so we transferred our animation here and unreal with the custom rig and we changed all the material imported from maya to this color okay the unread artist or the lighting artist can both your textures and your dm textures and everything will be okay let's talk now about how to transfer our camera so key focus so first of all we have uh the camera under this group okay we can delete this and make this this is our own our main camera right okay okay in production we always use uh multiple offset camera something uh like the camera node under group to offset and to add extra animation and we can make it under two groups okay to transfer this camera from outside this group we have to make some steps first of all we have to unlock distribute so now we can go to this camera to bake it we can click pick selection and now we have our camera animation under animated group so first of all come to the first frame and duplicate the camera and shift p to make it outside the group okay so second thing make this camera as a parent and select the another camera so let's call it camera baked select this and this and make parent constrain and now we have the two cameras moving with each other's line right and it took all the animation of the old camera and we can now bake it so now we have transferred our camera under animated group to the root of outliner in maya right so let's delete this constrain and we have our camera okay that's great so to transfer this camera that has uh keys and specific animation we should know that unreal also doesn't understand that the only camera or the only note camera doesn't understand this node doesn't understand this animation so it should be a child for also a joint so we talked about uh static mesh and it should be uh something like skin to joint but also the camera should has its own join in the hierarchy so how we can do this and how we can adjust the orientation okay so now in maya we have z and the depth right and x for the right and left movement or the band movement right okay for unreal the joint that we that will be parent for this camera should has its x replaced with the z so x and z so that's gonna be the x and that's gonna be the z so how can we do this right we have our joint view but our joint now has the same wrong orientation for the camera right and unreal won't understand this so how we can make it okay first of all let's press d and press g or j i'm sorry press d and j and rotate the orientations okay now it's rotated okay let's go now and modify and pick pivot and after that freeze transformation and now we have our orientation for this joint has been corrected right okay so let's take our camera and select our route and select parent and let's pick our animation on the joint okay act now let's delete this constraint now we have the correct orientation on the joint that we need the camera to be under it right android in the hierarchy so we will drag and drop this camera under the root and we will delete its animation okay we don't need any keys on the camera because the root already is moving and if we logged from this camera we now have our camera animation setup correctly so to ensure that we uh are ready to transfer our camera animation from is one real there is certain steps that we have to be sure that we did it all let's make sure that our camera have been baked and be outside here in the root that's the first step second step let's add joint as a parent for the our camera and let's edit its orientation to make the x is the facing axis for the camera the z axis is the pen access okay so now let's select our route and go to export selection fbx export and go to here and call it cam underscore version 001 okay how to import this camera animation in unreal let's come here in the sequencer and go to this icon and create camera let's call it cam enemies cool now we can go to import click select the the camera enemy school from the sequencer and click import and we choose our path and select the camera okay match by name false force front x-axis no because we did it before and maya right and create cameras no reduce keys no and import now we have our camera animation setup correctly now after we imported our camera animation from board and selected our camera okay we have now this flipped a little bit right something like fixed angle so how to fix it we can go to transform then rotation and draw we're gonna find i'm sorry not here in the camera keys we're gonna find that the rotation or roll is fixed number and it's wrong so we can easily go for all these keys and delete it and make row zero and let's fix our camera focal length something wider something like this right as the shot and maya so sometimes after we import our camera animation and adjust it we see our things like out focus so there is a manual uh focus distance that we can adjust also and now we have our camera animation with our animation with custom rigs from maya so uh this way can also work on with x-rays that's free online we can test something else now we will do our last test uh this rig is free from strong drags thank you trong for this amazing rig so we can make uh like very very fast animation right now and now we have our symbol animation i know this is piece of but i made it in just like two or three minutes so just to test our workflow and vfx tricks okay that's our maya animation let's transfer it into unreal with the same steps let's select our geometry and go to cache limbic cache export selection to alembic and ensure that the range is correct and uv right strip name spaces and word space and right visibility export selection and we can make it something like and now let's make new folder dragon and import the alembic file and of course we will select skeletal mesh as we talked about and now we imported our dragon let's drag and drop in the scene hide the floor sorry and select the dragon static mesh and press f okay that's our cool dragon okay now let's grab our sequencer okay and we drag and drop our dragon here we can start with frame one till frame 100 let's say here and we can stop here and drag animation dragon animation and now our strong dragon animation isn't in unreal and that's a great thing now we can transfer every vfx rig into unreal easily and efficient way thank you that was my tutorial for today i hope that i make something good and if you think about anything just comment me or private message and thank you bye bye

Channel: Loay Ahmed Maher

Views: 1,265

Keywords:

Id: x2ailjOAq90

Length: 32min 39sec (1959 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021