Metahuman Animator Part 2: Fixing detached floating head & rendering

hello and welcome back to the second part of the tutorial about to meet a human animator I'm going to open a new basic level in order to continue what we did in last session I'm going to save the current level [Music] as a new map called tutorial level part 2. and save then I'm opening a new window for quick service and get one of my metahumans upgraded at version 5.2 this is important I downloaded using the highest quality settings it's added in the project in The Meta humans folder here and open it to check if everything's all right seems it's okay next we'll add it to the stage if position is wrong correct its location at zero zero zero by default the pivot point of metahumans is located at their feet so I'm going to move it using alt while press middle Mouse button and in outliner right click character then pivot and set this new position as pivot offset it's a bit more comfortable to work with when the pivot is a bit higher for example here at this neck one more thing you can enable in Project settings experimental navigation in editor preferences check flight camera control experimental navigation it allows you to change camera speed on the Fly you can adjust camera speed quick or slow whether you're far or near your subject or character you're looking to work with now everything is okay we are going in our capture sequences to see if everything is alright meta human performances are saved here I've recorded a number 17 performance double click to open everything is processed correctly you can see a video footage on the left you can see 3D model live with breadboard and straight using the red line and yellow Square you can swipe left and right to compare your video footage and your 3D rendering and play with opacity moving clock or control clockwise to see if everything is consisted so I export it one more time I'm going to name it a s underscore Paul underscore MHP for meta human performance underscore to fix for example underscore head rotation just to remember this one has has rotation embeddy then check if head movement is embedded in the animation and the target skeleton will be the face archetype skeleton from the metahuman common face this one okay export processing now back in the main editor we are going to double check our animation all right we have head rotation indeed eyebrows nose cheeks everything looks pretty consistent so now we are going to create a new level sequence I've added the folder for level sequences I'm going to assume you know a little bit about legal sequences so here in metahumans Test 2 level sequences LS underscore for real sequence MHP and for example to fix save the sequencer opens now we are going to choose what we want to track in the sequencer here I'll meet a human body with a control wheel existing for the body and one more for the face there is no animation at the moment here on the face we are going to add our animation to interface track animation and our as gold MHP to fix head position here we go that on the first frame so let's move it here and put last frame here now the problem is here we have a conflict between the metahuman body and the lower part of the meta-human performance if you look at the body you have a large amount of points to be controlled and here under the face we have an animation track with a weight of one if you lower it at zero nothing happens let's pull it back to one and put it aside for a moment we are going to add the animation to our body so in the content browser let's go to add some animation here clicking on ADD button you can add features or content back we are going to get some elements from the shell person template add to project or review them for me and in our characters Mankins for ue4 or ue5 you get some animations Idol running Etc so let's get this one either issue inspected you get some head movement some shoulder movement okay we're going to retarget this animation to The Meta human in our retargeting let's go to retarget to make a human our source is SK many and we are going to retarget it to our body search for the blueprint animation of metahumans give it a name your comfortable with the prefix and the supex rt4 retarget and suffix your name or whatever okay and change your folder to move it to your animation in your working folder okay Henry Target here you can check if retargeting has been correctly done here is our idle animation right no issues all right so let's get back to our level sequence double click to open and then here we get moving here with the moving best let's try to fix it so I've deleted my body control read track and body track then animation I'm going to get my idle animation retargeted so here we go with rt underscore Etc and now everything still seems broken again at this point what is fix I'm going to move it it to zero explain it to have a loop a bit more the body is moving correctly but our head is still messed up what is it happening here in fact when you import a meta human you import the whole body when you do a performance capture we met a human animator you import only the upper body so you've got overlapping areas that are sending contradictory informations these are the paths we are going to fix let's get back to frame 0 and we are going to bake body information to emitter human control technical pause again when you do non-linear animation inside your software you store information of an object for example its start position and its end position and the software Twins or interpolates between the two positions using for example a linear exponential easing is out curve everything is processed inside the software when you decide to bake animation every position at every frame is stored and won't be able to be moved by cursors or parameters anymore so the objects keep track of position x y z and keeps it like burnt in at every frame end of technical pose what we are going to do here is baking our idle animation in order to assign it to a meta human controller here we go parameters seem okay let's bake it now we have two tracks of Animation power body no matter human control wig and the classic animation let's disable the classic animation to give only the control rig at this point normally you should have a whole range of keyframes sometimes they don't display correctly you can close unreal and open it again and things should be back to the normal back to unreal let's open our level sequence and keyframes all back now we are going to proceed to make the same rigging for the head so head to face and select bake to control rig and then choose face control board control V this one now you can see both tracks their regular animations and the baked one so choose the regular animations and and hit delete to erase it and now a baked track for the face and a bait track total body now we are going to look for the overlapping dots so let's look for head related lines search for head we got head control head ik control we got mha head ik control and mha head ik switch control for the face now we got globally the same ones and we are gonna get lines related to mha head so mha head I key control and mha head ik switch control we are going to select everything in mha head ik control everything here and copy it and paste it to the same line in body control Ray if it does not paste correctly at the wrong frame for example go to frame 0 things are still not correct at this point because you have to get your ik switch control keyframes all cleared and its values set at 0. this time we should be a bit better so let's grab the same line and keyframe it off and push to one and this time we are going to assume this value is right for the mha head I can switch for the body control rig let's try moving a little back and forth seems pretty consistent though everything is not perfect yet we are going to tweak some more elements our body is a bit inside the ground so we are going to need to offset it a bit in height so in our body in our body let's search for offset the offset values are Global we make clear keyframes again and we can tweak it globally for the whole animation range and especially in Z to have the shoe bottom just above the ground where offsetting is important is that the head position is a bit odd it moves the character as it is driven by the head ik so when you offset in X and Y you can see here in the side view let's trick it a bit in X and let's tweak it in a y so you see it corrects a bit the neck position which is a bit strange but things are working though a head is moving rotating and is correctly attached and is correctly attached to the body now time to render let's create a cinematic camera actor we are going to track the cine camera as a main cut and move it to find our character I remove the offset into search bar in order to see how camera back again okay here I go and in the camera let's change our Focus to tracking okay once more let's browse in the timeline to check it that everything is okay I'm not totally satisfied with the head position this neck so I tweak it a bit more and it seems sinks seem much better let's add it to the movie reduction and in the settings you may remove the jpeg export add a Genji sequence as an output where I'm going to add anti-aliasing override anti-aliasing let's go to five and five I had to correct my ntl using elsewhere because it wasn't properly set up at the project settings level anyway I tweak it put it to five and 5 and accept and go to render go rendering previewing straight bit and there we go final world this is not an official method for resorting Dish there are a bunch of elements in the meta human workflow there is a certain number of things in the meta human workflow that the meta human animator has more to do with an advanced beta than a final product anyway it is very very interesting and you can find at other YouTubers other solutions to solve this floating burst issue but none of them did work for me so I had to figure out how to fix the overlapping path between the upper body in the meta human read and the lower part of the metahuman capture performance results so it's still a fix not a definitive solution I hope epic will get things better in the future it remains a functional walkaround in your workflow and it may help you to process a complete body animation plus face performance for your next project so just

Channel: PiperadStudio

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Id: lNGTlWrpfqg

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023