Mixamo and Metahumans in Sequencer

hello and welcome today a basic requested tutorial using miximo animations inside a sequence with your metahuman so here is my basic scene and it is the downtown pack from the epic market place it was free for a month i think and that's why i ended up with it and although this is a mixed amount of metahuman tutorial my metahuman is actually from the city sample crowd pack and this again can be downloaded from the epic marketplace for free it's quite large but it's worth a play and so what i'm going to first do is drag in from blueprints bp crowd character like so make sure he's stood correctly on the ground i think there we go there's our guy and i think i'm actually going to change this character so with this is why i've chosen the city sample crowd metahuman because we can come down here look to character options and i can set to female which i'll do it may take a while the first time here she is and then i think i'll go for head index one skin texture index to one and hair index to two yep okay hair color index to one or two oh it's not changing oh well outfit index let me try three hmm yeah that's fine there we go so this is what we have okay and do we have anything for eyes just one moment i eyebrow index no okay all right fair enough there we go right next i want to come up to open level blueprint up here like so and drag off of event begin play type cine and set cinematic mode and you will get this note and where it says cinematic mode make sure that box is checked hit compile and save after all this is a cinematic tutorial it is not a game tutorial next i want to come up to perspective and i want to choose cinematic viewport there we go and i already have a camera it's just a modified version of the one that actually came with this pack so this pack actually comes with cameras set up around the town in various places and i've just modified one of those so i called it uh tuck cam maybe there is tuck cam and so if i come to placed cameras find my topcam this is the shot i'm working with currently what i actually want to do is just move my metahuman there we go and i just want to move her into focus by making a go over there like so yep i'm happy with that next i want to create a sequence so i'm going to go to here add level sequence and i'm going to place this in cinematics and i will call this tutorial shot one save and i'm going to set my frames per second to 24. you can choose whatever you like and then i'm going to hit save and now i want to find my cam there it is drag that in to my sequencer i immediately want to create keyframes while we're at zero and click one two and three so i've done current aperture focal length um transformer manual focus distance this is just so we can have control if we need it next i think we're going to need around 500 frames so i'm going to type 500 there and then i'm going to get this camera cut and i'm simply going to drag all the way to the end of the sequence like so then i'm going to save the sequence again i am going to do a save all because i've had a couple of crashes while trying to put together this tutorial and next obviously we're going to need to drag our metahuman in so let's find our metahuman bp there is bp crowd character and i would drag that in to the sequencer like so and what it will immediately do is add a body control rig and a facial control rig and this here skeletal mesh component one and another metahuman control rig i'm going to try and delete [Music] these control rigs so i'm going to delete those and i will delete that too and yep so hopefully inside this character we're going to be able to animate the body and this skeletal mesh component will move along with it um if so what i'm going to do is delete the skeletal musculum component i may have to add that back later i've never animated one of these characters before so i'm just winging it at the minute right so now we've got body and face and there's an animation track here as well i'm going to delete that so body bass right obviously now i need some animations content where's my miximo folder and here are my mixamo animations that i've downloaded i have a drunk walk and a female walk [Music] and a hit to side of body like falling over okay so what i want to do is make this character walk and then stumble over i'm going to need these animations to be retargeted to my metahuman first now i already have a tutorial for taking miximo animations and retargeting them onto a metahuman so i'm not going to repeat that process what i have already is an ik rig for my metahuman and a retargeter like so and in my retargeter i already have my metahuman setup so what i will need to do now is retarget my animations so i will do that and fantastic we should now have retargeted animations brilliant and a female walk and then a hit to the side perfect i think the first thing i'm going to do is just correct a mistake i i haven't got much experience with this bp crowd character so what i'm going to do is delete body and for now face click track again and add this skeletal mesh component 0 because i believe that's the root skeletal mesh that all the other animations follow so then i'm going to on on a normal metahuman this would be body or whatever it's named inside the blueprint basically the root skeletal mesh that all the animation is applied to and so then i can hit track and i'm going to search for female walk there we are and now here we have our female it is a walk in place animation so i'm going to come down here to this transform track if it doesn't exist for some reason click here track and choose transform it does in this case so i'm going to set a base keyframe on zero go to the end of the walk animation and then i'm going to move it on the y axis i think uh maybe like so so let me see what we have now i think this is going to be slightly off the screen so let me just delete those keyframes and go back and i'm actually going to move this backwards like this so now our character is back here it just gives her enough room to walk forward that's what i'm doing maybe even slightly further there we go then again i want to create a keyframe by clicking on the transform subtract like so and come to the end of the animation and again move it forward probably to about here it may end up being too far that but let's have a look [Music] right okay so it could be too far what i'm going to do is select all of those and choose linear yep it's so it's it's slightly too far so what i'm going to do is jump to this keyframe here by clicking here and then i'm going to just come backwards a little like so now let me try again it's a little bit better it still looks like she's floating a little yeah i'm reasonably happy with that i can always tweak it in a while right come back to animation track and go to the end of after this walk sorry and then i'm going to add an animation now because of the position of the character i don't think that three animations is gonna work anymore so i'm just gonna have a rather than good do a drunk walk after the walk she's just going to fall over so let me find the there is hit to side of body and let's just play that see what happens i can already see that that's quite fast that animation so i'm going to select the animation right click go to properties find play rate and i'm going to set that to 0.7 like so so now that should be slightly slower yep i'm more happy with that and then i'm going to come back to this walkout animation i'm going to drag my new animation into the walk animation like so and it's going to be difficult to see on youtube but if you take a look in your editor it blends them together like so hopefully we won't need to do any bone matching but if we do need to do that you can right click and match with with this bone in previous clip and for example i might use pelvis let me just see what that looks like there we go there we go so what i want to do is before she starts tripping maybe there so right there let's bring in some sort of asset that she can trip over uh let me just find one i saw i reckon just uh a small rock of some sort or maybe even a branch he's probably gonna be too large though so yeah how about a small stone so i'll just download that and import it into the engine okay and export to the engine here right you can close bridge now and i'm just going to take my stone and drag it into the scene no idea how large this or small this is going to be let me drag that up and just place it in front of our foot like [Music] so yep i think that's gonna be fine so then i hit play oh and there she goes once again obviously this is not pixar quality animation but this is just a basic tutorial so you can do these things yourself what i'm going to do is come to my camera and what we're going to do is scroll along until she falls to about there and once she starts falling i'm going to set another transform keyframe as my base then i'm going to scroll along and by there i want the camera to actually be looking uh a face so let's go to locate location and rotation and i'm going to pitch slightly and maybe move forward like so her hair seems to have disappeared but that's because the lord settings but that's beyond the scope of this day and then i want to focus onto that um yeah i wanted to go back here to where right where she was just falling and i just want to set a manual focus distance keyframe as well so now when we hit play okay [Music] there we go so i just had a crash there and i did lose quite a lot of work but you know this is working with unreal engine 5 so what i have is that's it that's it for this particular sequence as i said the hair is disappearing but that's beyond the scope of this tutorial what i want to actually do though is come to my uh tutorial cam and here where is his digital film i just i just it's just for my ocd i need a wider shot so this is what we're choosing like so okay again it's not amazing but it emphasizes uh what what you can do you can be creative and mix your miximo animations next up the second question i've been asked quite a lot is how do you take a miximo animation put it onto a metahuman and then add facial animation as well from something like faceware me famo etc so i'll do that now okay so i'm going to create another sequencer and we'll call this base and body shot one quite long but there we go i'm going to set my frames per second to 24 again and i'm going to add my camera like so and set all my keyframes for the camera [Music] this time though i want to actually go and zoom in like so and then set my focus distance there you go this character already has facial animation but we're going to replace that in a moment right uh hit save i'm going to save all again right next we need our character in the sequencer like so and hit save again just to be sure and i'm going to delete these again but a let's just get rid of everything for now except skeletal mesh component get rid of anything that is a control rig so all i'm left with is the character blueprint and this skeletal mesh component zero again on your metahuman this is probably going to be called body add a track and i want an idle animation and so if i hit play it's just an idle animation look for the body okay now because of the type of character i'm using uh this crowd character there is if you look this constant random facial animation so we technically we don't need to do anything at all to this but but i am going to add a face track and from here i'm going to choose animation and let's do crowd angry which is so so if you'd recorded something from faceware studio or me famo or wherever you get your facial animation from you would have an animation basically recorded for your metahuman i'm going to choose this crowd angry that comes with with the city crowd pack there we go and as you can see it's created an animation track so there we go so there's an idle animation and she's angry like so we can of course change that uh let's do a reaction facial animation there we go and at the end end here we could possibly do something else let's try um happy and what i can you can do is actually just drag that over the top of the other facial animation like so so it blends again like so and there you go and she ends happy [Music] what i want to do is find a miximo animation to show you that you can do this with the miximo animation so let's open up my mixer and make some animations these are all the animations that i have downloaded from mixamo um how about this okay so let me right click on that and i'm going to retarget using the retargeter again go back to the previous tutorial so rtg mixer mo in this case and i'm going to change where it's going in my case metamu humans animation and retarget and we should now have a meta human animation look we're good the fingers look a bit off but uh that could be a problem with the retargeter because of the crash it didn't save or something so don't worry about that right so for the skeletal muscle component animation track again i'm going to add that so it was idle wasn't it idle retargeted yes yep that's the one as you can see the fingers are messed up but just i try try and ignore that [Music] there we go and there you go so you have your miximo animation and with this obviously with mix of our animation you can loop it to the end like so a little loop and there you go mixamo animation mixed with metahuman facial expressions [Music] i hope you found this tutorial helpful if you did please like and subscribe it really does help uh more tutorials on the way i'm in the middle of a big project so it slowed me down with the tutorials but i will be catching up with them all soon so stay subscribed keep liking and i will be back shortly thanks for watching you

Channel: Jobutsu

Views: 17,327

Keywords: UnrealEngine, Character Creator, Actorcore, Iclone, Daz Studio, Metahuman, Mixamo, Quixel, retargeting, Blender, Unreal Engine, UE, tutorial, howto, how to

Id: GwWR5QHXtlY

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022