Mixamo to Unreal Engine 4 - [UE4 Basics Ep. 4]

hello guys smartpoly here welcome back to episode 4 of the unreal engine complete beginner's guide in today's video we will be focusing on miximo a free library of character animations i will show you guys how to download the animations how to retarget them for any character that you have so let's go ahead and get started first of all go ahead and head over to miximo.com to log in you will either need to create an account for free you can use either an adobe account that you have um and if you don't have one you can create account or you can sign in using a google account facebook or apple alright so once you log in the layout here is quite simple what you're going to see here is the animations on the left side and you're going to see this default character right here in this viewport the navigation in the viewport ports really simple you just pan with the middle mouse button left click to rotate and that's pretty much all the controls you need to know so what miximo allows you to do is to take any character and rig it here in miximo you can also use some of the miximo characters so if you head over to the characters tab there are a bunch of different characters that you can use they are all free as you can see here we can click on one and you're going to see the character here you can also preview animations to that character by going to the animations tab and clicking on an animation you can see a preview on that character okay so really at the heart mix mo is an animation library we have hundreds of animations here motion capture ranging from running walking sprinting to even fighting animations and they have these uh various different packs here so we have a long bow locomotion pack sword and shield the main part that i want to focus on though is the fact that you can take any of these animations and use it for any sort of character you're using in unreal engine 4 you can essentially take an animation and retarget it or reuse it for the unreal sk mannequin which is the default third person character in unreal engine okay so let's go ahead and download some animations so you can go ahead and reset the character back to the default character so if you click over two characters here scroll down and go to the third page you're going to see this x-bot character so it's going to say proceed with this new character your previous character will not be saved you're gonna go ahead and click use this character and so now we can go back to the animations tab and you can see all the different animations and you can preview all of those with that character i'm just gonna go ahead and click on this crouch to stand and i'm gonna go ahead and download that you're gonna see here there's the download settings so you can get the fbx uh with scanner without skin that's just the mesh that it comes with you can just click with skin click download and then there's another animation we can probably get which is walking this uh simple walking animation as you can see the character is not walking in place so whenever you're using miximo animations where the character is moving you want to make sure that you click in place this is important if you're not doing any root motion animation with your character so just keep that in mind to click the in place so go ahead and click download fbx and download that then we're going to go ahead and open up unreal and i'll show you guys how to import the fbx files into unreal engine i'll go ahead and make a new project just a default third person project i'll go ahead and just name this miximo okay so the importing of these animations is pretty simple to import your animation you can just drag and drop it but first what i'm going to go ahead and do is just duplicate one of these so just right click and copy and paste that and i'm just going to name this uh mix mode base you'll see why i did this here in a second so we can go ahead and take the miximo base and drag and drop it into our content browser you're going to see this fbx import options pops up since this is the skeletal mesh we're going to import the skeletal mesh import mesh and then you scroll down here you want to make sure that you convert scene convert scene unit so this is going to convert the the units of the character to match up with the unreal units this is very important especially if you're going to be using the physics asset which i'll talk about later and um you can either create the materials or not doesn't really matter so go ahead and click import as you can see here we've imported the mesh we have a skeletal mesh right here the physics assets and the miximo skeleton okay so now we can go ahead and import our animations this walking animation and crouch to standing so if we select those and drag it into our folder here you're going to see the fbx import options pops up as well you want to uncheck the import mesh since these are animations and you want to make sure that you have the mixmo base skeleton that we just imported selected and that all looks good you can go ahead and just click import and then import all right so if we go ahead and click on this crouchsand you're gonna see that the animation here is playing and over here you can see the walking animation as well and real quick i'm just going to explain these three files right here the skeletal mesh the physics asset and the skeleton so if we open the skeletal mesh we can go ahead and dock this at the top so if you've never used the skeletal mesh editor this is the top toolbar right here you got yours higher simple buttons like save cloth paint for cloth physics and the asset details here you have the materials this holds the information for all the materials on your character then we have lods mesh and then the slot to change out the physics asset it's all pretty standard and then over here we have the skeleton tree so this just shows you all the bones in the skeleton for a character and then over here on the right we have the morph target preview so if you have more targets like if you're going to change the shape and size of the character's body then over here we have the preview scene so you can just preview an animation blueprint okay and at the top here you're gonna see skeleton animation physics basically that's if you were to click this uh skeleton or physics it's going to pop here as well this is just like if you want to click those files it's just going to switch the mode so just think of these as modes so if we go into skeleton right here you're going to see the skeleton on the left uh the details so you can click on a different bone see the details for that and a preview scene right there okay and this is a little viewport as well you can take your little mouse and zoom into your character here in this skeletal mesh editor you're going to be doing work here on your character especially if you're taking mixamo animations like this and if you want to take say this walking animation and use it here for your third person character mesh or perhaps you have another character model that you want to use the animation for like say if you're using a dazz character like you've seen on some of my other videos or if you've purchased a character off the marketplace okay so we have the skeleton which we just went over the mesh the animation the animation editor so here we have a little timeline we can add little notifies that we can bind events to blueprints on the left here we have just asset details okay so information about the animation skeleton tree as always and then on the bottom right here we have asset browser so you can click on different animations here and you have your little play buttons here you can watch the animation okay and then the physics asset so this is like if we're going to set up like a rag doll or something that's where you would go to modify the physics okay so very basic overview of the skeletal mesh editor let's go ahead and go over how to uh use the miximo animation here for our third person character which is using a method called retargeting some of you might be familiar if you watch some of my dad's studio to unreal tutorials but to take a miximo animation such as this walking animation and to retarget it for our character what you need to go ahead and do is go to the skeleton here at the top the retargeting manager it's going to pull up this little window right here where you can retarget the character skeleton so to do that you're going to go here to select rig click the drop down and click select humanoid rig and as you can see here it's going to load all of these little windows right here so we have root pelvis spine all that right there so you can go ahead and click auto map and this is going to try to automatically assign all the bones from the miximo skeleton to the source so as you can see here root hips pelvis it tries to do its best job but really you're going to have to adjust this manually what we're going to do is for the root we're going to set this to none for the pelvis we're going to set this to the hips for the spine01 we're going to do the spine and we're going to basically go through each and every single one and set this up properly the reason why i know which ones are which is because if you go into the skeletal mesh right here if you just search sk underscore mannequin over in the skeleton going to see the root pelvis spine that's where i'm getting this information from i'm just using that and changing the bones and the miximo skeleton accordingly and once you've done this once here for the miximo character you don't have to ever do it again so just keep that in mind now i do also have this cheat sheet right here which you guys can download and it just shows you all of the different bone mappings that you need to set as so the root to none pelvis to hips spines your one to spine it has that all figured out for you so i'll leave the download link for that in the description below once you're finished setting all those you also need to click the show advanced so this is all like the index fingers the ring fingers all that stuff you're gonna have to also match those all up but likewise i also have this miximo advanced mapping cheat sheet which shows all of the bones that you need to remap here for index to left hand index all those ones are all here set up here for you so you guys can go ahead and just download this cheat sheet uh pause the video and match every single one up and to get back to the base you just click show base or show advanced so i'm gonna go ahead and switch these all out for now so likewise just go ahead and pause the video while you do this all right so now that you have all those map so you have the base as well as the advanced all the fingers and again you guys can download those in the description below so once you have that mapped you can save that as actual file to use in your future projects you can't export the file out of the project but you can migrate it from project to project so just keep that in mind but you can go ahead and save that as is alright so now what we want to go ahead and do is make sure that you have your sk mannequin skeleton here open and your miximo bay skeleton heroes open as well so go ahead and pop this window out here make sure that this is the skeleton window and then for the mix mo skeleton you can pop that out here as well and we're just going to drag the engine here to the very back so you guys don't have to see that and then i'm just going to drag these windows size them up and then i'm going to click on the skeleton tree right here so again make sure that you're in the skeleton right here and to get this retargeting manager you just click on this retargeting manager to bring that up and what i'm going to go ahead and do is modify this skeleton so make sure you have the human humanoid rig selected here okay and then we can go over to the skeleton tree and we can start doing some work here so first going to take the upper arm l make sure that it's transforming this and rotating this to the world coordinates so we can go ahead and rotate this about 50 degrees like so that's the upper arm l then we're going to go to the the upper arm r and do the same rotate at 50 degrees okay and then up next we're going to rotate in the lower arms here so click lower arm r and rotate that about 25 degrees like so and then for the left lower arm l rotate that in 20 degrees so we are just very simply matching the same pose is our mixmo character so take the lower arm l and rotate it down about 10 degrees and same with the lower arm r take it down 10 degrees okay as for the hands and fingers we also have to work on that so we can go ahead and click on hand r and bring that up about 15 negative 15 degrees for the fingers we're going to go into perspective right and we're going to adjust each zero one here so click on index zero one rotate that up 20 degrees middle zero one row rotate it up probably about 15 degrees and then pinky zero one rotate that up about 10 degrees and ring zero one we can rotate that up about 15 degrees so really just trying to line them all up i like the miximo character it doesn't really have to be too perfect we can always go back and modify it later on okay so same thing here on the other side uh we'll go to the left hand start with that first and rotate that up about 15 degrees okay and then we'll start with the index zero one rotate that up about uh 20 degrees middle zero one 15 degrees pinky zero one uh 15 degrees or maybe 10 degrees ring zero one rotate up about 15 degrees and that should be all good okay next up we have to pull the thighs in a little bit so if you go to perspective right you can see here that the thighs need to be in more so we can go ahead and click here on thigh l make sure your snapping is to five degrees you take that end just a little bit five degrees and then the thigh are you just want to pull that in a little bit like so as for the feet we need to align that as well so click on at the very bottom here foot l we can rotate that 5 degrees foot r rotate that five degrees so that's flush with the ground so we can go back into perspective and make sure that looks all good all right and then go ahead and click save you want to go in the retargeting manager [Music] and click here modify pose i use current pose and then that is basically just save that it will save the post there so you can hide the post or you can view the post uh doesn't really matter so we can go ahead and close out of that and then over here we're going to go to the skeleton tree go to options show retargeting options you're going to go ahead and right click anywhere in here and click recursively set translation retargeting system okay and then we also want to hit the applied asset here very important you do this we can go ahead and save that and close out of there back in our project here we can go to our folder and now we can go ahead and and click on animation say walking you want to right click click retarget anim assets okay and then you're gonna see this uh retargeting manager here so it says select skeleton so we're gonna select the ue4 mannequin skeleton and we're going to change the output folder here we can go ahead and just put it in the mannequin folder here click ok and then we can go ahead and click retarget so now you can see it retargeted the animation we can go ahead and double click it and you can see our character here now it has the walking animation okay so it looks like we actually had a little bit of an issue here with the feet so you can see the legs or at least the thighs here are a little bit messed up so we need to go back and actually go ahead and fix that okay so all you need to go ahead and do to fix that is actually change the calf twists here i guess i had it wrong in my bone mapping sheet here but i'll update that so you guys won't have this issue if you guys are watching this right now you won't have this issue at all because i'll have this updated but basically i just didn't have the i guess the calf twist and the thigh twists were all messed up but i retargeted i deleted the old animation and just clicked on the walking and retargeted that again and i just did that real quick and as you can see here if i play this animation you can see that the legs are all fine and everything is working good okay so now that we've done that for that one you can go ahead and uh retarget the crouched stand so to do that you right click retarget and then click the ue4 mannequin skeleton change the folder location to the mannequin or whatever folder you want and then just click retarget so you can go ahead and preview it and as you can see here everything is looking fine so yeah that's pretty much it once you've retargeted and set up all the retargeting information for your character you can go ahead and use any miximo animation that you want so go ahead and just download whatever animations you want to use and in the next video i'm going to show you how to set it all up with a character how do you set up a blend space so that you can run around with your character in your game so that's pretty much it for this video hope you guys enjoyed the video and as always i'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Smart Poly

Views: 103,014

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Id: 92rag3qStI4

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020