Mixamo to UnrealEngine 5 with Full Body IK (IK Retargeter)

[Music] hello and welcome if you liked today's tutorial please like and subscribe it really helps today i want to expand upon my ik retargeting tutorials as the engine evolves so much my tutorials this first tutorial i will be exploring creating a mixamo ik rig in the new engine i want to start from the beginning today so we are going to create a new third-person project and then import our miximo character and animations so let's begin first we need to select our third person template give our project a name and directory hit create if this is your first time creating a project in the new unreal engine 5 it may take a while for your shaders to compile with the shaders now compiled it's time to do some housekeeping right click in the content drawer create a new folder and name this mixamo [Music] inside this folder create another folder and name this materials this will be useful later before we proceed any further i just want to show you [Music] the new mannequin inside characters mannequins and go to meshes and today we will be using skm coin which is one of the new mannequins inside unreal engine 5. unlike in my previous tutorials unreal engine 5 now comes with example rigs if we click on the characters mannequins rigs folder you'll see there's already an ik rig set up for mannequins but as we can see all the chains are already set up if this is your first time seeing it then in an ik rig you set up chains of bones which are then used for retargeting later also in this ik rig example is a full body ik although i will touch on this briefly with mixed mode characters is not absolutely essential here we are at mixamo.com i will assume at this point you have a mixemo account and you are logged in if you don't have a miximo account then please go and sign up and come back to the tutorial let's proceed here in miximo i today want to use this xbox character first we need to download and then import into unreal engine so hit download choose this t-pose [Music] [Music] and then click download [Music] back inside unreal engine 5 click in our miximo folder that we created earlier right click choose import to game miximo choose the fbx file we just downloaded in this case export fbx and this dialog box pops up in skeleton set to none scroll down select use to as reference pose scroll down and make sure import animations is unchecked hit import you can ignore this warning [Music] we now have our character before we proceed i want to rename it rename the character to [Music] mixamo rename the skeleton to miximo add scale or skeleton to the end we can leave the miximo physics asset for now we are not going to need it here we have our two materials select them both and drag them into the materials folder with our housekeeping complete we can now open up our miximo skeletal mesh come up here and click on our skeleton icon select this icon here click show retargeting options ensure that hips is set to animation and we can leave the rest for now hit save and close okay we can now move on to creating our ik rig we will do this before we import any animations so back in our miximo folder right click create a new folder and call this riggs click inside our rigs folder right click go to animation choose ik rig it will ask you to pick a skeletal mesh pick our miximo skeletal mesh name this miximo rig and then open it up here we are inside our miximo ik rig what we need to do is create chains of bones for retargeting where this tutorial now diverges from my previous tutorials is that i will be creating different names here for my chains that match the content examples which are now included inside unreal engine 5. if we find our rig for our ue4 mannequin for example [Music] this is already prepared for you with chains of bones and a full body ik this is very useful and if we name our bones or our chains of bone sorry the same as these it will make retargeting easier later so let's do that first on our mix mode hierarchy right click and set retarget route on the hips so now our re-target route is our hips in order to get root motion scroll down and find the vb root bone that we created right click and on this new retarget chain from selected bones name this root hit okay perfect we now have our root chain next i want to create our spine so select spine hold down shift select spine two and it will select all these three bones for you right click new retarget chain from selected bones and choose spine next i want to do our head so i select neck and head right click new retarget chain from selected bones and name this head click ok [Music] next click on our left shoulder right click create a new chain and call this [Music] left clavicle [Music] hit ok now i want to repeat that for the other side you can either click on the bone here or you can choose from the list find the right shoulder right click and create a new chain and call this right clavicle perfect now i want to move on to our arms either click in the editor window or from the list find left arm hold down shift and select left hand forgive me hold down shift and select left hand it will select these three bones as you can see highlighted here right click and create a chain and it's already named correctly for us left arm now repeat the process for the opposite side [Music] name this right arm [Music] now we need to do our fingers [Music] so from the list we'll first do our left hand go to left hand thumb select it hold down shift and click on left hand thumb 4 [Music] right click new retarget chain from selected bones name this left dom now we need to do our index finger click on left hand index 1 left and then hold down shift click left hand index 4 right click and so on until you have done all your fingers with our left hand fingers completed let's move on to our right hand fingers repeat the same process start on the right hand choose the first finger bones right hand pinky one in this case then select right hand pinky four right click and create a chain and so on and repeat the process for every finger [Music] great so now we have all our finger bones although it seems complicated and a very long task as i said you only need to do this once and you can transfer it from project to project next let's move on to our legs select our left upper leg bone [Music] hold down shift click left toe end right click and create a chain and name this left leg next let's choose our right leg either select over here or click on the bone and then we want to hold down shift and click on right toe end oops [Music] and create a chain and name this right leg [Music] and there we have it if you now select each chain it will show you highlighted in green that you have created it [Music] and so on and so on so that's our chains of bones now created next i am going to create a full body ik this step is not essential if all you want to do is take animations from mixamole.com and retarget them onto the mannequin inside unreal engine 5 so you can skip this part if that's all you want to do however this will future-proof your rig in case you want to use mixamo characters inside unreal engine 5 which i will be doing a tutorial on very shortly click add new solver click full body ik select our hips and set root bone on selected solver we now need to create ik goals go to our left hand right click new ik goal then find our right hand right click and create a goal then we need to find our foot and create a goal our right foot and create a goal great we now have a full body ik solver as you can see it needs some work so what we're going to do is add bone settings this is where this part gets very complicated and is not very beginner friendly so again if all you want to do is retarget animations from mixamo to the mannequin you can skip this step okay for the brave let's do some bone settings i want to add right click on our hips add settings to selected bone from this point forward you may have better results than me by experimenting i can only show you what i have learned so far and it may be wrong so please do please do experiment anyway let's proceed in our hip settings go to rotation stiffness and set this to one [Music] next move down to spine right click add settings to selected bones [Music] i found an easy way of finding these values is to just pull the characters slightly to one side and select our settings and then i will just simply adjust the rotational stiffness until i get the result i am looking for in this case it's around there so around 0.48 again you can play with these values and you may get better results than me next click on spine1 add settings click on the settings again go to rotational stiffness and just play with the values until you are happy in my case i found just straightening the spine works for me but you might find that something else works for you but for now i think in this case again [Music] around there 0.904 click on spine2 add settings to selected bones [Music] and in the rotational stiffness again just slightly adjust until you get the desired result i think around 0.4 sorry 0.848 it's good there fantastic i'm going to hit reset up there to reset the pose [Music] next i want to select our right right shoulder and add settings and i think for this a rotational stiffness one [Music] and that's it for that and then on the left shoulder add settings and do the same rotational stiffness to one fantastic i'm going to hit save in case we have a crash okay next i want to select our lower arm which will be this it's right forearm in our case add settings and here i just want to scroll all the way down used prefer angles checked and set to 90. and then i want to repeat that process for our left forearm add settings go to the settings scroll down use preferred angles and 90 degrees on the z-axis and hit save again just to be sure okay i think that's it for our upper body for now yep so next i want to go to our thigh bone on the right add settings to our right thigh or in this case it's named right upper leg for maximal characters select our settings scroll down check use preferred angles and set to minus 90. [Music] repeat the process for the opposite leg add the settings scroll down use preferred angles minus 90. next we need to do our shin or calf it's called right leg on this character add settings and for this i want to set scroll down use prefer our preferred angles and set this to 90 and then repeat the process for the left leg choose left leg add settings scroll down use preferred angles and set the z axis to 90. the final thing we must do is assign our ik goals here search for your left arm and set this to left hand goal choose your right arm set this to right hand goal find your left leg set this to left foot go go to right leg and choose right foot go and hit save once again this full body ik process is not essential for regular retargeting but i thought i would include it anyway now we have completed this process it took a while but we can move it from project project hit save and it's now time to move on to retargeting here we are back at miximo.com and it's time to download our first animation what we need to do is click up here at the top where it says animations and from here select an animation in my case i've chosen this particular animation here i double click on it and it has appeared in the window next hit download without skin fbx 30 and keyframe reduction none hit download and now that will download to your download folder and we now need to go back to unreal engine 5 [Music] back in unreal engine 5 let's import our new animation click inside our miximo folder right click and create a new folder and let's call this animations [Music] then click inside that folder right click and import and then we want to select the fbx file we just downloaded in my case catwalk turn 180 time open and this dialog pops up again this time in skeleton choose miximo skeleton [Music] scroll down make sure all the settings are correct hit import if you are importing more than one animation at once you would click import all that's it our animation has now been imported if we click on it here it is [Music] brilliant let's close that inside our rigs folder right click go to animation and choose ik retargeter from here it will ask you to pick an ik rig to copy animation from in our case we want to choose miximo rig name this miximo retarget [Music] open up our mixmo retargeter and from this window at least in this version of unreal engine 5 in newer versions this may look slightly different but we choose our target ik rig asset in this case we want to choose the new ik mannequin and here is the new ik rig inside unreal engine 5. and here is the new mannequin inside unreal engine 5. from the target preview mesh however i want to choose skm quinn if for some reason your chains haven't auto mapped you can click here to auto map the chains [Music] we are going to experience issues because the new mannequin ik rig has many chains of bones so what we need to do to fix this is go to every single twist metacarpal [Music] and ik bone and set them all to none [Music] [Music] once this is complete go through the chains of bones and double check that they all match in my case i believe they do next we need to adjust this pose so it matches our miximo character if you're watching this in the future future versions of the hen engine have a slightly different layout to this ik retargeter but there will be a way or a button somewhere that you can click and it will say edit post let's create a new pose i want to call this one quinn [Music] hit okay edit pose again now i want to scroll down again this may be different on your version of the engine but there will be a bone draw size somewhere and scale that and to your liking also i want to move the target actor offset to move these further apart on this version of the engine it's here but on your version it may be somewhere else and now we need to adjust this pose to match this one and we do that by clicking on a bone and simply moving it if you need to move in smaller degrees come up here and for example you can set five degrees like so anyway let's proceed [Music] i'm happy with that it's as close as we're going to get i believe [Music] okay before we move on to any retargeting come to our root chain [Music] and from the details panel in translation mode under fk adjustments choose globally scaled now hit save and we are ready to retarget the problem we have with a miximo character is it has no root bone so in some cases the virtual bone method i showed you will work but in cases where it doesn't what we can do is go to our miximo ik rig and instead set in our root chain the start bone to hips and end bone to hips this will not work in every circumstance so alternate between the two to see what works best for you so now here is our animation if i double click on it we should have a retargeted animation and this one is pretty close sometimes retargeting may not be perfect it is here that the full body ik is incredibly useful and why the new system is better than the old one if we choose this sitting and laughing animation for example and we take a look at this arm in fact both arms are doing it but we will just concentrate on this left arm for the sake of the tutorial we can come to the we come to our chain mapping we select our left arm and we can make adjustments to our ik via ik adjustments such as blend to source or we can move the static offset [Music] in this case i'm going to try extension and just slightly adjust like so just to lift off the leg i may even come to static offset and just move that move [Music] nope it's not making much difference but i would spend time normally adjusting these values to get the desired result so go away and experiment and you will probably be better than this than i hopefully by the time of this tutorial there will be documentation that will explain all of this in detail let's move on to actually exporting our animation we'll go back to our catwalk animation and with it selected we can hit export selected animations this dialog pops up and it will ask you where you want to export the animations too in our case it'll be our characters mannequin animations and it's quin that we're using at the moment so we okay and so now if we open our new animation here we have our miximo animation retargeted to quinn if you liked today's tutorial please like and subscribe it really does help more tutorials are on the way so for today that is all goodbye for now you

Channel: Jobutsu

Views: 37,109

Keywords: 4k, asmr, world, motivational, unreal engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 4, ue5, ue4, lumen, daz studio, daz-studio, daz3d, animation, tutorial, blender, davinci resolve, IK Retargeter, IK Retargeting, retarget manger, animation retargeting, how to, retargeting manager removed, new way to retarget, MetaHumans, MetaHuman, unrealengine5 preview 1, IKRetargeter, IKRig, ThirdPersonAnimBP., Facial control board, Face rig, unrealengine5 preview 2, Mixamo, Mixamo retargeting, Mixamo to unreal

Id: JXBGw-6PpCE

Length: 32min 43sec (1963 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022