My Blender To Unreal Engine Character Workflow | Tutorial

welcome to a bit of a special video a lot of you have been asking you about my workflow between blender and unreal and so I thought today we're gonna take a more detailed look of my workflow between blender - unreal including how I bring my assets orbit unreal we're having the correct scale and everything making sure that the rigs work okay how I import my animations as a little bonus I'm also gonna show you how you can use the animations that come with the Unreal Engine mannequin or any animation on the asset store and apply them to your own character using animation retargeting and one more thing before you skip ahead I highly recommend that you take a moment sit down and watch this video I promise you won't regret it see exporting stuff from blender to unreal is a little bit like stepping across an active minefield if you miss one step you might really screw the whole thing up and it might cost you a lot of hours so just you know so let's get going I'll assume that you know a bit of blender because I'm not gonna go too deep into how things work but if you're unsure of anything there are tons of tutorials out there that can help you through I might suggest a few as well okay so we're in blender I have my character here he's fully rigged and ready to go I'm gonna take you through how I now export this character into unreal and get everything to work so the first thing you want to do and make sure is that you have the scale set up correctly so and this is a bit of a tricky part you want to go over to here and check your units so by default it's gonna look like this so what you need to do is you need to make sure that your unit scale is at the 0.01 okay and the reason for that is the default units in blender are meters and the units and unreal or centimeters so there's a conversion problem there it would make sense to set this to centimeters and just set the scale to one right and I've seen a lot of people who actually do that in use that method however things will appear to be fine but you will quickly notice after you do some digging that some problem Solarize and a bit later I'll show you exactly what I mean but for now let's just set things up correctly so you want to set the length two meters and keep your unit scale to 0.01 to account for that conversion all right the next thing that I like to do especially for this character because he's so simple is that I set up some materials inside of blender we're gonna go to object mode I'm gonna select our boxer go down to materials and so I already have materials set up but basically if you want to make a new material just make new leave it as it is by default and choose a base color of your liking and make it blue it doesn't really matter unfortunately the material is not actually going to transfer very well into unreal so you might be wondering why are we even bothering it with this well it'll all make sense in a moment so just stay with me the important thing is that you just choose a color and you can call it base for example so I'm gonna be using I'm just gonna choose my own materials that I already have but they're just basically a material with a color so we'll go with base you can see here I'm sure we're rendering this okay and we're gonna add another color which will be the glove color which is a red it's the same kind of material it's just bread instead so now I want to assign this material to a glove so the way to do that is to switch over to edit mode so you can just select one polygon and click ctrl L and that will select the entire mesh you can see that it's actually disconnected from the rest of the body so we want to do that on the integral of select polygons on one on each piece for the glove here for example hit ctrl L and now have these selected what I want to do now is hit the gloves material and hit assign and now I've assigned this material to our gloves okay great that's it so so I'm not gonna mess around with the actual materials I just want to put a different color on each thing so that I can quickly distinguish between them alright so that's it for materials so one more thing before we can actually export this thing okay so the thing with unreal is that you can create your rig however you want you can have however many bones you want you can call them whatever you want and then when you import them into unreal it'll become an its own asset and any animation you make for that skeleton will be fully compatible however if you want to use the animations that come with unreal you have to be a little bit more careful and I highly recommend that you use the same amount of bones and that you have the same naming it'll make everything so much easier you'll see so that's what I've done for this character so for example you can see the names of my bones here Elvis fine ones point two and I've kept them the same as unreal and if you don't know how to check that is pretty simple so here I've just created a scene for us it's based on the third person it's based on the third person preset and if you go in here in the mannequin and the character and mesh double click the mannequin skeleton you can now go into the skeleton tree and you can see all the bones so you can use it as a reference when you're setting up your own rig and I would highly recommend that you name it the same as you see here because it'll make things later so much easier and to be clear if you for example don't have fingers you don't have to include that just build from the base up and include what you need but don't skip one part in the chain so for example don't skip spine two and just jump directly to spine 3 that's not gonna work so that's the write down here you can see pelvis spine spine - one thing that's a little confusing though is that in unreal you'll have something at the very top here called root so you may be wondering oh should I create a bone called root no you shouldn't when you create your rig in blender the top piece will be called armature all you got to do is just rename that to root like that and that's it you don't need to do anything else so you don't need to actually create a bone for that so that's that and and all you have to do that don't export with it named armature it'll screw everything up so yeah it's a little weird but just go with it alright okay so our character is now ready to be exported into unreal and you definitely want to check your scale as well so what I like to do is just grab this measuring tape here drag it from top to bottom okay 1.8 meters yeah that that's definitely realistic alright so the next step is to now export this character over into unreal the first thing that I like to do you can see I have some lights here and I've sorted everything into different collections so I have my main character here in this so I'm just gonna do select objects and hit file export FBX I'm just gonna call this boxer tutorial alright so now we're gonna go over the export settings so the settings that I use is that I basically des elect anything other than the other mesh in armature all right that's all we need we don't need lights we don't need cameras I also like to take selected object because I don't want to export those lights and that's why we also selected our character so that that's the only thing we'll be exporting can leave that as it is under geometry if you've ever exported something from blender to unreal before you might have countered this error to get rid of that you want to make sure under geometry to set smoothing to face that will just remove that problem altogether the rest you can leave as it is so under armature what I like to do is I just remove the leaf bones those aren't required and I choose to only include deform bones what that will do is it'll just delete any I K controls or anything that you have in blender that you use for animation and it'll only include things that actually help drive the animation of the character and that's great because it'll get rid of a lot of load for us so I like to keep that ticked the rest you can leave as it is and then under animation obviously this is not gonna include animation so I'm just gonna uncheck that and we're ready to export so Bo export that done okay so over and unreal I'm gonna create a new folder boxer and I'm just gonna drag it right in here and here's the magical part there's a lot of buttons here don't need to touch any of them perfect all you can do is hit import but I'm just gonna go over one thing so you can assign a skeleton here you don't want to do that sin so if you leave this blank it'll just generate its own skeleton and since I'm using a custom rig that I built myself I definitely want unreal to do that so I'm just gonna leave it just as it is I'm not gonna touch anything reset to default I'm gonna just hit import give it a while okay so we've got five files here so to start off obviously the materials don't look the same if you look here this is really glossy and in unreal it's not the specular component and all that stuff it won't carry through unfortunately however the reason we set up the materials in blender the way we did is because now you have these material slots see you have the one for the body and you have the one for the gloves and you can now replace the materials you see here with your own materials for example I can grab this which obviously doesn't work at all but you get the idea now you can create your own materials inside unreal and you can assign them to the gloves and the body even though it's part of the same object right so you wouldn't have been able to do that otherwise I think that's really handy I like to work that way so that's the materials part and now for the rig part and you can see now that our character is in here the scale is correct and no problem okay so to roll back to what I was mentioning earlier about scale let me now show you what happens if you don't set it up the way we did okay so I've seen a few other people do it this way where you basically have the unit system be metric unit skill set to one but you change the length meters which would now make it the same unit a sand real and this makes perfect sense and I would love for it to work this way okay so I'm just gonna export it like this instead all right we're gonna throw that in there boom now this is gonna be a little tricky because okay you'll see now how this is this is it took me a while so if I just take this and just drag it in you'll see that it seems like they're the same they're the same scale they look the same good to go right ha well so I want you to look at our correct boxer so we're gonna open up the asset we're gonna move over to our physics asset alright and you'll see that Unreal has set up these automatic bodies for our character okay if you've seen my latest dev vlog you've seen me playing around with this now let me move over to the one with the incorrect scale and now you'll notice that it looks a little bit different okay you can see that the head is really large and there's only one body for the entire arm the hand isn't even included and the same for the legs we have way fewer physics bodies here now why is that well I was confused as well in our correct one we have bodies set up for each bone everything is looking correct and it's all good but here we don't what I figured out is that while it looks to be correct when you import into unreal the scale it is actually reading it wrong somehow and I don't know how maybe it's a bug but it it it reads it wrong somehow and that's why it's doing this because when it generates this physics asset it has a threshold for scale so if a bone is too small it won't generate a physical collider for it and that's what's happening here it is reading everything to be tiny tiny tiny tiny small and I don't know what else there might be there might be other problems as well that I haven't found yet so I would so sorry that's a bit of a tangent I just wanted to mention that because this is something that cost me a lot of headache so I thought that would hopefully be valuable to some of you alright moving on okay next up let's move over to animations so I've set my scale back to the correct values and remember once you start animating you cannot start touching with the scales anymore because you won't be able to change it after that so make sure that everything is set up correctly before you start animating okay so before I animate I like to set up my workspace like this I'll set that to dopesheet and choose action editor just make it a little bigger split this out and set this to nonlinear animation okay so you will understand how the action editor and the NLA works a little bit for this to work like if you just follow along and you've never used them before this will be a little confusing so just warning you if you want to learn more about them I'll put some links in the description that were really helpful for me when I was learning if you watch my dev vlogs you know I was struggling with this a lot so but yeah okay let's get going we're gonna make a couple of simple animations we want to make two animations so that you can see that they're all coming through fine in one file and everything so we'll just start with a little wave animation always nice okay so the first thing that I do is I create a new action and I call it what I want it to be wait cool I'm gonna make sure to click the fake user button here the little shield and now I can start animating so move over to pose mode and set up the pose maybe move the arm up a little make it more interesting as you can tell I'm a professional animator no problem insert a keyframe bow move forward 20 frames maybe yeah keyframe that and here we go hello okay now I want to bring this into the NLA strip boom and now there it is so now I want to name this track wave now if this is confusing again you can have to watch it tutorial on this because it is really confusing I am fully aware but just stay with me here let's just ignore this for now if you don't know what I mean now I want to create another animation it's gonna be a little bonk we want to like bonk him on the head a little bit I'm just gonna click new call it bonk and point point point right all right okay same thing bring it into the NLA name it bonk and now you see we have these two tracks here it's pretty neat so if I highlight the bonk you will see that that's what's playing point point and then if I highlight wave you'll see that it's the wave okay and that's it now we're ready to export unreal easy huh however again minefield here's another little mind for you now we think we're all good we're just going to export our animations and so let's move ahead and do that so you're gonna have to change a few settings obviously now we want to actually export the animations and we didn't do that before so the way you do that is to just simply click take animations down here alright and what I like to do is I untape the all actions so now we're only gonna be exporting the NLA strips otherwise you would get duplicates of each animation so anything else you can leave as they are okay so a couple of things you got to do now before you import now we do want the animations right so you got to click import animations however the skeleton at this time we do actually want to select the skeleton because if we don't select the skeleton here it'll generate a new one we don't want to do that we want to use the same skeleton that we generated when we imported the box of the first time this will tell unreal that these animations are specifically for the same skeleton that our boxer is using so very important here to select your box or Delton or whatever your skeleton is now you can hit import right and so you'll notice that we have all the same stuff as before obviously because we exported that but you also have two new files and these are our two animations but now you're gonna be like whoa what the because if we double click here you see we have the way and it's all looking fine well it looks like something it looks like what we did at least however if you now look at this one which is the bunk one you notice that that doesn't do anything why why is that yeah I was wondering that too believe you me okay so I'm gonna show you exactly and this took me hours to figure out it's like I'm telling you hours okay so you're I'm saving you so much time now I'm just gonna delete all these because we're gonna start over and I'm gonna explain why this happened okay you noticed how I had this star selected right I had wave selected that means that it only exports that animation I don't know why because it still exports the other ones they just leave them in the in the a post so what you have to do here is you have to click again on the star to unpick it and now now it'll export all the animations so if you had had bunk selected it would have exported bomb correctly but not wait so make sure to uncheck that now you're fine okay yes great feature I do agree all right okay same thing select the skeleton import animations import and boom and there you go here it is we've got the bonk animation and you've got your wave which is now compatible with your boxer what I do now is I just delete these things that I don't need and in there I am now I'm left with the animations so now I can for example click this use animation asset select one maybe the bomb and now you can see that he's bunking awesome so yeah that's pretty much my workflow that's how I've been working up until now in the boxing game and it's been working great so far and as I promised as a little bonus I'll also show you how you can now take the animations you see on the mannequin and apply them to this character and that's a little bit of a tricky part so super bonus for you you're gonna have to do something that is known as animation retargeting and that's what we're gonna talk about next a few steps involved it's not too complicated once you know how to do it but it can definitely cause a bit of headache if you're a little new so step number one is to set up our mannequin for retargeting so basically what retargeting means is that you're taking in a man animation that is designed for a completely different rig and you're converting it to be compatible with a custom ring or any two rigs for that matter they do need to share similarities though otherwise it's gonna be all okay mannequin so so what you want to start by doing is for example if you wanted to use the animations from your mannequin you're gonna have to go into the break of the mannequin so you click the mannequin character mesh and you have the mannequin skeleton let's open that up so on the left here you'll see you have a retarget manager you want to open that up but you want to do now is you want to click the select humanoid rig bow and because this is set up to be a humanoid it's already good to go like these these name conventions are good so if this is confusing don't worry just click Save and now you can close this that's it that's all you got to do for the mannequin now you want to go into your boxer boxer and open up the skeleton now you're gonna do the same thing here you select humanoid ray now because I used the same naming convention as the rig for Unreal Engine and the same amount of bones and everything this just works now you can see but if you didn't do that you can go in here manually and you can select what the pelvis is you select the pelvis and you select the the spine etc so you can go and select them manually but because I kept the naming convention the same it's now populated it automatically and it's all good to go which is super nice and that's why I chose to do that so what you need to do now is just simply save it and now they will be compatible almost but we'll get to that and don't forget to save you have to save this otherwise it won't work so now you want to browse to the animation that you would like to retarget going to your mannequin animations let's say we wanted to apply this animation to our boxer right click on that animation retarget and an asset duplicate atom assets and retargeting and now you'll see that the skeleton shows up here if it doesn't it means there is a difference in the skeleton and then you need to go back to that list and just make sure that you've selected each bone for corresponding to each thing there might be one missing there and if that's the case this won't work but if you've done it correctly it should show up here so I'm gonna click that and I'm gonna hit retarget and that's it okay now you may notice that there are a couple of things here the head is on the ground and the gloves and arms are a little strange okay but it kind of does what it's supposed to do though okay so what you need to do is you need to go into your boxer and move over to skeleton tree here and in the options you want to go over to show retargeting options so currently the route is going to be set to recursively set translation retargeting animation which is not really gonna work the thing is that now it's just taking the straight animations from the mannequin and applying them straight up to the boxer why the head is on the floor I don't actually know it's pretty dumb but the issue with the arm is because the the scale and everything is wrong so what you need to do is you need to set this to recursively set translation with targeting skeleton bone and then you want to take this skeleton and set it to animation scaled okay save that now let's move back to our animation great looking lovely okay so now everything is in place so that fixed that issue so everything is looking nice but you may notice one thing and that's that the hands are a little a little tight right the reason why that is is because if we now look at if we bring up our mannequin and if I not compare this to my boxer you see that the arms of the mannequin are a little higher than our boxer character so we can fix that by going to our boxer going to the retargeting er we now want to match the rest pose of our boxer to our mannequin to make it translate better between animations so I'm gonna select the arm and just rotate it up by maybe 10 degrees should do the trick you also notice that his elbows are slightly bent so I'm gonna do that as well and by maybe 20 degrees cool next up is to click here and modify posts use current posts if you click that now it's stored that as a new rest post when retargeting so you can see you can hide the post and you will be back to normal so it's not destructive but we can view the post and that's what it is so let's save that and you will have to regenerate the animation now though so when I go back and delete the one we have and again right-click retarget duplicate select our thing yeah okay so see this is where you can compare the different the the to rest poses and now you can see that this one lines up pretty well with that one so let's hit retarget and play that and yeah I mean obviously it's still intersecting a little bit because his hands are so big but you can clearly see how it's looking way better now you can see his elbows are a bit more bent and it's matching up a lot better we could even bring the arms out a little bit more if you wanted to get rid of that intersection when doing the rest pose but yeah that's how you retargeting a missions and you can now see you can go into animations and you can maybe do the idle we target that as well just same thing we target boom and now we have Idol and yeah you have an idle animation and the and the good thing with this is that [Music] anyways this is basically my entire workflow hopefully this is helpful to you I know a lot of you were asking about it so I hope I didn't leave anything out that you were wondering about if you're new if this is the first video you're watching consider subscribing Li do dev vlog videos which I put a lot of time and love into and you might want to check those out if you're into that if not yeah this is how you export stuff from blender turn on real well that's it for me thank you for watching subscribe like hit the bell everything you know what to do and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Pontypants

Views: 194,300

Keywords: Unreal Engine Tutorial, Blender To Unreal, Workflow, Tutorial, Blender To Unreal Rig, Rig, Character, Animation, Animation Retargeting, Blender To Unreal Engine, Blender, Unreal Engine, Blender Export, Blender Scale, Unreal Engine Scale, Pipeline, Export 3d model, Export Rig, Unreal Engine Import, Unreal Engine Character, Unreal Engine Export, How To, Guide, Export, Exporting

Id: nY4Q8cYBLP8

Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Pontypants]

Thanks for sharing 😊

[u/SmilingRob]

By /u/pontypants This really helped me, especially the scale tweaks, and the star in Blender NLE

[u/raganvald]

Very nice its very similar to the workflow I have used for unity. I appreciate the video i have been thinking about trying ue4. I have never used the nla sheet in unity you can just import the actions. That star thing is rediculus thanks for sharing.