Hello guys, welcome back to another video. In this video, we will be checking out
the new Unreal Engine retargeting system that is coming out in Unreal Engine 5. 4. Basically, they've added native
support for the most common industry standard skeleton types. So we have things like Mixamo,
MotionBuilder, Xsense, MoveAI, Daz3D, CharacterCreator, and MetaHuman. And so in this video, I want to
show you guys just how simple it is. To now retarget any animation for any type
of character inside of Unreal Engine 5. 4. With this new retargeting system in 5. 4, it will take you less than 5 minutes
to copy any animation to any other character mesh that you want, so long
as it is a supported skeleton type. Whereas in the previous versions, to
retarget animations, you had to use this very complex, uh, IK retargeter, which
was a really good tool, but it was just complete overkill when you just wanted
to very quickly get some animations retargeted for your custom character. Now before we dive into the video,
check out my courses on smartpoly. teachable. com. If you are interested in making games
inside of Unreal Engine, luckily for you, I have a complete multiplayer
survival game course, which shows you step by step how to create a multiplayer
survival game inside of Unreal Engine. I'm going to be remastering
this course in Unreal Engine 5. 4 and adding some new futures
In the course, like controller input, support first and third
person mode, and so much more. So if you haven't picked the course
up yet, I highly recommend you do as I will be remastering it
when they released on religion 5. 4. And with all that out of the way,
let's get right into the video. All right. So the first thing that you want
to do is you want to make sure that you have on religion 5. 4. 5. 4 downloaded and installed. I'm currently using the unreligion 5. 4 preview one that just released
yesterday This is sort of like the beta version of 5. 4 But this process should work
the same and when you go ahead and launch on religion 5. 4 just create a brand new third person
template and That way you have the third person character and a few
animations that we can test out. So now that we are in our project,
I'm going to showcase how you can retarget animations from Mixamo. So you can download these
animations from mixamo. com, so I'll leave a link to
it in the description below. So these are all free
animations you can download. You can just select whichever
animation you want, click download. And download the animation
file or the FBX file. And this will work for any skeleton type. So if you have any other type
of skeletons or animations, this will work completely the same. First thing that you want to do is
you want to import the skeletal mesh. So I'm going to create a new folder. and name this mixamo example. Double click, open that up. And we have this animation from mixamo. The first thing that we want to
do is import the skeletal mesh. So let's duplicate this
animation, copy and paste it, right click and just rename this. And we can just rename this
to SK underscore mixamo. So this will be our skeletal mesh
that we'll import first, just drag and drop that into our folder. And we're going to leave
all the settings as default. So you want to make sure that
is imports as a skeletal mesh. We want to import the mesh. And click import all. Okay. So that will go ahead and
import the skeletal mesh. We'll get this little warning message. No smoothing group found. We can go ahead and ignore
that close out of there. And you can see it
imported the skeletal mesh. Sometimes it will import the animation
itself, but for whatever reason, if it did not import the animation, I could
delete these, or if you want to use any other animation, once you've imported
the skeletal mesh like this, you can just take the animation file, drag and drop it. And you just want to
uncheck important mesh. Okay. That way it will import as animation. And of course, make sure that you
have the proper skeleton selected. Like, so we have the mix mo
skeleton and click import all. Now we'll go ahead and import that
animation that we just downloaded. Okay. Now with that open, we can open up
the animation and you can see it playing here on the mix mo character. Now to retarget this animation for say the
UE five or for any other skeleton type. All you have to do is right click the
animation that you want to retarget, and click retarget animations. So once you select that, it will pop open
with this retarget animations window. And then you can see
things like the source. So this is the source skeletal mesh. The source that we're
taking the animation from. And then you want to select
your target skeletal mesh. So first we're going to do
things like the UE5 mannequin. So you click this dropdown,
you can select SKM Manny. And now you can see in the bottom
left, here are the animations for this Mixamo skeleton. So we have this dance animation. So if we select it, you can automatically
see the preview of what the animation will look like on that character. So as you can see, it's
automatically supported. So you don't have to create any
sort of mappings or any IK rigs to instantly retarget the animation. So once you have that animation selected,
or you can even select multiple animations in here, you select the animation. You just click export animation. It's going to ask you where you want
to save that newly exported animation. In my case, I'll save it to
the Mixamo example folder, and then just click export. It's going to ask you if you want
to overwrite existing files, we can just leave that as default
and just click the export button. So now you should see the new
animation asset that has been retargeted to the UE5 mannequin. So if I double click and open this
up, you can see that newly retargeted animation playing on this UE5 mannequin. So this will work for any skeleton type. So I could right click this
animation and do retarget animation. And I could even select
something like the UE4 mannequin. So this is the SK mannequin. As you can see, it also supports
retargeting from Mixamo to that skeleton. You could also change the source type. So say I wanted to change the source
to our SK mannequin, and I wanted to change the target to our SK Mixamo. Have this jog forward animation. I could retarget from SK mannequin to the. Mixamo Skeleton. I could also retarget from
the UE4 Mannequin to the UE5 Mannequin and vice versa. Now the neat thing about this is that
there are many different Skeleton types that are automatically supported. So they added support for the
most common Skeleton types that you're going to be using. Things like MetaHuman, MoveAI,
Xsense, Daz3D, and Character Creator. So all of the industry
standard skeleton types. And I'm just going to show you how you
can retarget something like a Mixamo animation to the MetaHuman character. So in here I have a couple of
different Mixamo animations. I'm going to right click and
click retarget animations. And you just want to select your target. Skeletal mesh. In my case, I have a metahuman character
that I had downloaded from the metahuman creator, and then you can select whichever
preview animation that you want, and you can see that it's automatically mapped the
correct bones because it's automatically supported right out of the box. So let's say I wanted this shoulder
hit and fall, or if I wanted to select multiple animations, you could just
shift, select all these, click export animations, And we can create a new
folder for this and just name this to MetaHuman and click export and export. Now you can see the retargeted
animations to the MetaHuman character and we can preview all of
these on our MetaHuman character. Okay. So it took the animations from the
Mixamo character and retargeted it to the MetaHuman skeletal mesh. So this new retargeting system
is very quick and easy to use. And the neat thing about it is you can
still use the old IK retargeting system, which allows for more flexibility. So the main purpose of this new
retargeting system is to allow you to really quickly copy over animations from
one supported skeleton type to another. Now, if you run into a skeleton
type, for example, a creature that has four legs or a quadruped type
character that isn't supported, you can still use the IK retargeting system
and create things like an IK rig. And I K retargeter or more
advanced skeletons and for skeleton types that aren't supported. And I have a full video
detailing that entire process. It is a manual process, which is a
lot more time consuming than this automatic retargeting system, but
that does allow for more flexibility. And skeleton types that aren't
supported in the Unreal Engine 5. 4 retargeting system. So yeah, that is pretty
much it for this video. I just wanted to showcase how quick and
easy it is to retarget animations from any supported skeleton type, whether
that be Mixamo, UE4 Mannequin, MetaHuman. You can very quickly and easily copy
animations to your character because it is supported right out of the box. So yeah, that is it for this video. Let me know what you guys think. Think down in the comments down below. This is a huge quality of
life update to unreal engine. I think they should have had support
for retargeting to these skeleton types ages ago, but it's nice to see that they
now added that support in the engine. Yeah. Let me know what you guys think
down in the comments down below. Also check out my multiplayer
survival game course. I'll be remastering it and on religion 5. 4. And yeah, as always, I'll
see you guys in the next one.
