Retargeting Animations for Metahumans in Unreal Engine 5

hey everybody how's it going and welcome back to the channel in this video we are going to talk about meta humans and animating and retargeting them now i know i said last week that we're going to be talking about motion capture but i figured there are some people that still like to use the metahuman body the metahuman skeleton for animations and maybe want to know how to retarget and use animations with them there's also some masses that i've seen on the marketplace like the polyphoria assets which the characters some of the assets do come with meta human skeleton you can use meta human skeleton which makes them a lot easier to do you don't have to do all the customizations that i've had to do if you had the mannequin marketplace acid so i figure i make this video for those people who are going to still using be using the meta human body now before we get started as always there's a shout out to my level 2 patreons level 1 get some perks on this court and level two um get the shout out over here like you're seeing on screen and get the videos on early access there's also a tip or thank you button on youtube that you can do right now if you like this video and just like to help out that's brand new just click that button it's like a one-time donation highly appreciated by the way but if you can't do that then just leave me a like and leave a comment for the youtube algorithm helps a lot too there's a twitter where you can follow me there's the instagram uh sometimes post uh different stuff in there if you want to follow me there as well there's a discord for all your questions if you have questions please join discord there's almost a thousand people in there that can help you i'm there myself sometimes so uh if you have questions about my tutorials or anything on real engine related just join our discord server and with that said let's get started now i'm just going to add my metahuman here you're supposed to add a metahuman to your project for this to work so we're going to be working with metahumans thanks to gabrielle's unreal menagerie i think that's how you pronounce it he was the one that when i saw this video gave me that idea to kind of like do this retargeting without having to re-target all the bones and yeah let's just get to that it's it's a little bit of a workaround a slash patchwork but if you do it once and you don't have to do it again at least for that particular project and it's much easier than many other retargeting workflows that i've seen for many humans so what we're going to do is we're going to double click our blueprint we're going to go into our body and we're going to select the skeletal mesh so i'm actually going to browse to where this is double clicked it's got a little mesh and this is our skeletal mesh so okay it's just like everything else nothing has changed however there is one little tab that we don't have here that we're going to need when we go to the skeleton because when you go into the skeleton i remember just going to the skeleton is this little skeleton icon you have right here when you go into it you're only going to see skeleton tree tab and retarget sources now in if you go back to your scheduled mesh you see that there is a tab called acid detail that tab acid detail is usually not there i'd be surprised if you have it because every project that i opened this tab never comes as default but this tab has something special hitting in it so if you go into windows and enable that tab for the skeleton bear in mind i'm saying it for the skeleton not the skeletal mesh you go here to acid details you're gonna see this little uh property that's very surprising that is super helpful and it's called compatible skeletons so i'm here just going to add a skeleton that can be compatible with the metahuman and that's it there's no more retargeting no more anything it's that simple however it does not end there because i the animations that i have are not made for this particular skeleton now what skeleton am i talking about i'm talking about the new mannequin skeleton which i don't think i have no i don't have on this project so you have to do is go to add add feature or content packed and go to third person you click add to project there you go now we have the third person mannequin from unreal engine 5 and the reason why we need the mannequin from unreal engine 5 is because something very particular if we go back to content characters mannequins meshes this is the unreal engine 5 one if i open this skeleton there's not much to it but you see something very particular here and some of you may already know what i mean but if you go back to our metahuman skeleton you see how the metahuman skeleton looks like compared to this and if we go back to the actual mannequin so the mannequin ue4 which is the old one you see that this pose is a lot more open so this is one of the obstacles that i was seeing is the posing because you can always retarget however many bones you want then in the new retargeting way but it's it's the posing that it's sometimes the problem so in order to get around that you now have the new ue4 manic i'm sorry the new ue5 mannequin which pretty much has the same pose as the metahuman you're going to see what i mean by that so if we go into the metahuman skeleton just this one right here all we have to do is throw in a compatible skeleton we're gonna click the plus button now we're going to look for that mannequin there you go we have the skeleton we can throw it in here there you go it's that simple it's already compatible and now what we're going to do is we're going to use what's already built in there are many tutorials on the ik retargeter b but we're not going to do any of that we're going to go into here we're going to go into rigs and you already have the retargeted retargeters sorry and the ik rigs made for you by epic so you don't have to do anything pretty much now we're going to do is we're going to open this and you're going to see that we already have the animations from both so let's just do this one double click there's a jogger it's jogging now that animation we can export it out and we can add it to the metahuman but that's just a standard animation that comes with the engine it doesn't add too much it too much to it we need to try this out with an actual animation pack okay now one of the animations that we're going to be using is from this close combat animation set this was free at some point if you have a good if not just feel free to use any animation pack that contains a mannequin skeleton and i said that in my previous video that's why it's so important that if you're going to purchase an animation pack that it has to have the mannequin skeleton because otherwise it just messes things up we're going to go into close combat we're going to go into animations let's uh let's check out the ones in place so let me see let's look at locomotion idols idols are usually the largest ones or the loopy ones so this is a cool looking one let's try to get this animation over here now if you double click this animation you're gonna see that it does have a skeleton however it's not the same mannequin skeleton that we had in our ik retargeter because this iq retargeter has this mannequin skeleton which is from the new unreal engine pack i know this is sounds very confusing uh even though these are the same mannequin skeletons they are in different folders so you can actually have different mannequin skeletons that are 100 the same and that's actually how i managed to do what i did in the previous video check out the playlist below for that what we're going to do is we need to get this skeleton so i'm going to click the skeleton it's going to take me there and i know this may be confusing when you see several mannequin skeletons inside one project makes no sense but that's how in real roles if they are in different folders if they were created with the same mannequin skeleton but it's from a different pack then it's going to inherit the one from that pack and you have to make it compatible it may not make sense for you right now but just wait and see so what we're going to do is we're going to go to windows and again acid details so we can make a compatible skeleton now uh this is the wrong one this is not how you do it sorry the one that you have to make compatible with is the one that's in the retargeter so we have our retargeter here and all we have to do is we need to go into this mannequin this one here so we could click here it's going to take us to this retargeter click here it's going to take us to this mannequin and i'm sorry this skeleton is the one we need and this is the skeleton that you need to make compatible with the skeleton the mannequin skeleton came with your pack and again very confusing but just follow the steps open the skeletal mannequin where i'm at let's go to windows let's go to anim acid details you see compatible skeletons so we're going to add the one from the ninja so i'm going to look for that browse and then we're going to go back over here i'm going to throw this one in here and close this let's just browse to where it is close this open it again and voila you have all the animations from that pack just that easy i think this was even easier than the previous video it's probably a lot less work but we do have the animations working there you go looking pretty good as you can see it follows things exactly the same there is one thing however that i'm noticing and i know if you haven't noticed it yet but um with a previous animation that i was trying this with it was even more noticeable so right now if you see where his arm is it's actually a little bit further back than the one from the mannequin and some animations to be honest it it doesn't matter but for this animation it it almost looks like he has his elbows all the way to the outside so we need to correct for that before we actually export this animation to be used with the meta human now we're going to do is we're going to go into the arms i'm actually going to pause this over here yeah here is very evident and you can see the difference between the two i wish we could add a camera to each of these to make things easier but uh you can see that his arms are a lot closer to his body than this one so to kind of correct for that issue we can go into the arm over here in chain mapping just click on the arm and where you see ik adjustment you see there's blend to source if we bring down to zero and unfortunately uh let me just let's just do so this is how it was before and if we do zero this is how it is so that's the difference it wasn't letting me use the slider okay so we want it closer to this so i'm just going to time zero here and zero on the right arm okay that helps us a little bit so if we that actually looks a lot better now in i still think that his arms are a little bit further out and one thing you have to take into account if you're using an armored character you probably want this to be one so it doesn't clip through the armor so this is going to be a case-by-case scenario i'm just showing you the tools so you can use them it all depends on what kind of character you're using if you're using a metahuman that has an armor on him um probably you want to leave it as it was before but the way that i'm doing is just correcting for the post problems that this had now there's another thing called extension which is this one right here which i can pull it back or i can pull it forward and you can see that it kind of corrects that uh placement of the elbow which is the elbows what's giving me problems right now so if i want the elbow to be a little bit further in let's do 1.1 that's probably too much of 1.04 like that just a little bit just for the right arm it just helps a lot let's do it for the left arm all the way over here 1.04 and i think that makes things a lot closer and the good thing is if you make it this way and it's just going to be on every single other animations all right okay so we have some animations here and let's export them out so many human can use it i'm gonna type idle let's do this one let's export the animation i'm just going to export it to the main folder so it's easy to find let's export another one let's do uh this one looks cool this is the default jog i'm not gonna do that one all right that one's the one with remotion let's do the one without root motion uh let's do this kick so control and click let's do um ninja jog this one jump and falling and now we're just going to click here okay and there you have it we have all the animations in there and now if i take my metahuman that's right here and i go into sequencer just to make a sequence let's make a test sequence as we always do and let's add our metahuman if you haven't animated if you haven't added animations to metahuman before know that you do have to delete the control rig and the faceboard because otherwise the animation that you're adding it's not going to take any effect however don't worry the control rig and the phase board are always going to be there for you you can always call them out whenever you need them and i'm going to show you how later on just going to delete this too whoops i think i just deleted the body uh just delete the control rig not the body okay we're gonna go into the body and we're gonna go into animations i'm gonna type idle and you're going to see that we have the ninja retargeted idol we have before there you go we have our metahuman let's just extend this we have now i met a human let me go to cinematic viewport it actually looks pretty good and his hands are well positioned and everything everything is looking fine there's absolutely nothing out of place and uh you can see that this immersion works fine let me look for the other animations that we had and uh no it it didn't break it's just deleting sometimes deleting the animations that does that so let's do this the evasion one we go boom he's doing the evasion that actually looks pretty cool and this is a pretty cool pack by the way i highly recommend it there you go let's try one more for the sake of testing so the ninja ones are jump falling so uh oh this is perpetual falling that sucks let's go to this one the kick the kick looks very cool check it out these these are some well crafted animations by the way but my point is we did a tour meta human he needed some workarounds but it's at ease as easy as it gets there's no we are retargeting it's pretty much instantaneous all you have to do is if you are confused you can go back and follow my steps just follow along with whatever animation pack you have and try it the first time you do it is going to be super confusing but after you do it the first time you're gonna see it's a breeze and i know a lot of people have been saying that retargeting is a lot harder now in unreal engine five or a lot more cumbersome it's actually not it's pretty easy after i i discovered that little hidden feature where you pretty much don't have to retarget anything because the new mannequin has all the unreal engine um all the metahuman features then it makes things super easy now that we have our animation here let's say there's something you want to change i wouldn't change anything about this animation but let's say hey i miss control rig where is control rig i want to have it i want to use it i'm going to tell you how to get it back it's actually super easy barely need convenience um you're just going to right click on body you see there is bake to control rig and we have the asset right here which is the control rig that we previously had i'm going to click here and you're just going to leave this all these expression as default uh don't click reduce keys it's going to affect things just leave everything as it is and click create it's going to take a second and it's going to bring control right back for you to use and there you go now if you happen to want more uh to do the changes yourself what's recommended is that you go here into this little plus button click here and go to additive so if you go to additive then you can change your metahuman so i like to do is just let's do a key on absolutely everything let me let's make that key linear now let's make him face another way so there you go boom we're going to key that or if you go here create a key now you see that he is perpetually looking at this side all right and the same thing can be done with any other part of the control so let's say if we wanted to rotate his arm this way now his arm is going to be that way i wouldn't use this to change an animation like this because this animation is it's already great as it is and if you're using control rig after the fact it's going to be to correct animations if you want to do it before might as well just do keyframe animation yourself but just bring back control rig if you need to to kind of get some cool corrections in there if you see that your animation is not working the way you want it now let's do i want to delete that so everything goes back to normal and we're going to do is we are going to make the control rig when it comes to the face control rig board create now that one actually took a little while but don't worry just let it be it's not gonna crash and i got my control rig bag so let's let's change his um let's change his facial expression i can actually do this here let's add a section let's add an additive section over here select this one i'm going to key everything and make it linear when i do this i'm keying absolutely every single bond that there is i'll just do it because it's uh much easier um than just doing it per uh controller so i'm just going to do absolutely everything and let's say we want him to have an angry face so i'm just going to go here i'm going to switch to local making have a little bit of a more angry face kind of like this there you go [Music] got a little bit of a different facial expression in there and there's other things that we can move over here that's this one like that and let's say he to want to open his mouth let's let's try to do that now let's just do let's show let's show a little bit of teeth let's just show a little bit of teeth like this there you go he is really angry and textured streaming is going overboard uh i think i already talked about how to get rid of that message but there you go now he has kind of like an angry face there you go showing teeth pretty cool all right and we have auto key on so that's going to be permanent and now i have him kicking with a very angry face and that's how you bring back control rig for the body and control rig for the face so you can do cool things like this you not only are taking advantage of using marketplace animations but are also using the control rig and everything that's cool about the metahumans

Channel: MR3D-Dev

Views: 47,153

Keywords: Best metahuman retarget, metahuman retargeting ue5, ue5, unreal engine 5, short film animation, animation retargeting ue5, metahuman animation

Id: 9wLZWBKxysA

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2022