Revolutionise Your Animation Workflow With HEAT In Unreal Engine 5!

hey guys and welcome back to another video today we're going to be talking about heat now heat is a platform that allows you to store visualize and use animation data in any 3D program and because heat works in all 3D programs that means that team's working on multiple programs can collaborate on the same animation file so in layman's terms heat is essentially the middleman of animations so for example let's say you have an animation file in blender but you want to use it on your character in unreal simply upload the file to heat and it will automatically rety your animation for you to use on any 3D character that you want now obviously that's within reason you know if it's a biped animation you can't use it on a quadraped character it's the same with normal retargeting except it's going to do it for you and possibly even at a higher quality than you could if animation isn't really your thing but you also don't need to create your own animations heat has over a thousand animations for you to Simply drag and drop into your project directly from unreal but before we get further into the video I just want to thank he for actually sponsoring this video and I've been talking to the team for a little over a year now so it's great to finally be actually working with them and collaborating on creating a video for them as well we've been talking about what they're building what I'm building and just the industry in general they're really great guys and absolutely love what they're building I've seen the product grow over the past year and I've seen how dedicated they really are into creating something absolutely amazing and now I rarely accept sponsors on the channel as you may know and SPS I can't actually think of or remember the last time I did accept sponsor and that's because I only want to promote stuff that I actually truly believe in and will truly use and this is something I have already used and will continue to use in the future as well in my own projects and I might even use them in videos further down the line as well if I see fit for example if we just need an animation really quickly that they've provided we can then easily use that in the project and the tutorial as well but anyways now that I've got that quick overview of heat out of the way let's jump onto my computer so we can actually see it working in action and I can show you how to use heat in your projects so let's get right on the computer so we're going to start off with where you can actually get heat from so you want to go over to their website which is heat. Tech and I'll leave a link to that in the description down below and from here you want to sign in or create an account so I'll go do that now I will sign in up here in the top right and I already have an account if not you would sign up I'm going to log in so let me do that now and once you have signed in you'll be greeted with a screen like this this is basically the dashboard where you you can download the plug-in explore movements upload a movement subscribe or look at the documentation so what we're going to look at first is the subscription so if you press subscribe here you can see the different plans so here you can choose your subscription tier or plan and there are four different tiers that you can choose from these are free mover and pro and obviously from here you can see free is where you can get 10 animations and 5 megab of movement upload storage however you don't get prior support or the character storage mover is the next one which is the one where they'd recommend you go for and this is where you get access to the entire heat Library which at the moment is over a th000 animations you get 100 megab of movement upload storage you get priority support and you get character storage this one is $25 a month and then if you go for pro you get access to the whole heat Library you get a gigabyte movement upload storage priority support and character storage and that is $75 a month and you can pay monthly or annually now the difference between mover and pro is just the amount of upload storage that you get and I said there are four tiers the fourth tier is called Enterprise and that is for larger studios and is available upon request and I will cover all of the features that you get further on in the video as well I should also mention as well that mov is just for personal use web Pro is for professional and commercial use so once you've logged in you've selected your tier which again could just be free you want to now actually download the plugin so what we're going to do is go back to the dashboard or discover up in the top left here is the home button and then we'll press download plugin we have heat bridge and unreal heat Bridge as you can see is for blender unity and Daz and then unreal is the one that we're going to be going for in this video heat bridge is amazing but again I'm not covering that so what we're going to do is press download on real plug-in what this is going to do is take you to the Unreal Engine Marketplace page and once you here you can just press free and then you can get it in here and then you'll simply just press open in launcher the standard way you would always install a plugin to your engine and once the epic games launcher has loaded you want to go to library and then scroll down to Vault and you can search for heat and you should see heat beta plugin what we'll do is we'll select this or you can press install to engine underneath it press install to engine and then you can see which engine version you want to install it to I'm going to install it to 5.3 and I'll install it here while this is installing I I'll also mention as well I have already created a new project which I'm going to be doing this in so it's a completely new fresh project you can see the whole process from beginning to end you can do this in an already established project as well I've just got in a new one to show that I've not got anything else already set up so I'll be back to you once this has installed to the engine and so once it's installed we can then enable it in our project the normal way you would so you go to edit plugins search for heat and then we can just tick heat there and it says plug-in heat is a beta version that's fine just press yes and then we'll need to restart our engine to enable it fully so I'll do that now and get back to you once it's done so now that it's enabled we can close this and now we need to actually log in to heat through unreal as well so what we need to do is we need to actually get up the heat to window so to do that we can go to window up at the top and then we can go all the way down to the bottom and press heat and now once this loads up you will see that we now have access to the heat Library directly inside of unreal without having to go to the external browser we were on we were on earlier so you can see this here and now this is essentially where we were earlier but we can press sign in to link our account onto unreal as well so you open up this and just log in with the same details you created an account with earlier I just signed in with Google so I'll do the exact same thing here and now and I'll get back to you once I'm logged in again perfect so now I am actually logged in to heat through here as well so let's make this screen a little bit bigger so we can see it nicely and you can see that now my library has populated with all of the animations I have so I have an account as well on here obviously I believe I have the Mover plan so I have access to all of the entire Library so all 1,000 animations that are on here perfectly like so so let's actually just make this full screen so we can go over what it all means and then we'll go into some of the rest of it so firstly let's maneuver about through heat so we have the home button up here which to discover this is what we went over in the browser earlier on in the video where again you have explore movements uploading movement subscribe and documentation underneath this you have my library which is what we just saw a second ago where we have access to all of the different animations that you currently own or you have uploaded so you can also press the drop down menu to go through different things so you got my library Marketplace uploaded collected in plan and favorites underneath my library we have collections and this is essentially playlists that you can create so you can have kind of folders of different animations so let's say you found a load of animations that you want for one game you can put them all in there or if you've got them for one character or if they're all kind of movement animations you can kind of organize this however you want but that's a nice way of doing that underneath this we then also have create now this is something I will go over a little bit more later on in the video so let's actually import an animation into the scene so you can see how easy it is so let's go to my library I'll make this a little bit smaller so I can see both that and my project let's find some empty space and then very simply drag and drop so let's get the unarmed Sprint forward you can simply drag it from heat and drop it into your scene you'll see that you can move it anywhere you want it's going to put it onto the mannequin it's getting the heat animation once this loads which it might be taking a little while cuz I've got a lot of stuff open on my computer but once it loads you can see we now have this animation in here perfectly like so let's minimize this so we can see it better and we've now got this animation very simply drag and dropped into the project onto the unreal mannequin now as you can see this is root motion not in place that's something else I should mention the majority of the animations on heat at the moment are root motion there are some in place and you can create your own animations and make them in place as well but the majority of them are root motion so if you don't know how to use root motion I can go over it very quickly here in a very very simple fashion so let's find where this animation is first of all as well so I'll go over that too so if you go into your content browser we can then see we have heat animations there perfectly that's where they're all going to be populated so let's open this up straight away in here and then one very quick and easy way that you can set them up to be in place is search for root motion and then just tick enable root motion simply as that we now have an in place animation perfectly like so and again that's how easy it is to also get these animations into your project let's do it again let's find another one let's get crowd Applause drag and drop it straight into the project it will get the heat animation it's made sure it's all retargeted over nicely and now we have the animation in here like so let's all give a round of applause to the heat system if we open up the window again you can see that in the bottom right we have import as so at the moment they're all importing onto the mannequin because obviously there it's the unreal mannequin but we can open this get t69 H which is this kind of red model that you see here that's basically the heat mannequin that they use let's drag and drop one in here shotgun idle at EAS on t69 H this is now moved in an animation perfectly onto that mesh actually let's get the same one so let's get crowd Applause so you can see it retargeted on both the unreal mannequin and this mesh here cuz again this means you don't have to do all of the retargeting it's done for you we have more here so we can also get a metahuman and a user model so you can if you're using metahumans in your project you can get animation straight into there or if you're using your own custom character you can get them straight on there as well so let's go over metahumans now now in order for this to work you going to need to obviously have the metahuman plug-in enabled and have a metahuman installed as this is a fresh project I don't so let's go over that now very quickly what we can do is go to edit plugins we can search for bridge just to double check to make sure quickel bridge is enabled it should be by default but just make sure there and then we will go to window and quickel Bridge like so once this loads it's very similar to the heat window I will allow that there you can see this is similar to heat as is in it's just its own window in onreal which is very very nice what we can do is I'm going to go down to this kind of monitor icon here and then go to meta humans and you can see I've got three meta humans here so let's just get Oscar we'll click him and we'll go well highest qualties that's the only one I've got and then we will just simply add now this is going to add this metahuman into my project here I imagine if you want to use the animations on metahumans you've already done this process and you know what you're doing but I'm going to again go over it very quickly now just cuz I also need to get it into my project so that should have now installed if we close quickel Bridge here we can go into our content browser content and we should now have a metahuman in here we've got Oscar so that's perfect if we now go back to the heat window here if we now go to metahuman again we should see that we can now have model select and Oscar as I've imported Oscar into my project so that's absolutely fantastic if we now get crowd Applause once again but with the metah of Oscar selected if we drag and drop this into our project we should see that this animation is now onto our metahuman so obviously it may take a little bit longer as it is a metahuman and I've obviously they got missing plugins so I will enable those so if I enable missing on all of these and I might need to redo this just so I can do that yeah I need to also restart my project so I'll restart my project so I have metum working but you can see that this is very simple so I'll restart now and get back to you so I'm back in the project now that I've restarted with the new metahumans enabled so I go back to heat from window here we'll go back to my library here I'll make this a little bit bigger once again then I will import as metahuman select the model of Oscar and then I was doing the round of applause one so they all look the same see if I can find IT Crowd applauds V4 so I drag this in with the Met human Oscar we should see that it is now on Oscar metahumans do take a little bit longer to import just because it's a metahuman the pure size and quality of them but that's the same with anything you do with metahumans as well so you can see that we now have this animation on the metahuman as well it's still obviously preparing textures and shaders however once it's done we'll see that we now have it on the unreal mannequin the heat mannequin and a metahuman as well so again it's now getting the heat animation and once it's done that which is currently doing we will see that all of these three different mannequins or these characters will be playing the same animation perfectly as you can see there let's minimize this and let's see we can get these playing as well we to just simulate here we can see that all three of these characters are playing the exact same animation and we've had to do zero work for this it's just retargeted over for us automatically so that is absolutely perfect so that is now how to do on metahumans but let's also go over how to do on your own custom character as well so first of all we need to have our own custom character so I'm just going to get one from mixo so if we open up mix ot.com we can then log in or sign up if you've never used this before but you can use your Adobe account with this so I'll log in using that now and so we are now here on mixo I'll go over to characters and then we'll just choose a random character that we like the look of so let's go for alien Soldier we'll use this character here so just let it load this is the one that we're going for so we will download this in a t pose and we'll download this like so once that's downloaded we will go back into our project here then what we need to do is we need to import this into a specific location and if you already have your mesh imported that's fine just move it to the location where I'm about to tell you so you need to make sure that it is in this characters folder here now if you don't have this folder that's fine you can create it just make make sure that you spell It characters exactly like this with a Capital C as well because that's obviously where it needs to look for the skeletal match so we'll open that up and now you can have subfolders in here or you can just import it straight in so let's just import it in here so we will get our alien character that we just downloaded off of mixo or again one that you've got or your own custom character that you already have in here we'll import all and we should see that we now have the mesh in here so once it's imported and you can see we've now got the skeletal mesh inside of this characters folder the next thing we want to do is we want to instill inside this folder right click go to blueprint class and we want to go to all classes and we want to search for heat and what we want to do is we want to create a heat pose modifier we'll select that and then we'll name this HPM for heat posst modifier underscore and then the name of the character so for me this is just alien so I'll name it HPM alien we'll open that up straight away and now this is going to actually enable heat to do the retargeting of the different characters so on the right here the only thing we need is the bone map override so you can see you have heat root heat hips heat spine so that is the skeleton of heat and then on the right you'll put in the skeleton of your mesh so obviously root hips spine and so on and so so forth now that may be tedious however if you are using a mix mode character we don't need to do that manually so what we can do is we can actually go to edit project settings and then we're going to search for heat and under here you can see we have skeleton to pose we're going to add a map element here the key soft object path here is going to be our skeleton so that is ch44 non PBR skeleton for me that is the AMX my one I just downloaded and value soft class path that is going to be the pose modifier that we haven't set up yet but we just created because we have one automatically made for us however we do need to install that from the Heat website so let's go back onto their website up here and then what we're going to do is we're going to go to discover we want to go to documentation and then we'll go to Advanced Tools in ui5 user models free blueprint configs and then you can see here we have have mixo SK mannequin Ready Player me and VIP we want mixo so we'll click on that one there and this will just take you to mixo orconf asset which is on a Google Drive so we can download this and then just import this into our projects so we'll download it and then the way to import a u asset is just simply move it into the folder in Windows so I'll show you that now as well so you want to locate your project folder within Windows once you're here you go to content character and then into the bit where you've imported your skeleton if that's in a sub folder mine is just here I can't see it probably because I haven't saved so if I were to just save all I imagine that would then show up so I I save selected go back to my folder and you can see that's all there now then if we get the mix Modo config from your downloads folder or wherever you put it I'll copy it and I'll paste it into here and now we have mixo config doet if I close this if I go in here we now have mix mode config perfectly open this up and this is now already perfectly set up so we don't have to go through and do it ourselves so now if you go back into the project settings where we were before we can now go to value and search for mixo config there that is now perfectly set up so it will retarget our own user model every time you have a new character you will simply just put it in here so you go skeleton pose input your skeleton and input the config which can either be the M mixo config or a custom one which you have set up simply like this hmp alien here which again we haven't gone through but once you would you'd input everything in here press compile and then put it into the project settings so once you've done that there's another key thing you want to make sure you've done you want to ensure that your character is in a t pose so if we open up our alien mix my character here you can see that this is in a t pose some of them may be in an a pose or a y pose you don't want that you want it in a t pose like so if it isn't in a t pose what you can do is open up the skeleton select the left shoulder for example and then you can move it about like this until it is in a t pose and then you will create asset and create pose asset current pose however again mine's already in the T pose so I don't need to do that and now once we've done that we can go back into our heat window here then we will import as user model and our model is going to be the one which we have which you can see there is CH4 non PBR that is the one which I imported from mixo so we will select that and then let's get crowd app Clause once again let's stick with a theme put that in there you can see my character it's getting the heat animation once it has done that it should be giving me a round of applause with all of the other characters which we have here and you can see perfectly like so so let's minimize this again go to simulate and we can see all of the different characters here giving me a round of applause for Heat doing such a good job of having it do it automatically for us so we have the heat mannequin the unreal mannequin a metahuman and a custom model from mixo all perfectly doing whatever animation we want them to do so again doesn't have to be a round of applause let's just scroll down and pick another one let's get the creeper for this alien drag that in there and then we should see it's getting heat animation onto my character and it's doing this kind of funky little animation here which this looks like it could be used as an inplace running animation and again you can do that on any character which you want you just set it up the way I have done with either muman or a user model or obviously the mannequins in here as well and that is essentially the basics of how to get animations from heat into your projects again nice and simple simply just drag and drop o from over a thousand different animations straight into your project for you to use obviously you don't need to keep them in your project you can delete it from here however you still have it in the heat animations folder in here all of these are in here like so now another fun little thing that they have is you can actually blend different animations together within a sequencer so to do this let's create a level sequence so at the top let's go to the sequence here add level sequence I'll just put this in content and call this heat animation blending save that and then this will open up a new level sequencer now in here you can also drag and drop directly into the sequencer from heat which again is really really cool so let's open up heat I want to do it onto the t69 H I'm not really a fan of that alien uh and let's get Groove two hard swing let's drag and drop that straight into our sequencer here so you should see it's getting heaty animation and this is now added straight into the sequencer perfectly like so let me see where this is actually put it in the world as well it's over here so let's just move it away from 0000 and over here somewhere where we can see it perfect okay so we now have that in our sequencer so now let's get another animation in here which we can then blend between the two of so let's zoom out a little bit like so and then we want to make sure that we have this mesh selected and then we can drag in another animation so let's go for standing cheer this time and we can drag it onto that mesh there it's going to get the heat animation you can see it's added it onto that same skeletal mesh we can minimize this and now let's expand this out a little bit and we can see that it's going to be playing these different animations perfectly like so and now how do we actually blend these together because obviously if we play this normally it's just going to snap between them like so which looks terrible so we can very very easily blend these simply just drag one onto the other and that is going to blend them now if we watch this back like so you can see the is blending and now to make this look even better we're going to right click on the second clip we will match with this bone in previous clip and then we will search for whatever bone that we think most makes the most sense I think for these two animations left toe is going to be good they kind of said to me the toe is normally the best one so let's go for heat toe base L now if we play this back again it's going to look even better that's merging perfectly you can make these merge for it as long or as quick as you like you can see that looks absolutely perfect we've now got these two animations blending together in this sequencer so you can create your own sequences directly from heat using all these animations and again that looks perfect it looks like just one clean smooth animation so I think that's all I'm going to be going over for these animations within the project like so we've got it onto the unreal mannequin the heat mannequin a metahuman and a user model and we've also gone over blending these within a sequence as well all of this very easy very simple to do but now let's go over actually uploading animations to heat as well as I said earlier you can use your animations or their animations we've gone over theirs so let's Now cover yours so at the moment this is only on the web browser however they are going to be moving this over to the in engine portal soon as well but for the moment let's just go to the browser so once you're here you're going to want to go to upload a movement and then you can simply drag and drop a movement here and you can see they support gltf glb fbx and heat heat is their own custom file format they've created so I'm just going to upload hip hop dancing fbx into here and then here you can change the retargeted settings if you hover over this you can see heat needs to know where your movement was exported from so we can map it onto our models our Auto retargeter can guess most export Origins but can't in cases where bone mappings are identical for example move one move AI accents so if you're importing a movement recorded with accents select accents for the correct mapping my hip-hop dancing one I've just got off of mixo so I will put that on there like so and they do also accept all major moap solutions for example move one roko and mlla so anything that you want really they'll do so let's press upload it's now processing this movement file they will uploading and you can see as quick as that it's now retargeted it onto the heat mannequin like so and that is absolutely perf perfect now that it is in heat this essentially means that we can put it onto any other character that we want as easily as you saw we were doing earlier within unreal they've put it onto their own heat file which means they can retarget it using their system that they have developed and in this editor here you can modify it as much as you want so you can modify the shoulders the elbows the Y offset all of this great stuff if you wanted to I'm not really going to do much of that but really important thing in here as well is the rotation so if you're your character comes in rotated the wrong way you can rotate it here as well if needs be so then I'm going to save this and it's going to generate a gif and save the file So that obviously the thing we saw in the unreal had a gif showcasing what the animation was you can see what it is by hovering over it so you don't need to import it as well to actually see what's happening so once it's saved you can name it and give it description so let's just call this hip-hop dancing as that's what it is doing and we'll give this a description of a smooth hip hop dance something very simple like that you can change the motion type here from hip route and in place this is in place so we'll take that one there and you can give this tags as well so we can give this the tag of is dance one yes it is we can give this a tag of anything else that we want so this helps you find it in your library as well so let's also give it party for example and then we can simply press upload and you say congratulations your movement is ready to use in our unreal Unity or blender plugins so again I'm doing unreal but it does work in blender unity and Dazz as well and there's also something else to mention is that this upload portal is all for personal use only as in you can use it commercially however nobody else will see this this is just for you to use and you to see so it's uploaded on there for you to access whenever and wherever but it's just yours so if you want an animation that's only in your game you don't want anyone else to have have it that is perfectly fine so any animations you upload will show in your profile for the next time you open up onreal engine as well so for example now that I've done that I can go back to home and I'm going to go to my dashboard up here and you can see my library is here if I go to uploaded you can now see that I've got hip-hop dancing perfectly here you can see we just did this hip-hop dancing uploaded by Matt asland a smooth hip-hop dance with a tyes of party dance and user generated so although this is just personal use and you can see here your storage as well so this is 77 megab and I have 100 megab that I can use and although this is just for personal use you only you can use it they are actually onboarding select motion capture artists to become verified creators as well and those creators then can publicly sell on the heat Marketplace so that is something obviously looking into expanding upon into the future as well so now if we were to actually go back into unreal what we can do is open up the heat window like so and now if we go from my library to uploaded we should see that we have hip hop dancing here this is the animation that we just uploaded to heat and we could have modified if we wanted to I obviously didn't but we have it here it's going to get the heat animation and we now have it onto the mannequin here and again we can put this onto any mannequin that we want so let's do the metahuman of Oscar and we'll import this in like so going to get the heat animation and we now have it perfectly like that so we've got two different characters using the same animation and I didn't have to do any retargeting for these at all so let's go back into the heat window here again one last thing I want to show you is the collections so let's go to my library and then if we were to go onto boxer we can click it and then what we can do is on here we can favor this so we can find it again later on if we want want to or we can also save to collection now I also don't have any so I'm going to create a new collection I'll name this one boxing for example that's what he's doing and I'll set the visibility to private then I will create this as a collection and we can then click on boxing there it's ticked and it's now added to boxing so if I to close this or if I to go back into unreal let's say oh I am in unreal sorry let's minimize this we'll go from my library to favorites as I added into favorites as well we'll see that we have the boxer or if we go from favorites to collected you can see that it's in there as well or if I go down to collections here we can see that I've got this collection called boxing I'll click on it and we've got this animation so there are many different ways of going about it and it's very it just makes it really easy to find all the different animations which you want well with that I think that might be it for this video of me covering heat showcasing it and showing you what it's all about again it essentially means you can really really easily get animations from blender into unreal onto your character or go from their library of over a thousand animations as well perfectly onto any character you want whether that's their character metahumans or your own custom character and you can go on to multiple different ones without having to retarget it each time you can set up the rarer once or if you're using mix mode it's done for you already and again if you're using metahumans that's also done for you already as well and you can just easily drag and drop your animation into the project so thank you so much for watching this video and thank you again to heat for sponsoring this video there's a link in the description down below where you can find heat as well and I hope you enjoyed this video and found it helpful of me showcasing heat and also showcasing how to use it too so again thank you so much for watching this video if you did enjoy it and you did find it helpful please do make sure to like And subscribe down below as we're trying to hit 100,000 subscribers this year and all of your support means a lot and it's really appreciated so thank you and I'll see you in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Matt Aspland

Views: 5,658

Keywords: ue4, unreal engine 4, unreal engine, tutorial, ue4 tutorial, unreal engine 4 tutorial, how to make a game, how to, blender, unity, games design, ue5, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, ue5 tutorial, HEAT, ue5 animations, anim, animation, animations, how to use heat, plugin, tool, animation retargeting, retargeting, ik rig, drag and drop

Id: hW7FBGoiZ10

Length: 32min 45sec (1965 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024