Setup Live Link Between Maya and Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial

hey everyone i'm going to show you a quick tutorial on how to set up live link between unreal and maya so live link is a tool that allows you to stream animation data from an external package like meyer or motionbuilder or into unreal onto like a skeletal mesh or an object uh it's very useful for motion capture or previous or just kind of streaming data through to see if an animation's working um quite nicely there's a lot of a lot of uses for it but its primary function is for virtual production so i'm going to show you exactly how it's set up inside of unreal 5 today i'm going to be using maya 2022 um so let's get started so inside of unreal the first thing we're going to need to do is make sure that the live link plugin is enabled so if you go to settings at the top right head down to plugins and i'll bring open this tab and in the top right you can just search for live link and so you can see i've got live link version 2.0 here i've already got it enabled but make sure you enable that and restart your editor you'll get a little warning in the bottom corner but make sure you fully reboot and then it can be enabled and used so once that's there you can go back to your level and at the top if you hit window you will now have a virtual production slot here and you've got a live link section you open this window and this is the window for connecting unreal to outside applications so we're going to need to get it set up inside of maya in this tutorial i will do another tutorial on motionbuilder uh but to do this all we need to do start by going to the epic games launcher and head to the marketplace we're gonna need to download an external tool that we'll need to install into maya so we can get the two applications communicating so if you open this and just type live link in the search bar all one word and you'll see that there is two products here so there's maya live link of motion lab motion builder live link we're going to use my live link for now if you open up this and add this to your basket and purchase it add it to your account kind of usual for marketplace equipment and click install to the engine um i've already got it installed so i can't do it again but once that's downloaded you want to head to your explorer and you want to go to your pa your program files so let's drag that over here so we need to get the file that we've just downloaded from the marketplace and put it into maya so it's located in program files uh epic games launcher the engine version you downloaded it into um in this instance i did actually download it into four to six you're gonna go to engine plugins marketplace just here and you've got maya live link there so if you pop into there and then you've got binaries and then in here we've got 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 um so i'm using uh maya 2022 but my 20 works with it um so if you just go into there basically pick the version that's your my year or the closest to it copy these files out now head back up the chain to your program files again head into the autodesk folder this time go to maya bin plugins and then paste those assets into there so i've already got them pasted in there so i won't uh i won't replace them i'll just cancel that off but then restart your maya and uh get it open so now we have to enable the tools on the maya side so maya here and uh you want to start off by actually enabling the plugin in the software so you head to windows at the top settings and preferences plugin manager you want to type live link into the search bar and then you've got two plugins you want to make sure you're enabled so you want maya live link plugin 2022.mml loaded and autoloaded a maya live link ui.py loaded and autoloaded so you can close that now to open the interface inside of maya you have to type the command into the mel command line at the bottom so you can type maya live link ui so that's camelcase with the m the ldl and capital ui and hit enter and it'll open up the my live link ui now it is a bit tedious you will have to retype that every time you open up and close the ui one thing you can do to make your life a little bit easier is if you open up the script editor open up a mel tab and do the maya live link ui command in there if you select all of that text and middle mouse drag it up to your shelf it can drop it in as a script that you can call at any time so you can click that it pops open the tool and it's very easily inaccessible you can right click on that script click edit and open up the shelves tab and you can customize a few things that will make it a little bit more readable uh so your icon label down here you can type the name if you want to keep it give it a name or label call it ll or unreal link and what it whatever's whatever's best for you i'm just gonna stick with live link oh live link uh on the icon name you can press the m on the side and change the little icon that appears um i'll stick with maybe a hik character there's a full body one select that and save all shelves now you can see we've got a nice little accessible button always there whenever we want okay so now we've got unreal set up and we've got maya set up we now need to connect the two together so you can see here there's no connection now if we head back over to unreal still in the live link tab we can click source message by source and you can see the maya live link has just popped into existence so if we hit ok on that i know you can see we've got we've got a connection coming through so we're not streaming any data yet but one way to check if the data is coming through properly is to open up a skeletal mesh so if we head back to my content browser and pop into the skeletons folder and we'll open up the mannequin skeleton so on the right hand side here we've got the preview scene settings and under animation preview controller where you can customize like a preview animation there should be a new option called live link preview controller so if you turn that on there's a quick check box we can enable to test called enable camera sync if we hit that on the camera should sync with maya from now on so if i just drag this character over here and drag this here oh drag that there they should see unreal matches exactly what i do next up let's get the character sinking so if we open up the skeletal mesh for the sk mannequin so we still got the sync on if i enable skeletal view you'll notice if i move the character they're not matching the bone data has not been transferred and this is because we aren't syncing the character what we need to do is open up the world outliner and hit the root of the character and inside of the maya live link ui we can add a selection so we can add the root and we'll give it a name so this is the name to correspond between unreal and maya so let's call him mannequin and we want to make sure it's the full hierarchy and that's it from this side on the unreal side you'll notice just above that camera sync check box we have live link subject name so inside that subject name if we put in mannequin it'll start streaming data through if i turn off the camera sync just so we can pull back a little bit so if we start rotating arms and stuff you can see that the data is now streaming through in real time which is really cool however you may have noticed that the character did roll over this is because the hierarchies aren't matching exactly between unreal and maya so in unreal you'll notice the root is the tip is the root of the hierarchy whereas inside of um maya we've got this uh group above the root which has a minus 90 on so this kind of happens when you export out from unreal it groups everything together but what we can do is if we just select those two unparent them delete that group and you'll notice now the match is exact and there we go and there's the data data is all rolling through perfectly matched which is brilliant but this um is only half the battle because we've only got it streaming into the previewer what if we wanted it streaming into the level so to do this we're going to need an animation blueprint that's set up for live link so if we head back into the content browser go to your blueprints folder or wherever you're going to make the file located right click animation animation blueprint and we'll make that a animation for the mannequin call this abp live link and pop that open so live link offers a animation node called a live link node it's very simple to set up it's very similar to what we've just done but if you just right click type live link pause and you'll get this node here plug that directly into the outpost and put the same name that we did as before into there and hit compile now if we drag this preview to the side you see it's still streaming over awesome so one thing you may know is that the input pause was visible but ignored this can be quite annoying in any output logs or things you've got so one thing we can quickly do is if we just put a local space ref pause which is basically the buying pause of the character if we just plug that straight into there and hit compile it'll get rid of that little note and that's it for streaming onto a character so we can drag that character straight into um a level to make him nice and zeroed out if we just hit uh play i've got a game mode on so let me just eject fly out and just put it to the side and move the character and i can see the whole character is fully streaming through and it's all nice and dandy so you can as you can imagine this is amazing for things like motion capture shoots if you want to stream uh the raw data from maya or motionbuilder in through live you can get the characters with some nice materials some nice lighting and you can get cloth running or dynamics on them and it's all previewed and it kind of it brings the world to life and kind of allows the actor to kind of see themselves on screen it's invaluable i've done it many times on shoots um but it's really cool um but it's not limited to that there's a lot of possibilities and it's important to note that this isn't limited to characters although this demonstration was on a character it works on anything that has a joint hierarchy um you can sync through cameras and feel the views and things like that um there's a lot that can be done with it and it's really powerful and really cool i will do another tutorial on the motion builder side it's it's basically the same tutorial except this kind of the the ui interface on on the motion builder side is slightly different um but it's it's pretty much the same process and the unreal side is exactly the same so guys if you've got any questions uh drop a comment or message me on twitter mattlake ta i hope that was helpful and i hope you learned something thanks for watching guys bye

Channel: MattLakeTA

Views: 420

Keywords: Unreal Engine, Unreal, Engine, LiveLink, Live Link, Autodesk Maya, Maya, Motion Capture, Mocap, Tutorial, Games, Animation, MattLakeTA, Matt Lake, Technical Animation, Technical Animator

Id: Gj4QoDp3R34

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021