The Easiest Way to Retarget Mixamo Animations in Unreal Engine 5

what's up guys welcome to new Unreal Engine 5 tutorial and today I'm going to show you how to retarget the Maximo animations into the well the Epic skeleton or uh then into the mannequin or any other uh character that you have from the marketplace that is the Epic skeleton or whatever um it's gonna be a very easy video to follow and quick so I have seen a lot of tutorials out there and they're a bit confusing because they're like 40 minutes and you know Etc but today I have made a very easy default tutorial to understand what we're doing and how to do it basically in a short amount of time so with no more said let's get started alright so first of all we need our animations from Maximo so let's search into mixamo.com uh you can have an account go ahead and make one uh from Adobe I already have like a character here but of course I'm gonna choose another one for the tutorial so I just go up here into characters and basically we are gonna find the uh what was the X bot or something like that uh why but whatever you want I use this character there we go uh now the character doesn't really matter okay because we are only gonna use the animations in this case actually because we're gonna use the uh feminine version of the Epic skeleton because it's by that by default I'm gonna choose the x-bot so when you have selected it uh you will see that it is just in T post just go up here into the load and let it in FBA fbx battery and these typos go ahead and download it alright so just before importing it I'm just gonna create a new folder which is going to be called uh miximo uh tutorial or whatever and now we can import the character let's go ahead and drag it into the uh content browser now you'll see that we have all the settings just leave them as default make sure you have skeleton mesh and import mesh selected and the skeleton has none so we'll create a new one and just say uh import all we have just warning because of the fbx type but it's okay and then there we go we have all our assets now of course he created a physics a you know a different skeleton uh two animation sequences whatever uh we are only gonna use really this skeleton but anyway counter shift uh save to everything all right so now that we have our character let's get the animation that we want to basically just get from so let's go up here into animations get the bot out and then we can use uh get you see simple animation in my case for example I'm going to use these uh simple reaction animation it looks pretty cool so just go ahead and download it now we're gonna leave it in fbx we're gonna say without skin because we already have the uh the mesh and unreal and then I'm going to say 60 frames per second keyframe reaction none and just to load it then go ahead and just drag it in and then we can go ahead and import it back now make sure that you have the um XBox skeleton selected and then we can say import o and it will start importing and there we go we have the animation on here okay so now what we have to do is create an ik rig and from here we're gonna set up all the chain bones that we want to copy the position and then rotation also and paste it over the mannequins skeleton to copy basically the animation you was to understand it just much better when we start doing it I'm going to use the new chain system from Monroe Engine 5 which is really cool and easy to use just right click go into animation and then we're going to create an ik rig so now here we have to select which skeleton we want to create one from in our case it's going to be the xbot which is going to be the mix and more rig so I'm going to rename this into ik rig underscore make Samo here we go you can save it and go ahead and open it all right so here you can see that we have our character with old bones we can see also the hierarchy of the bones here and we have a really cool window that we this uh ik is selected and now what we can do is create a chains which basically will go from one bone to another one so basically this uh changes from other versions of Unreal Engine I wouldn't have to go bone by bone but we can create a whole uh like change so for example from the shoulder to the hand is going to be the left arm or something like that which is going to be just much easier and faster for us so there are two ways of doing it we can go ahead and just add new chain and then just to show you uh the first one is actually going to be heads just type in head and then we can select a start bone and the end bone in the case the start bone for the chain of the head is going to be neck and then you select neck and then the end bone is going to be the head top end okay now that is a way of creating the chain or a faster in my opinion way it's just going up here into the hierarchy selecting the bones that you want and uh so next up is the spine so select the first spinal here and then shift select the spine two and then right click and then we can create a new chain from a selected bones and let's name it spine there we go and it will do exactly the same but we'll have to select uh this one's we're going to select the ones that we need and right click and I think it's personally I think it's faster now the one um quick thing before we continue adding the chain of the bones is to go into the hips right click and make this the root because it is a root uh to to you know the animations alright so let's continue with our chain bones so the next up is going to be the left arm so let's just find the left shoulder over here which is going to be a starting point and the end point is going to be the left hand so it's going to be this one so you select it right click and then new chain bones and we can leave it like this but I'm gonna say left arm and you say okay and there we go now the right arm so just go into the right shoulder and into the right hand right click new root and then right on there we go so we actually just have uh two more left to do so yeah so what we have to do now is the left leg so let's find the left um up leg which is this one and so is the right one this one is the left one and then the left toe end so basically pretty much to the end right click new chain and it's going to be the left leg we go I'm gonna do the same with the right so right up leg into the right to end right click return chain right leg there we go so for the purpose of this video I'm not gonna be rigging each of the fingers uh just it because it it takes too much time okay and if you want to do it well you know now how to do it uh you just have to go into the pinky for example and select only chained create new one and it's going to be right hand Pinky and then okay and then you would do it with with the ring two Etc okay so yeah it's just if you want to also break the fingers you can do so in my case the little tutorial I'm not gonna do it but now you know how to do it yourself activate that and then we have all the um chain rate so basically this is ready to be copied from animations so now we can go back in over here and now uh we are very lucky because with Unreal Engine 5 if we go into characters mannequins Ricks you can see that there's already an ik mannequin rig created for us which also has the um fingers rigged so yeah we're gonna be using that one of course without the fingers but yeah and I just realized uh right now a bit further and it is just that we have to rename um this chain names to match because if we use the ones that I just put it on uh for some reason in the Auto map chain that we'll see later um it just didn't match correctly so uh on the left arm you just put l arm in the right arm or arm in the left leg here and our leg right so like this basically later and the how to configure it will basically get it correctly it's because with the other names it just didn't work correctly okay yeah just change that only this four ones to the one that they have and that's it all right so now what we have to do is right click animation and go and create an ik there basically on here's where the magic will occur it's where we're gonna copy the um chain positions or all the bones from one rig into another one so in this case from the maximum character into our mannequin so we want to pick an animation uh a rig to copy the animation from which is going to be the maximum one that we created so on here I'm going to rename this into ik retarder and it's gonna be maximal two many equipment so I always suggest uh placing the name of the of the ik that you're gonna copy and then also to the one they're gonna paste them so now we can open and you can see we have our button here so now on here in the Target is the one that we want to select to paste basically the animations it's selected and we're going to place the ik mannequin so you can see that we don't have to do anything just like I explained before this is because we're going to content characters mannequins rigs there's already a mannequin rig created for us now you can see that we have our character on here so if we go into the asset browser and double click on reaction you will see that we start proving how our retarding animations will look you can see that really is looking pretty pretty good we're pretty much copying all the um you know the legs is pretty much perfect except for the arms Etc this is because the positions are not uh correctly aligned so just go up in here where it says add pose and now you can see the difference this one has the T pose this one has an A Pose so of course this just creates conflict on the copying and pasting of animations so we have to position this one as the tables over here so for this we're gonna just select the uh shoulders in this case the right one and just uh rotate this into around 60 degrees let's do also this one on the y-axis there we go now let's change a bit of the position and you can see that we still have to it's on tweaking just select the elbow and just rotate it around uh 40 degrees I think it's gonna be good and it's go up over here select this one and then also rotate around 40 degrees there we go so now if I get the edit post on here out you can see how it is starting to look pretty much perfect now we only have some problems well guess what on the hands on fingers and this is because it is the only thing that we are not retarding so basically we don't want to retarget the fingers in this case so just go into chain mapping and you see that we have successfully um gathered all of this and this is what I was saying before that we if we had changed the name uh from the ones that I have before this would have not debited correctly and anyway uh now we don't really have to click this button because it already has done it for us if you want you can click it but it's it's just by default but okay so now what we have to find is the fingers and just set them to none over here because the S mesh so the spine to the spine the head to the Head now the root is selecting the arm which is not the one that we want so you select spine and it will just be a bit better but okay now we have to put the all the fingers into none so let's just start with the left index um third cup cool something let's go like that this place none left index none the left middle none left meal none left thumb none left thinking on left thinking on ring now and the other thing no there we go and now we can go to the right ones scroll a bit down and you can see that we have here the right pinky uh this will be not right pinky now right ring no ring no right middle no from middle none right index known and right index none and then right thumb none and there we go you can see that now our character is much better positioned uh the hands in this case of course it is not exact because we are not copying exactly and retarding the fingers but like explained before you can do it create a new root chain and you select in the pink key to the end of the pinky the ring to the end of the ring and the all the right ones on all the left ones and then you can use basically mash them in here and it will work but in this case for this purpose I'm gonna do it but for me I I think it looks pretty pretty decent and pretty cool so now that we have all the retargeting set up we can then retarget specific animations so now we can just go back into our content browser go to content maximum tutorial and but we can I'm just gonna make this a bit better so all the models over here so from here to here to here sorry to hear here to here it's weird here all this going to models just you know have it more organized and there we go so what we got to do right now is uh this uh reaction animation for the mannequin so to have it just right click go into animation assets and they're going to see this I can which is duplicate and animation ads click on it and then on here we can select the ik retarder that we have just created which is the actual Maximo 2 mannequin so you select it and you can see that we have the source which is the Xbox from XML and then the third which is the mannequin uh that wants to now just press retarget and we can start copying the animations and pasting and then you can see that has taken us here and if we double click over here you can see that we have successfully copied the and the animation from Maximo into our mannequin so that was it guys if you enjoyed the video and found it helpful I really appreciate if you could like the video and subscribe we are so near reaching 2K subscribers so you're gonna help me out go ahead please I have lots of unwilling to fight tutorials out there in my channel so you want to check them out you're welcomed and now yes with all that said bye bye foreign [Music]

Channel: Gorka Games

Views: 36,190

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal engine 5, ue5mixamo retarget, tutorial, unreal engine tutorial, how to retarget mixamo animations, ue5 mixamo, ue5 how to retarget from mixamo, unreal engine convert mixamo animations, unreal engine 5 how to retarget mixamo to mannequin, unreal engine 5 retarget mixamo to any character, unreal engine 5 retarget mixamo to epic skeleton, unreal engine 5 how to retarget with new Ue5 features, how to retarget mixamo animations in unreal engine 5

Id: wO3LJet6pIc

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022