Tweaking and converting animations with a Custom Retargeter - Daz to Unreal

I just wanted to show you why this magic actually happens and what this magic retargeter asset is and where it's hiding if you in case you wanted to make any changes so this isn't perfect the one that comes with the dash to Unreal plugin there's some tweaks that might be necessary let me show you where that is so under plugins there's Dash to Unreal content and in here there's a folder called retarget if you go in that this is the G9 retargeter that we've used so if I wanted to make any changes to that it's advisable not to do that in either the engines or the plugins folder so I would probably prefer you go and left click and drag the G9 retargeter out and put it into your project here copy it over there and then make changes on that so I'm going to rename mine mirror retargeter and then I can make some changes here so double click there to open that and this is now where the retargeting magic happens and the Epic said in the documentation that this is possible to use this as a pause converter as well as a live retargeter and live for time is what we're doing so at the top here under Source this is the mannequin that Unreal Engine provides this is Manny this is the mail mannequin so at the preview mesh I can also go and type in Quinn like we saw it in the viewport there we go that is now the female mannequin and then on the bottom here we have the G9 ik rig that also comes from the plugin and here we can now pick mirror our skeleton mesh and there's the two side by side so if I wanted to make any changes on this I think the first thing I'm going to switch off is the debug drawer that gets rid of these green lines and we can also go and change the target mesh offset here 128 is the default if you set that to zero then they're both on top of one another and that's good if you wanted to make broader adjustments sometimes smaller adjustments you can't quite see so the arms and legs they're all fine but the fingers they need a bit of adjustment so if I put this back to 120 you can see that the queen fingers are a little bit more bent than the Genesis figures and that means that if you go and look at pauses and especially look at fingers they might you know stick out a little bit and you know that is something you can tweak here I might show you that in another video in fact I might show you this now in your target switch over to the Target head over to edit pause and then you can go and pick a bone that you want to change here so if I go and look at the fingers they all need to be bent by a rotation of 10 so let's find them in previous versions of Unreal Engine we could select them here in 5.0 but we can't do that anymore so I'm gonna have to pick him from here so we don't have the fire upper shoulder left hand let's start with the index finger here so select the index finger and then just bend that over by 10 and then you go on with the next one and you bend that over by 10 as well there's a little bug actually the moment you select this you have to move the viewport around for it to kind of wiggle and now the fingers look similar than what you had here in the Unreal Engine scale it's maybe a little bit too much but you get the picture this is something that you need to fine-tune on a per character basis so we're done with the finger let's go on to the middle finger same thing left click and drag that down by 10. I'm just going to go 10 just because you know it that seems to be working okay middle finger done so it's a little bit you know it takes a little bit of patience yeah so if you select a finger and then you want to move this and it doesn't immediately react just wiggle the Viewpoint like in my case I can't do anything here and I'm gonna have to go and just wiggle the viewport and then it works at each of these Bend IN by 10 until you're done okay that's that now that we've made a change we can have a look or we need to get out of edit mode first and then we can go and see what this looks like so you can pick an animation like walking for example walking forward so here you have these two different types of animations MF means mannequin female and mm means mannequin male so you can use them both so mm means this is the mail walk but that doesn't look as live as the female walk so this is not what a female character would be like it'll be the male character so we'll we'll talk about that when we transfer male characters so right now let me go and try walk and then I can say walk an MF walk here double click that and then we can see that this is more like a female walk now there we go and then you can make adjustments and judgments of saying hey is this good does anything needs adjusting you know so slow down the animation speed up here so that you can catch things better so if you think hey yeah the the index finger could probably bend down a little bit more or you know bending needs to be adjusted what not you can do that for now I think I'm pretty happy and I can use my custom retargeter now for this shoulder Target pause brings us back to this and that's all this to it so live retargeting means that this retargeter is being used live as we play the game I'm gonna go and open my animation blueprint again and give this node our custom retargeter so mirror retargeter so that my changes actually work and then I can go and play my game again and there she is now with corrected fingers perfect so this is now using my custom retargeter so the retargeter just to bring this to a close here the retirector is a is this magic pause and animation conversion tool and you can use it live like we do here but you can also go and transfer these so that it becomes playable on a custom character if you wanted to do that and just to show you how that works if we wanted to grab one or multiple animations you would select them and then export the selected animations out and then you pick a new directory like say in here I might go and make a new folder called Mirror animes and then in here you can go on choose to rename these things I'm going to keep them as they are and hit export and then these animations have now been translated so that they're playable on our new custom character without the retargeter so that's basically the retargeted doing the work offline we've saved out the animations and they can now be applied directly to the skeletal mesh if we bring in our mirror here and turn her around once again we could go and apply that animation asset directly to her in the details panel so we're not going to use a blueprint here we're going to use an asset and then we're going to go and have a look what they are so there's only three those are the three that are compatible with my skeleton so I'm going to go and pick the first one here MF walk forward and when I do that then she looks like this it's almost like she's about ready to walk but she's of course not quite walking yet and that's because we need to go and switch if we wanted to preview this life we need to switch Unreal Engine into simulation mode so up here where the play button is the three dots icon head over here and switch to simulate and then she starts walking around like there's no tomorrow so very very cool I hope you got a lot out of it principle is the same if you now wanted to use mixer more animations or anything from their studio in this way you can do that I'm going to show you next how to fix the clothing and how to bring in the hair so stay tuned for that

Channel: The WP Guru

Views: 5,036

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Id: 2g6vS8cAuz0

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023