[UE5] [DazToUnreal] (part 3) DazStudio Characters in UnrealEngine 5

[Music] hello and welcome this is the third installment of my dance to unreal tutorial if you like anything you see today or it is helpful please like and subscribe it really helps we now continue where we left off in the previous video enjoy next i want to go to our level blueprint by clicking up here open level blueprint and as you can see on event begin play i've dragged off searched for cine and set cinematic mode then you check here and compile and what this will do is on play it will go into cinematic mode now i'm not a game developer i use unreal engine for cinematics so that's the way i set it up if you want to do this for games etc then obviously you would do it differently now create a sequence so we click up here click add level sequence um where will we store in tutorial cinematics does tutorials and create a shot shot to save and it will open that up we want to set the frames per second to 24 [Music] and click save i want to save all now because this is where things sometimes start crashing right what i want to do next is dragging my camera and as you can see it's already created a camera cut track automatically i do want to extend the length of this shot to 500 frames so i'll do that there and then drag the camera cut all the way to the end okay for now that's fine we need to now uh select our let me just get rid of those from there right select our character so there they are and drag that into the sequencer to hit save again now from here hit track and select body so track animation idle retargeted and we drag that all the way to the end for now and save i constantly save at this stage because i've had so many crashes with unreal engine 5 right so i want to go back to our character in the outliner and click on body yep it's already set to itself to custom mode that's why i want i want to make sure that animation is on custom mode right so if you hit play as you can see our character is now idle if we stop the animation stops that's what we want we want full control right so next i am going to add a camera animation i have one already imported and i will open it up here and there now what this camera animation does is a template i will show you where to get it shortly and what it does if it adds camera movement look to your camera makes it move around okay and this is where it's from okay so this camera animation is from a pack and it's this cinemotion two real handheld camera motion kit now whatever this guy is at currently asking i can't see at the moment it was around 22 pounds i don't know why that is dollars uh buy it don't even question it just buy it this kit is amazing it's just simply you drag in animations like i just showed you you by using shake you may get something similar but these are real camera movements and the expertise that went into these are absolutely amazing so that is and once again cinemation 2 real handheld camera motion kit i this is the best purchase i've ever made okay so we've got a bit of camera movement now but what i want to do is do a panning shot just for experimentation that's how i will start a sequence of shots i will start with one and then i know what i'll need to do from there so let's do that now right so go to transform so inside your camera go to transform and if transform isn't there for some reason click on here and add transform from there right the first thing i want to do is create keys for all of these transforms here so there we go and now it's created keys for us what i want to do next is move on the x axis like so and maybe forward and then i want to rotate slightly that way and up don't worry about the focus for a moment we'll do that in a second okay so let's scroll up to our manual focus distance set a keyframe and then adjust that until she is in focus in fact what we'll do is set that really low so it's really blurry and this is where the diaphragm settings were really important as you can see it's a lovely blur right what we need to do is move forward maybe 20 frames and then focus in on it like so i think we're that okay so when we hit play it suddenly focuses and that's what we want uh i do want to move further over and rotate a little bit more and keep moving so it's like we're at the side of her and then what i want to do is click here and go all the way to the end of the sequence um and then we're going to try and move to the other side of this and rotate there we go and i want to move slightly closer and scale up sorry pitch it up slightly yep and then we're going to focus there back in honor there we go and so now what we have is [Music] i want to play with the lighting slightly even though i have set it up previously i do want to do that so what i want to do is um we need to somehow we're in cinematic mode i want to go to show and make sure in post processing show post processing and i want to make sure that i adaption is switched off and so we're not getting auto exposure now right so let me i want to zoom in in front of her and what we're going to do is move the right lights around pretty good as they are but you know it's always good to try something different so we'll turn off the lights all the lights one by one okay so all we've got now is an ambient light so if we turn the ambient light off it goes dark except for the glow behind which is coming from this air glow here so we'll turn the ambient light back on and we need to make sure that our ambient light i want it to be slightly cold no just slightly warm just maybe what we're trying to do is make sure it's not perfect white because that's terrible for rendering perfect black or perfect white is is not very good for rendering so we just want it to be slightly off maybe a blue [Music] you can barely see it but uh it's not white so we click okay then we go to our background light and as you can see this just simply illuminates behind her and the light is just simply pointing at this mesh and that's what we get there we go you see perfect okay what i might do with the background like though is just yeah just slightly increase the radius um the brightness is fine i think so yeah the brightness is fine let me go back down to 30 and then our top light is this one here and as you can see right yeah just slightly increase the radius the brightness is fine i think yeah the brightness is fine let me go back down to 30 and then our top light is this one here and as you can see this lights the top of her head and her shoulders it's coming from slightly behind and pointing down if we zoom out can we see this um where's the top light there so it's pointing down onto the back of the head i'm not a lighting expert i just know what i like and through experimentation i get the results that i want for a particular shot right so now we have a lighter above her and then we have two key lights this one is lighting her from this [Music] direction we go and again with the any of these lights you would adjust the color of them the brightness until it works for you maybe this color doesn't work for those um so i'll just play around with the lights uh i do like that but because we've got a white background and maybe just go back into the blue yeah about there i quite like that and then obviously you can move this light around by changing where its position is i quite like that i want this side of the face to be shadowed though i quite like that there we go just make it a little bit softer perfect then we need to go to this one and this one i think is like a pink yeah yeah i can see that so [Music] i've got it as a pink at the moment let me just i think it was fine now i i kind of like that which is like a a violet and it's very subtle if we'll turn it up look but he's just just awesome so that's 20 and then again we can move that around and depending on where it is it will have a greater or lesser impact [Music] there we go again there is no formula to what i am doing i'm just doing it by eye i just i'm just it's like painting a picture i just i want certain parts of the character to be lit a certain way i can't tell you where that comes from it's just somewhere inside and yeah there we go right i'm going to click here and this will take us back to our main camera so hit play now now we've changed the lighting this is what we have i'm reasonably happy with that um maybe we're focusing slightly too much on her breasts and so i will lift this up and [Music] up yep and then as we go through so about there i want to be up here and maybe point down yep and also here i just want to adjust the focus so we're focused on it there we go and then by the end yeah we have dropped back down but that's fine so here we go yep i like that i do it doesn't matter if it goes out of focus every now and again it doesn't have to be in focus all the time [Music] yep i'm happy with that okay uh next been at this now for maybe six hours so i'm gonna stop for a break and then i will move forward okay so what i've done is i've taken a couple of days away from this and had a bit of a rest and i came back and i made some changes but i forgot to record so some of it is missing and i do apologize for that what we have is i've changed the character slightly and what i've essentially done is worked on the materials so now the character looks like this now it may look like i've made massive changes i haven't all i have done is uh change the color of our geo suit um adjusted the normals and the roughness a little i've also worked on the metallic quality of it so the skin and the head if you look they're just ever so slightly metallic and i've been able to get the roughness off what was stopping me i forgot that it was a clear coat material so it was constantly shiny all the time and that's not what i wanted and i really struggled with that and it i was just very tired and the break helped me solve the problem so i still have the same master material i've now broken it down into skin cut out emissive roughness skin mixer clear coat normal and here is the specular with the geosuit from dash studio there was a mission cut out for that and so if we turn around and look at the back and down the legs and on the arms you can see that there's an emissive on there now and that is controlled it is relatively simple so inside our master material there is an emissive color and then it's very simple look in this commented section we have the emissive cut out which came from that studio and for each for the torso the face the arms except that they have an emissive cut out then a color which we can control from the outside i think i currently have it set to orange but by default it's red and then that simply goes into a lerp and then we multiply that by whatever this is to add brightness or turn down the brightness and it's as simple as that and then that gives you this result there we go and obviously in the material instance let me just forgive me let me go to torso here in our material instance what i have now is see there's an emission and a way to control that and then an emissive collar and it's as simple as that and so that's what i've done changed the colour worked on the roughness clear coat and emissive i want to show you that if you look at this idle animation let me just turn off the camera a moment as the character is animated idol she seems to be breathing and she's blinking i want to just quickly show you how to do that so when we first imported our character it if you don't remember that go back and have a look i made sure i brung across sorry brought across two morphs one was eyes closed and one was mouth open and the reason for that was so i could animate inside unreal engine so let us go to this idle animation so where are we um here we are i'll open up our idle animation so go to where your idle animation is here she is and i've pressed stop for a moment but when i press play low and that's all it is it's looping so what i have here is we have eyes closed and what i want to do is i will create a backup for this animation give me a moment so duplicate and we'll call this version two idol retargeted version two let me open this one up [Music] one moment there we go right so i'm actually going to delete these curves here and start again so now if i hit play the eyes are no longer blinking and the mouth is no longer opening so what we want to do is we make ensure you've got the morphs so we know we've got an eyes closed uh look click that back on auto and our mouth open there click that back on alto again all right what we want to do is go to curves click here add curve then search for eyes closed [Music] and then click on eyes closed and edit curve at the beginning add a key or you can use your middle mouse button ensure it's on zero zero and then go to the end you can use your middle mouse wheel to scroll out and then at the end or close to the end add key and we'll set that to 4 here and so this is where it is on the timeline this is the value so then what i want to do at random points is just add keys again you can use your middle mouse button just to click and it will create a key click in fact that's a lot quicker click click and click now i want to do is go to the middle key out of these three i'm simply gonna go up here type one and then go to here the middle one of these type one again basically every time it goes to one her eyes will be closed every time it goes to zero her eyes are open so this is what we got let's hit play blink blink there you go and it's as simple as that so then let's create another curve oh sorry let's stop the animation first hit you can click here to go back to the beginning or there slightly off the screen there to go to the end we want to go to the beginning and click on curves add curve and we'll find our mouth open [Music] hip curve on the mouth open track edit curve place a keyframe at zero and one as close to the end as possible yep again i will set that to four oops i probably made a mistake in the other one it should be within the animation range so you can see that ends here on around 90 there so that's where we'd want it to be but anyway so then i will again click in some random places i mean you can be methodical if you want to do it on bang on one second it says it here or two seconds and so on so anyway we'll click here here here here and here and then i will i want it to be do it slightly away from the blinking so then i would i think this time not point a i don't i don't want the mouth to be fully open up you see it's too much i just want it to open a little so not 0.4 and then this one i want to do it again here and 0.6 and so then every time it goes here look it'll open slightly and then opens at the end so then our finished animation is this let's zoom right into my face there you go and so she's blinking and her mouth opens slightly now obviously in death studio you can export as many as these morph targets as you want it will the more you add though the longer it will take to export and then import into unreal i will say that but you know it's a so say you have uh bought a morph pack with various facial expressions this particularly works well with genesis 8.1 characters they have better facial expressions so you can bring those entire morph packs over into unreal i don't tend to do that because as i said it takes a long time on my machine i haven't got a top quality machine and so it does take a while and it kind of interrupts the flow of my creative process so i tend not to do it but if i can sometimes i will okay back in our scene i have turned some of the lights off i have been working with the lights as well and i did forget to record that um so i'm going to try and start again so obviously i showed you all the top light and the back light before and what i'm going to do now is work on this key light which is blue i do actually like where it is at the moment maybe just pull it out slightly like this and it's giving that blue to that side of the face okay then we need to go to the second key light that's a bit bright okay that's a little better so if we just move it back and forward like this to around there um yeah around there so if we turn it off on off on and that's what we have let me save all and let's go to our camera and that's what we have now let's just hit g to go into game mode and there we go that's what i have i i really do like the look of that if i could i'd like to change the color of this but start to get beyond the scope of this tutorial i may just give it a go just give me one moment this is what i've come up with i wanted the the bodysuit to be slightly whiter than our metallic skin here okay so with that we are now going to go into creating an uh another level so you can select let me just put the one we created before give me a moment and i think it was shot too wasn't it so this is what we had before and with the new colors this is what it looks like sorry i'm not in cinematic mode let me try again and now this is what we've got yeah i'm i'm very happy with that at the moment in an ideal world you may have seen it in the intro to this tutorial i would like this suit to be kind of a skin color but i'm okay with this kind of like a like a light gray isn't it i i'm quite happy with that i think it goes with like the metallic face and such right what we're going to do now is this scene here we have just a collection of animations and various camera movements and what i'm going to do because i've already done this is i'm just going to break it down for you i thought that would be a better approach and there we go now the inspiration for this is actually what you're seeing on screen now so let me go to here so if you look at this animation i was listening to music which is often now how i get inspired to do things i'll be listening to music and then i like visualize something inside my head based upon the music it's just how my brain works so with this the animation didn't re-target correctly now watch the neck me click through let's see if we can see it look so there there is a problem with the retargeting and the neck is out of place but played at speed at 24 frames per second it's kind of a creepy zombie sort of dance because of those faults and this happens to me quite a lot where i will find something that i really like from something completely unexpected and then that ends up being the centerpiece for whatever i'm doing so a lot of the time i don't really plan things out it just seems to happen and then i will build around that anyway enough jibby jabber let's move on so as you know before we have a camera and we have our blueprint for our character in here then if we go down to body we have our animation now what i have here is some retargeted animation they came from a genesis 8 character i think inside dash studio now if you don't know how to import dash studio animations please go back and watch the first part of this tutorial series where i showed you how to do that because because that is all i've done i've just imported those and then i have retargeted onto a genesis 3 character which are system three system 50 characters sorry and what have is a this animation click here like so and if we go to the preview mesh and just look on our standard genesis 3 character look that's all it is it's just a robot dance which again i i was listening to music i was looking at the character that i was creating and i thought that the use of this robot dance would be it would just fit together there we go okay and then we have another robot dance i think this is the one that didn't re-target properly let's have a look yep see the neck is just slightly off for whatever reason now i haven't used all of that i didn't like all of the animation and what how you would do that is when you're bringing in animations let me just pull this down for you you can pull it down and it will create a separate animation track is uh you can choose where the animation starts and finishes just by dragging like this look and it will remove frames from the beginning or the end of the animation now in unreal engine 5 animation blending is fantastic as you can see here look if we there it it blends together and then there are these options here where you can match uh with a previous bone i haven't got matching turned on in this but you can choose rue or pelvis or thigh he says just play play with that and you will find that it's really useful sometimes but most of the time i tend to find that unreal engine just seems to now it just seems to blend the animations together look it's just amazing but anyway that's what i had i have a collection of these robot dancers and that's how i created the intro scene to this video onto rendering i would normally use movie render queue to render my movies it's a little more advanced so i'm not going to be doing that today we're going to do a basic render and i'm going to be outputting png images now you can take them png images and you can bring them into something like davinci resolve import them in and create a video from those separate images so in order to do that we would click here and we go to render movie now you could from here of course choose uh an avi if that's what you wanted to do i wouldn't advise that i i would at least work with png or exr it is probably better if you have the space on your hard drive and the machine to do it to use an exr and [Music] bring that into something like davinci resolve but today we'll use png um my frame rate is 24 frames per second obviously if yours is different you can you can override it here but it's better to say inside your level sequencer here uh so i'm at 24 frames per second that is because i have a gtx 1080 ti that's what i do all my work on and anything above 24 frames per second at 4k is going to crash basically yeah i just i i haven't yet managed to do it so but i like working at 24 frames per second anyway it's just something i'm used to inside a camera and so on uh the resolution as i said is at 4k and that's that uh i never touched compression quality for these quick renders output directory we click here and you would choose where you want to store your png sequence you can write an edit decision list or final cut pro i never touch any of that um and we want a cinematic mode set here those are the defaults you can choose a beginning and an end frame if you would only like to render a certain portion of your sequence and then simply what we do here is uh let me just change that folder because i've already rendered this out to new and we'll call this number eight for me there we go and then we hit capture movie so basically it will create png images inside your folder which you can then stitch back together and create a video sequence once your rendering has completed you will have a collection of png images i'm just trying to open them for you there we go and if we click through like so what we're doing is clicking through this folder full of images here [Music] what we have is this okay and then you would import that into davinci resolve or or similar software that accepts png images and it would stitch them together like this and then you would have video okay so that is the end of this part it's slightly shorter than before up next i am going to be bringing in a daz character with air and it is possible that that will be uh a character that has a meta human head so does body meta human head and hopefully that is gonna work out fine as i said i don't usually plan these things they just kind of fall into place when i have a vision inside my head and i slowly do things and then i just if i can't get something right i would stick it until it's done i i never give up and one thing i will say is during the creative process like with this character i will go out i will walk in nature i will just go away from the computer i will go and do something completely different whether it's spending time with family or whatever and it just gives you a fresh perspective anyway i hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you found anything useful in this tutorial today please like and subscribe it really helps as i said up next i'm hoping to do jazz bodies with meta human heads [Music] you

Channel: Jobutsu

Views: 3,409

Keywords: UnrealEngine, Character Creator, Actorcore, Iclone, Daz Studio, Metahuman, Mixamo, Quixel, retargeting, Blender, Unreal Engine, UE, tutorial, howto, how to

Id: gfP_SeIOs70

Length: 39min 5sec (2345 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022