[UE5] Mixamo to MetaHumans - UnrealEngine (IK Retargeter)

[Music] hello and welcome if you find today's tutorial helpful please like and subscribe it really helps in today's tutorial we are going to be retargeting mixamo animations onto a metahuman unlike my previous tutorials i am going to start from the very beginning and teach you every part of the process let's begin here i have unreal engine preview tube and i'm going to open up a blank project today you can choose a third person or whatever works best for you but for my purposes i only need a blank project so let's create that once unreal engine is open we need to first do some housekeeping i want to create a folder call this ik retarget team next i want to create another folder call this mixamo we'll be using these folders later next we want to open bridge you would do that here if for some reason bridge is not in the list like it is here for me go to plugins and type in bridge [Music] it will ask you to restart do that now [Music] okay once we've restarted we can close the plugins window now we want to go here and click on quicksilver bridge [Music] of course you will need an account with qixel i will presume at this point you already have an account with qixel.com you would click here to sign in and then once that process is complete we want to click on metahumans now i will not be using custom metahumans today i will be using a messy human reset which is freely available to everybody so you would choose one of these characters go ahead and do that you can either hover over and click this button here to download or you can click on the character and click download here [Music] i don't need to do that today i have already downloaded this preset and that is the preset that i am going to be using today once you have completed the download which will take a while depending on your connection and machine hit this add button and it will import a metahuman into unreal engine 5. once your metahuman is imported into unreal engine you will see these dialog boxes on each one of them click enable missing and you will be asked to restart the engine click restart now if you do get any of these dialog boxes just hit save selected the engine will now restart once unreal engine has opened back up we can now close bridge we don't need it anymore [Music] if you click down here on your content drawer it will open the content browser now we should have inside the metahumans folder our character [Music] we can drag that into the editor and go over here to the details panel click on location click here and it will set the character to zero zero [Music] okay that is our metahuman character imported next in your browser go to mixamo.com if you already have account click here to log in if you don't have an account click here to sign up you will need an account to proceed once logged in you will will be presented with this page what we would need to do first is obtain our miximo character today i will be using this why bot if for some reason this character is not in the window here you can click on characters go to the search box and type y bot and this character will be here you click on the character use this character there we go clear the search box right so before we do any kind of animations we need to export this character from mixamo and import it into unreal engine 5. so we hit download we choose fbx and t-pose hit download [Music] once this has completed go back to unreal engine [Music] now we are back inside unreal engine and we need to import our miximo character so click on the content drawer go to your content folder click on the miximo folder we created earlier and then inside this folder right click import to game miximo now what we need to do is go to my download folder and we need to click on our ybot fbx and import you will be presented with this dialog box hopefully you've seen this dialog box before but if you haven't this is where you would choose a skeleton and all the other import settings for now we are leaving it at default we are leaving skeleton empty because when we do this it will create a skeleton for our miximo character and that is what we want so hit import don't worry about these warnings they're not important at the moment okay so in our miximo folder now we have these files first i want to right click and create a new folder and call this materials next i'm going to drag our materials that were created into the materials folder next i want to click on our skeletal mesh and i want to rename this miximo [Music] and then go to the skeleton and rename the skeleton mixamo skeleton and also rename our physics asset to miximo physics asset and that's it now we have if we click on the skeletal mesh miximo character fantastic i'm going to save all now as a precaution [Music] now we are going to need mixamo animations so we're going to go back to mixamo.com now we want to click on the animations tab [Music] from here we're going to choose animations that we want make sure that you do choose animations with some root motion for testing purposes but other than that it's up to you what animations you choose right so we're going to choose an animation and we once we choose one we click on it and it will be displayed in this window from here you can adjust these settings to your liking there are plenty of miximo tutorials out there that teach you this i i'm not going to be changing any of the settings i'm just going to be simply using this animation as is okay so once you're happy with this animation what we want to do is click on download and choose fbx format frames per second is on 30 which we will leave and skin we want to choose without skin that is very important that here you choose without skin because we already have a skin that we have imported into unreal engine hit download once it has downloaded we go back to unreal engine okay back in unreal engine inside your miximo folder create a new folder and call that animations this is where we will store our miximo animations click on the animations folder and go inside right click import to game miximo animations and choose the fbx file that you just downloaded this time when the dialog box opens up you must choose the skeleton in our case it is called the miximo skeleton because that's what we named it in the previous process so with the miximo skeleton selected scroll down and change anything else you may need to change i don't need to change anything at this time hit import and now we have our first miximo animation imported into unreal engine [Music] now go back to miximo.com and download all the animations you need simply repeat the process i will do it one more time just for clarity so let's choose another animation i will choose this elbow punch so i click on it there we go hit download fbx without skin 30 frames per second and keyframe reduction is on none hit download [Music] go back to unreal engine inside your content miximo animations folder right click import to game mix amount animations select the file you just downloaded open in skeleton choose miximo skeleton hit import and there we go again repeat the process now for as many animations as you need i have now imported all my animations that i will be using today into unreal engine hopefully you've done the same it's time to now move on and re-target these animations earlier we created this ik retargeting folder let's click on that and inside i want to create some assets first we need to create two of these ik rigs so we right click go to animation go down to where it says ik rig and click there this dialog box then pop pops up and ask you to pick a skeletal mesh from here we're going to search for our miximo character and we click that we then want to name this miximo forgive me [Music] miximo ik rick next we need to create our metahuman ik rig now this one is slightly more complicated because we need to know which skeletal mesh we are using to do this we click onto our metahuman that we dragged into our scene earlier hit here edit blueprint it will then open up the metahuman blueprint it may take a while if this is your first time opening it inside our metahuman blueprint we want to make sure we click on here on viewport and then select body in the details panel scroll down to mesh and you will hear you will see skeletal mesh take note of this name here it says here f med [Music] u n w body what this means the f is for female med is for medium this here is for underweight and then the bodies for body so we know we are using the female medium underweight body this is important so remember this that is the body you are using for your metahuman we can now close the blueprint go back to your content browser and into our ik retargeting folder right click animation and create another ik rig this time you want to choose your body so for me it is f [Music] medium underweight and we are looking for this time preview if we click on that it will then create a new ik rig and we want to call this mh rig sorry ik brick and that's it we've now created our ik rigs first i want you to click on me on your miximo ik rig and this is what we have it's created an ik rig with our miximo skeletal mesh in it [Music] click on your metahuman ik rig and ensure that it's created a metahuman ik rig as you can see it's chosen the preview body that we selected you can choose from here other skeletal meshes but that's beyond the scope of this today and so just work with the preview mesh for your particular body let's close this for now right go back to your mixamo ik rig and here we are now going to create chains of bones for our skeletal mesh our first task with mixamo character is to click on hips right click and set retarget route click here and now it should identify that as our retarget route okay next we need to create [Music] chains of bones for our various bones here i like to begin with the spine so i click here or you can click here look on the various bones but i like to click here i choose spine i then hold down shift and i go all the way to neck here and i click neck with shift held down and it selects all those bones for you and as you can see highlighted here in green it has now selected out all our spine bones i then right click with those selected over here new retarget chain from selected bones this dialogue then pops up here we want to ensure the name is spine click ok great we now have a spine chain go back over and select head choose new retarget chain from selected bones now we have this dialog popped up with head click ok because we want to name it head now we have head selected at any time you can click on these chains and in green it will highlight the bones that are in that chain okay let's move on next i want to click here on the shoulder and just on that bone i'm going to new retarget chain from selected bones this time i'm going to rename this to larvical r hit ok then on the opposite side [Music] i select the bone i right click over here new retarget chain from selected bones and name this clavicle l [Music] now i want to do the upper arms so i select here and as you can see i have here right arm and i select new retarget chain from selected bones and i want to call this upper arm it is important that you name these in a specific order that you can remember and then between ik rigs you will see that we we name the bones similar sorry the same names so that will become more apparent later so anyway let's create an upper arm and do the same for the other side so here is left arm again a new retarget chain and we will rename that to upper arm l i've made a mistake here and i've named that l instead of r so we can just change the name here and there there we go so now we have a spine a head a clavicle r a clavicle l upper arm r and upper arm l now we're going to repeat this process i'm going to speed it up slightly but you would select the bones like for example now we're doing the forearm and and i will put my settings up on the screen shortly [Music] next we move on to the legs so far i have spine head clavicle r clavicle l upper arm upper arm left forearm right forearm left hand left and hand are [Music] for the legs we will break down the legs again into here we have right upper leg so we right click new retarget chain and we call this upper leg r and then i will speed up again and repeat the process [Music] [Music] for the feet i want to select these three bones here which are right foot right toe base and right toe end and newly target chain from selected bones boot r oops booked r [Music] and then repeat the process for the opposite side [Music] okay so far we have these [Music] bones great now we have to do the tricky thing which is the fingers which takes a little while so we go and find our left hand first and then below that you will see these fingers for the miximo character we skip this first bone i believe nope forgive me we select we first go to the left hand middle and then hold down shift and click on left hand middle four and then right click new retarget chain and we want to call this middle l and then we're going to repeat the process for the thumb the index finger the ring and the pinky [Music] so [Music] [Music] now we're going to repeat the process for our right hand so again start with the middle finger middle one hold down shift go to middle four now let's repeat the process [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so that's the fingers done yeah okay so i will say is i repeat i'll repeat what i've said in other videos where ensure that your naming convention remains the same from ik rig to ik rig it just helps with the auto chain setup later in the process which i will explain there we go so that is our miximo ik rig setup once it's set up you don't need to go back and do this again so i know it takes a long time but you can move this from project to project and it should work absolutely fine so hit save and close next we move on to our metahuman again like anything meta human there are a lot more bones in a metahuman and so the process is slightly more more complex looking it's not actually more complex at all so what we want to do first is select our pelvis right click and set retarget route so next to the pelvis now you should have retarget route now i need to create a spine chain so click on spine01 hold down shift and then click on neck zero two so all of those then new retarget chain from selected bones and it will give you this name of spine one we don't want that we want to call it spine and hit okay and that's it we should have our spine now look look there we go highlighted in green and then go over to head right click new retarget chain from selected bones and okay there are a lot of bones in this meta-human skeleton uh so next and normally i would just find the clavicle in this mess here i think it's possible to make the bones slightly smaller in the details panel i can't find a way to do that at the moment i presume that there is a way though but anyway so i'm going to choose clavicle l and right click new retarget chain from selected bones and it gives us the name clavicle l that is exactly what we want if you remember in the miximo character when we chose the bone up here around the neck and the shoulder we had to call it clavicle l that is why i did it it's because this bone up here is named clavicle l and there'll be other things that match that you'll see so anyway click ok and that creates a bone for our clavicle l now we need to find our clavicle r there's a lot here isn't that uh maybe if i click around oh so if i click up there it does find the clavicle okay so then new retarget chain from selected bones and there we go but now we've got a clavicle r and then we need to do our upper arm which is called upper arm l on here so right click on upper arm l new retarget chain from selected bones and it gives it another ml and then while we're over here because it's directly underneath choose lower arm and new retarget chain from selected bones this time i want to call this forearm forearm l and so now we've got that lower bone there but i've called it forearm right so let's go back over to the other side again i've clicked here and just so it takes me to the correct place on the hierarchy and upper arm r and select up yeah the names correct upper arm r and click ok then while we're over here again click on lower arm r right click new re target chain from selected bones it's named we want to name this forearm r and that's it i think our arms are now done so click on spine we have spine head we have a head clavicle we have a clavicle clavicle r on that side and then upper arm left forearm left upper arm are for arm r now we need to have the ands again you'll probably be better searching from this list because just look at that um so there we go find hand r new retarget chain from selected bones and it's the correct name already hand r then if we click over here and try and find the hand yep i think i hit it first time so hand l hand l is the correct name and there we go so now we have both our arms and both are our hands um next we need to move on to the legs so i will click on a bone here and it has selected the thigh that's great so new retarget chain from selective bones and we want to name this upper leg l there we go and i'm immediately going to jump over to the other side and select that bone there because i can see it the thigh r i'm going to name this upper leg r there we go yep that's selected and that's now created next we need to move down to our lower part of our leg which is calf l and new retarget chain from slits and bones and it's already named calf l that's what we want again these are the names that were in the miximo ik rig that is very important so we click on the other side calf r and select that there we go now we need to do the foot which is directly underneath the calf and we select foot are ball r and that's all i need to do on this foot so new retarget chain from selective bones and it's already named for r that's what we want and then on the other side we can click on the foot actually it's like foot l ball l and we target chain there we go and there we have it so now we've got our feet our calves our upper legs our hands our forearm upper arm forearm upper arm clavicles a head and a spine so now we need to do the fingers i'm not going to do the toes i just don't really see the point of it at the minute so because our miximo character does not have toes so there's no point right so we next we need to do the fingers so i presume that under the hand so we find the hand and there we have it our hand so we need to find our fingers and on the metahumans it starts with the ring finger here um so we find our ring finger which is ring zero one r ring zero one r and then we simply go down to uh ring03r hold down shift and click on that and it selects those three bones that is all we need for our retargeting purposes today with the finger just those three bones there are a lot more bones in in the in the ring finger but we don't need them so let's just keep this simple new retarget chain from selected bones and we want to name this ring r because that's what it was called in our miximo ik rig now we the next finger if we scroll down is our pinky choose pinky zero one pinky zero two and pinky zero three or choose pinky zero one hold down shift and choose pinkie zero three it selects those three pinky bones and new retarget chain from selected bones and we name that pinky r now we have a right pinky finger next we scroll down and the next one seems to be middle finger so we click on middle 0 1 r middle 0 3 r with shift held down and it selects those three middle finger bones and we name this middle ensure it's named correctly middle oh there we go then we scroll down and the next bone is uh thumb 0 1 r thumb 0 1 r hold down shift click on thumb 0 3r with those three bones selected new retarget chain from selected bones and thumb r and that's it we have done our right hand i believe oh no i can't count we've only got four fingers which where i come from is quite normal choose index 0 1 r and index 0 3 r and hold down shift select new target new retarget chain from selected bones [Music] name that index r okay so we have a ring finger you're not going to be able to see these highlighted because they're hidden under all these so ring r pinky ring middle r thumb r and index are there you go and what we're going to do now is go over to the left hand again if i click over here it takes me kind of over to the left hand and we're going to repeat the process for all those finger bones now i'm not going to talk through all of those i'm going to speed up the video but it's exactly the same as the other side except that this time you will be naming things with underscore l so to begin i choose thumb 0 1 l then i select thumb 0 3 l and with those three bones selected i create a new chain and name it thumb l now i'll repeat the process as on the other hand [Music] [Music] we now have all our bones in place hopefully i haven't forgotten a and what i'm going to do is just drag this out and i'm going to do this you don't have to do this this is just to show you on your screen the chains that i have set up [Music] that is our ik rigs now set up for both miximo and metahuman it's time to move on to the ik retargeting close our ik rig in our content ik retargeting folder right click go to animation [Music] go to this time go to ik retargeter and click on that this dialog box then pops up pick an ik rig to copy animation from we want to copy animation from our miximo character because that's the animations we downloaded so we in this instance we select mixamo ik rig and we will call this miximo retargeter there we go and then we click on that and this window will now open this is our new ik retargeter itself as you can see our miximo character is here and all of our imported mixamo animations are down here in the asset browser the first thing we must do is choose a target ik rig in this instance we are retargeting to a metahuman so from here we choose our metahuman mh ik rig that we created so we click there and as you can see it has loaded in our preview mesh now what we need to do before we go any further is check that our chain mapping is set up correctly so we hit here on chain mapping there is a button here to auto map chains but it does it automatically when you first load up your ik rig but if you make changes in your ik rig you can hit here and it will reload what we need to do is go through and just ensure that our target chain and source chain the chains match up so this is our metahuman on this side and this is our miximo on this side so as you can see he's done spine head clavicle upper arm forearm hand thumb ring pinky l middle l index yeah okay so it is very important to go through and just double check that it has done it 99 of the time as long as your naming convention is correct it will it will work here and you won't have to do any changes okay so i think we're absolutely fine there we go yeah so if for some reason one of these chains doesn't match up say it chose the thumb chain for your head you would just change it here it is as simple as that to to to match up if your naming is different between uh your ik rigs then obviously you would have to change it here too just so the chains of bones matched up right let's move on as you can see with our metahuman there is a problem and that problem is it is not posed correctly at the moment now with the mannequin you have to go through another step to retarget to the mannequin but we don't have to do that here with a mixed mode character so what we need to do is go up to new pose and we're going to name this pose miximo to mh to metahuman and then click on edit pose here the bone controls are quite large at the minute and so i can't see anything so on the details panel scroll down a little and you'll see this draw bone sorry bone draw size if you make that smaller it will make these bone controls smaller there you go so it's whatever works best for you alter that and then you can see your bones next i just want to move our character over slightly to uh maybe 160 and it just moves it slightly away and so it gives us room to work with right so looking at it we need to match this pose with this t-pose the best we possibly can now it's i don't like this process it's virtually impossible to get it to match spot on but it's what we have to work with so right so first i'm going to click up here and just [Music] right so the bones are moving too much so what i will do is go up here and i want to set this to 5 degrees and that means it will just move in 5 degree increments there we go so with that now done i click back on that bone and i just want to move this up five maybe again you may find a better way to do this than me and your numbers may be different to mine i'm just doing it this way for today right so and then i will lift that up to maybe 50 degrees yep and then the other side to 50 degrees and then the hand bone needs to go up to maybe 15 degrees and [Music] 15 degrees on the other side yeah the legs need to go in five degrees maybe they do look quite close together don't they okay let's look at the feet maybe the feet need to come in five degrees too there we go there we go so the legs are closer together that may create problems so let's pull the legs back out five degrees and instead i'm gonna go up to here where we chose our five degrees and choose two point eight one two and then move it two point eight one [Music] that's a little better then i'm gonna go back up here and choose five degrees again yep that's fine right so that looks good from the top uh you may [Music] now it may have been a second for you but it has just taken me three and a half hours to get to this point and the reason for that is i had eight or nine crashes from unreal engine preview two if you are experiencing those crashes when you are retargeting animation i will give you a tip now during this posing process ignore the fingers in unreal engine preview 2 do not do not pose the fingers or this retargeting process will fail and you will have a crash it's as simple as that this book does not exist in newer builds of unreal engine so i presume it will be fixed in a release so do not re touch the fingers in unreal engine preview 2. anyway let's continue i need a rest now uh you may have to zoom in and go to these finger bones and do these two by five degrees each finger and this is a tricky one so i'm going to speed up the video okay so on that side i move most of the bones five degrees if you do need the numbers again you're probably going to do a better job than me i'm not that great at this um but he looks about right on there anyway we need to repeat the process now on the other side [Music] i'm reasonably happy with that i'm sure problems may uh crop up later but there we go right so what we need to do now as you can see if we look from above the arms need correcting still so i will click here go to top and then we will match these bones up to as well there and there and the hands are slightly off so we bring those back hmm okay and that's it we now have a pose that almost matches it's pretty close anyway we hit head edit pose once you're happy and that's it we are ready to go now we go over to our asset browser and at this point we can choose an animation and it should retarget there you go we are having a problem look here [Music] where something is not quite right so my first check would be i would go to these auto map chains and just double check one more time [Music] okay there is the problem you see i have missed something and i'm gonna go up a leg and that was creating the problem look so 90 of the time for whatever reason it's just the way my brain is it will miss something minor like that um i mean it probably would help if i had my glasses on today but there you go uh now it's retargeted and it's pretty close let me zoom in i just always like to check the hands because you do get some strange behavior what i will suggest is that if you do have any uh imperfections is once retargeting is done although it's a bit of a task for those animations that haven't quite retargeted correctly go in and edit the animations in the usual way anyway with that done we can now retarget these animations to our metahuman so i'm going to select all of these animations there we go you don't have to choose all of them you can choose which ones you want to retarget but i am going to retarget all of them then click here to export animations and it's going to ask for a folder to save them in we want to go to our metahumans folder and i'm going to create a new folder there and call that animations there we go click ok and now it will export those selected animations to that folder and retarget them for you there we have it after many many hours for me and not so long for you we have our animations in our content metahumans animations folder uh we can click on the various ones look there's a punching animation and so on and so on they're all the ones that i downloaded with that done i just want to show you one more way you can now retarget because you've got these uh ik rigs and ik retargets set up go into your miximo folder animations and you can simply select all of these like so you can right click like that go to retarget animation assets duplicate and retarget animation assets and it will open up this dialogue from here choose your ik retargeter which is our miximo ik retargeter as you can see it's loaded our skeletal meshes don't worry if they look strange here or if they're not in the same pose it will not affect uh animation retargeting you can add a prefix a suffix you can search or you can replace uh in your file name um hit change go to metahumans animations click ok and retarget and it will now retarget our animations into our animations folder and we will be able to use them on a metahuman and here we are so with this second method we have now retargeted our animations again right i'm going to show you how to place these one of these animations onto your actual metahuman here is our metahuman make sure she is selected and make sure that the blueprint itself is selected so the the top of the hierarchy hit add and then click live and you're looking for live link skeletal animation click on that then go to auto activate and ensure that's ticked and then what we need to do is select the body here and from here ensure that use animation asset is selected and then we can it says anim to play we drop down this list and here are our retargeted animations so let's just choose an appropriate one and there we go so that's selected go back down scroll back down to your live link and hit auto activate again and there she goes she'll just dance [Music] our viewport and that's it that's the end of the tutorial if you found this tutorial helpful today please like and subscribe it really helps also if you'd like to share via social media please do that that helps too up next i have some dance to unreal tutorials and also uh custom meta-humans with daz bodies and and meta-human heads and i'm hoping to bring you with that to you in the next couple of weeks thanks for watching and i will see you soon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jobutsu

Views: 76,922

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

Id: W5ZYUlkaq5s

Length: 55min 52sec (3352 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022