Unreal Engine 5 Retarget Animations Demo - with Rabbit Heart Character Shenya

hello everyone in this video I am going to show you how to retarget animations with this character Shino I am going to cover ue4 mannequin animations Paragon animations and ue5 animations as well as miimo animations you will see how we can bring those animations to this character before starting to be more clear I am going to use sha for this demo it's not the video to watch if you have costume characters although maybe it might helps but I am not sure below are the assets with animations that I am going to use in this demo starting with ue4 animations many animations on the Unreal Engine Marketplace are still based on ue4 mannequin so I will cover that first part two's animation starter pack is also based on ue4 mannequin then we look at how to retarget animations from one of the Paragon character bellica the same technique can also be applied to other Paragon characters then we look at how to retarget animations for ue5 characters I don't have any ue5 animation pack so I will be using the animations from the content pack finally we look at how to use mixim animations with shinya a brief overview on the retarget process first we have two sides of the characters one character want to copy animations from the other the other character has the animations we will need to prepare ik rigs for both sides and then create an ik retargeter that process the ik rigs to Output the animation the ik retargeter do the retargeting works and output the animations we can choose which animations we want and Export the animations from the ik retargeter all right let's Jump Right In we will create a new project and I am going to use Unreal Engine 5.3 for this demo while waiting for it to load we go to the epic games launcher and look for the animation pack that we want to use we will use the close combat anim set I got it when it's free for the the month we will also add shinya to the project then we will add the third person content inside it contains the ue4 and ue5 mannequins that we will be using after we added all the assets I also like to color the folder to make them easier to identify the third person content pack comes with three folders that I will mark it with a grayish color I will give all the animation packs a San color then I will create a new folder called retarget inside it I will put the ik rigs ik ret targeters t- poses and exported animations Etc since I will visit this folder frequently I shall give it a bright red color I will put all the ik rigs here it's just my preference you can also put it together with the skeletal mesh all right once we imported all we need let's check out the animations that we are going to retarget these are the animations for ue4 mannequin and we want to transfer them to shinya the the first thing we do whenever we import any ue4 animations is to make them compatible with content packs ue4 mannequin locate the mesh folder and find the skeleton to open it look for the panel called retarget sources we will add skeleton there if you couldn't see the window click on this retarget manager button then we click on the add skeleton button and choose the SK mannequin from the content pack there are two SK mannequin here pick the one from the third person content pack next we are going to create an ik rig for shinya we can create an ik rig by right clicking on the skeletal mesh and select create then select ik rig from the menu however we will need to create the chains manually but there's an easier way just copy the same setup from the ik rig that comes with the third person content pack this is the setup for the ik rig of the ue4 mannequin for shya we will just duplicate this ik rig and change the mesh inside duplicate this ik rig we will change the mesh inside to shinya the chains and Bone settings should translate over without issues the ik goals position looks slightly in the wrong position but it's an easy fix just select all the goals and reset their location and rotation that's it then we will create a folder to hold all the retargeter assets for shinya create a new ik retargeter open it and assign the source and Target ik rigs in the details panel move shinya aside a little bit and hide the debug displays in the asset browser we can see a list of animations of the ue4 mannequin we can play the animations to see how it looks on Shino there's some issues on the animations some of the problems comes from the source animation however the rest of the animations looks okay to me on the surface this this might be good enough but I am going to import a retarget pose that are more accurate press this button at the top to switch to show retarget pose select Target so we can import pose asset for shinya click on the create button from the drop-down menu select import from pose asset we can switch between different retarget poses to compare this is before and this is after run the retarget animation again and switch between poses to compare while we playback the animation there's some slight difference between the two poses but the pose asset that I create should be a tiny bit better from here you can export these animations out to use by the way if you see this feel free to skip to next part if you don't want to watch me preview animations let's check the feet contact in the side view uncheck Auto align FL to mesh notice that the left foot floats a bit from the ground we can tweak some settings for this specific animation we can use the blend to Source option to constraint the foot to the same position as ue4 mannequin in the root settings we can also adjust the pelvis up or down in the z-axis like so this is the result we can export this animation using this setting but remember to reset the settings because while the settings might work for this animation they might not work for the other animations another animation that will have problem is the back evade her hands are too far from the ground during the upside down pose and when she lands her land position is also too far from the original unfortunately I don't think it's possible to fix this with the ik retargeter actually we will most often find problems with animations where their hands or feet need to stay locked to an object weapons or floor we will be able to fix some of them by blending the ik to the source but I don't think all of the animations can be fixed inside the retargeter let's import another animation pack to show you the same process we will import the animation starter pack it's free and you can get it in the marketplace after import the animation pack we will see that the animation list in the asset browser doesn't have those animations we just imported just like what we did to the the close combat anom set the first thing we do after importing an animation pack is to find the mannequin skeleton that it use and make it compatible with the main skeleton that we have in the content pack after that if we reopen the animation retargeter we will find the animations from animation starter pack in the list of animations let's check out some of the animations since we are reusing the same ik retargeter everything should works like before I want to show you one of the an animation that have some problems and how we can fix it the hands are not in the correct position for this animation we can try blend to source to constraint Sha's hands to the same position as the mannequin here we can see we have snapped her hand skeleton to the same position as the mannequins using the blend to Source setting but since her hands is smaller there's still a wide space between her hands let me show you the before blend to source and after blend to Source this is before and this is after to fix this we can use the static offset to move the left hand hand in the x-axis we can also shift both of the hands up and down or forward and backward by tweaking the static offsets Y and Z values we can export this animation to keep this animation with these settings let's reset the settings because other animations probably looks better without it you can also tweak the root settings which let you adjust the pelvis position by the way if the feet sink into the ground you can fix it using the blend to Source setting and to move the feet up use the static offset setting next I am going to demo how to retarget Paragon character bellica let's import bellica from the the epic games launcher this is bellica and these are her animations so the first thing for Paragon character is not making the skeleton compatible we only use compatible skeleton for the ue4 mannequin what we will do first is create an ik rig for her I will duplicate the ue4 mannequins ik rig from the third person content pack and change the mesh inside just like what I did for Shino then I will create an ik retargeter to retarget Bell's animations to shinya open the ik retargeter and set the source and Target ik rigs first off Sha's shoulders looks a bit off switch to show retarget pose and we will see that bellica and shinya arms do not match in the same angle if we look at the skeleton the clavicle bones of bellica is also angled down a little bit more the retarget animations look strange because their retarget pose are not matching to fix this we will match their retarget pose I am going to use T pose because shinya already comes with a pose and it's also easy to create T pose for custom characters using the miimo auto riger bellica doesn't comes with at pose but we can create it easily using miimo Auto riger first we need to export Bell's mesh in the fbx export options remember to uncheck options that are not necessary we don't need things like vertex color level of detail Collision or morph targets go to mixo website mixim mo.com you need to register an account and login to use their service I have already registered and logined use the upload character button to upload our custom character once the character has been processed and rigged we can search for T pose and apply the pose on our character now bellica is in t pose we will export her without the skin because we don't need the mesh informations we just need the skeleton information in T pose after it's downloaded we can drag the fbx file into Unreal Engine to import it pay attention to the import options we don't want to import the mesh so uncheck import mesh in the skeletons field set it to bellica skeleton then click import we can ignore the error message for my own preference I like to put all imported T poses inside the retarget folder I will put all our customade T poses in the T pose folder so it's easy to locate them later open the T pose animation sequence that we just imported and we will create a pose asset now we are able to use this pose inside the ik retargeter go to the ik retargeter switch to source and import the pose asset for bellica run retarget animation again and check how the animation looks let's go to the side view and check the feat contact just for demonstrations I will export some of the animations feel free to skip to the next part which is about retargeting ue5 animations since I don't have any animation pack that are based on ue5 mannequin I will demo with the one in in the third person content pack remember that for your ue5 animations you need to make the ue5 skeleton compatible with the one from the third person content pack just like what we did for the ue4 mannequin the ik rig for ue5 manin is ready to be used and we have also already created the ik rig for shinya so we can now create an ik retargeter open it and set the source and Target ik rigs we also need to import a retarget pose I made to match ue5 Manakin import the UE 5A pose and that's all we need to do for retargeting ue5 animation I will play some animations to see how it looks this is our last demo I am going to show you how to retarget mixo animations to shinya first we will create a folder called miimo to hold the mesh its skeleton and all its animations then we will go to mixim website and download the mesh in t pose download the T POS mesh with skin it's good to rename the fbx file to mixim mode. fbx drag the fbx file into Unreal Engine in the import options uncheck physics asset uncheck animations and select create new material materal if the settings are correct we will have just these four assets I will create a material folder to put the two materials inside and then create an animation folder for the animations let's go back to mixim website again to get some animations I will pick a few of them when you download these animations remember to download them without skin it will gives you a smaller file size and when you import them unreal will autod detect that these are animations since there are no mesh informations inside after we imported our animations we will create an ik rig for the miimo character open the ik rig first thing first set the retarget route to the hips then start defining the bone chains starting with the spine bones following by the head chain which include the neck in the chain the left clavicle the left arm the left fingers and finally the left leg then we mirror the left to the right we can also set up the ik solver but since this will be the source ik rig having an ik solver is not going to do much the ik solver is only going to be useful on the target ik rig because then you will have those ik options to constraint the feet to the source animations feet for example we can now create the ik retargeter to retarget animations from miimo to Shino open the retargeter and set the source and Target ik rigs at the very beginning we can see something strange happening to shima's arm but that's because we haven't matched the retarget pose yet switch to show r Target pose so for miimo we are going to import T pose for shinya to match the T pose of miimo that's already there by the way I have added two new t- poses here T pose shoulder and T pose straight these are the t- poses with variations on the angles of the clavicle bones I will show the use case of t- pose straight in a minute but these are options for you pick one that looks the best for your specific situations I will import the default T pose first and I will turn on Bones display so we can take a look at the clavicles let's play some animations to see how it works okay but wait something's broken at her limbs that's caused by the incorrect chain mapping Unreal Engine have mapped The Twist bone B to the wrong bone chain since mixim skeleton doesn't have twist bones it should be set to none we can set all the twist bones mapping to none in one step using autom map chains that will also set those ik bones To None which is also what we want great the feet can be adjusted with the ik settings to make it stick closer to the ground which I am going to show you soon with another example for this animation the feet sink into the ground a bit much we'll see if we can fix it by setting the blend to source to one the feet are now sinking deeper than before but it also stay locked to the ground we can then adjust the static offset C value to pull the feet up another problem here is the intersection between the lower arm and the thigh I can try to adjust the static offset but it seems in this case that's not going to work I think the whole spine need to bend up to lift the two clavicles together with with the arms for this to work which unfortunately I don't think it's possible to fix an ik retargeter for this animation I think the shoulders droop a little this is a case where we can use another T pose the straight version to improve this situation we will import the T pose straight and turn on the displays of skeletons to see what's the difference between the default T pose and this version the default T pose has the clavicles B Bon close to straight but you can still see it angled down a tiny bit switch to the straight version to see it's exactly straight mixim clavical bone is very straight too so I think the straight version is better when you are retargeting miimo animations for the drunk walk animation the shoulder looks better with straight T pose too in this walk animation I want to highlight that the root bone are not moving which is a problem if you need a root motion I will create another video in the future to show you how to fix the root bone problem for any other non-root animations it should be fine though that's it hope you find this video helpful let me know if you have any problems in the comment section see you later I

Channel: Rabbit Heart

Views: 3,172

Keywords: unreal engine character, unreal engine5, animation retargeting, retarget animations, mixamo, paragon

Id: SrzN_egLZYk

Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023