Using Synty Characters in Unreal Engine 5.1 with Live Retargeting

hello everyone in this episode I want to do a little bit of Unreal Engine fiddling in particular I'm going to show you how to set up these cinti characters with the newfangled Unreal Engine 5.1 setup so it's changed significantly from back in the day in Unreal Engine 4 in which we had to retarget the animations in this case we're not doing that so this is definitely Unreal Engine 5. look at the foot ik we have it and it's live and the cinti character is being driven with the Unreal Engine skeleton Quinn in place and we're going to do this with the help of a retargeter asset and so this this whole animation process here is happening live under the hood let me just quickly show you how this works in my third person character this is the cinti mesh and that is in fact parented to the regular Quinn mesh which is this one and the mesh is set invisible so if I go and make that visible then you can see that underneath it there's really that original mannequin driving this and the beauty of this is that a we don't have to retarget any animations and B we have an independent animation blueprint that will be driven from the bone rotations of the original skeleton so let's have a look how to set that up from scratch all right so I have a new project here that is the third person template without startup content the only thing that I've just migrated into this are the polygon nightclub assets here from the project when I hit play then we can walk around with Quinn so let's go and replace her with a cinti character I would escape and have a look at my player character so that's under characters here and nope it's not sorry it's like the third person under Blueprints and here's the BP third person character let me go double click that open it up and dock it at the top because we're gonna have to go into there and make some adjustments later I'm not going to touch the code here in the event graph I'm going to leave all that alone I'm going to just replace what basically add that cinti skeletal mesh to the viewport in a moment what drives this magic under the hood is a combination of an ik rig and an ik retargeter and also an animation blueprint that is being driven by the retargeter so we're going to go and put these things in place in Reverse so to say we're going to start with the ik rig in fact if you dive into the characters folder and have a look at the mannequin ue4 folder under rigs you'll see that epic have provided these assets for you so if you ever wanted to convert under Engine 5 animations to the four skeleton or more likely vice versa 4 to the 5 skeleton these things can help you out here we're gonna have to go and create this thing from scratch so this is an ik rig for the Unreal Engine 4 mannequin and these are the retargeter assets one is from the four to five and one is five to four it's a little Philly to set up so it's quite nice to know that they come with a third person template so I could create this from scratch or just copy this and then put my cinti skeleton in place and that's exactly what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and left click and drag this over into my polygon nightclubs folder and say copy here and then I'm going to open the nightclubs folder here and I'm going to start with this guy I'm going to double click the ik rig from the Unreal Engine for mannequin I'm doing that because the Senti characters are compatible with this skeleton it's just you know this is not the preview mesh that I want in there on the bottom right we see all these ik chains that have been set up so in the viewport you can see these yellow things and that's basically the start and end of an ik chain and Unreal Engine uses that to infer where the arms or where's this bone chain and then no matter what these bones are called in the compatible skeleton or the incompatible skeleton rather it'll just infer what needs to be done there so um this we're going to tweak most of this is in place all we're going to do is change the preview mesh so it might just go for the bartender female here and here she is shaders are being compiled a few warnings are coming up she doesn't have any hair but we're going to deal with that a little bit later so the most important thing right now is that we need to tell this ik rig what the ik chains are and as I said most of them are in place but some of them namely the fingers here they need to be changed and we can do that so spine is from spine one to spine three so that's correct left arm is correct goes from the left arm to the left hand but then the left pinky that needs to be changed because we don't really have pinky fingers on the cinti characters we only have the three finger skeleton and I'm going to map them so that the little finger and ring finger are both on the finger and the middle finger and index finger on the index finger and the thumb is on the thumb so that's what we need to fix otherwise the fingers look crooked so we'll do left pinky it's going to be finger one is the start and the end of that is going to be finger four like so we can see that good stuff then the left ring finger is going to be the same thing so finger one left and it ends at finger four left so those are the ik chains that I'm just telling unreal engineer this is where that is so that it can infer that then with the left thumb that is called thumb one and it ends at thumb three so that's correct left middle finger that I want to map to the index finger so it starts at index one left and then it ends at index finger four left then we have the actual index finger which is also incorrect so that needs to be index finger one and ends at index finger form and that's the left hand taking care of now we need to do the same for the right so once again the right arm is correct but the right pinky is incorrect we're gonna go and move that over to the regular finger so finger one right to finger four right then the ring finger same thing that is finger one right finger four right then we have the right thumb is correct then the right middle finger that's going to be going on to the index finger so that's index finger one right two index finger four right and then on the actual index finger that also needs to be changed to index finger right and index finger four right there we go there are some other options in here like twist bones and stuff the city characters don't have that so you get a lot of warnings here you can ignore them for now or you can remove the ik chains that you don't have but for now that's really all we needed to do here now we can either close this file and then go and have a look at the scary retargeter asset next I've actually not renamed it I should have really done that that's so that's how I'm going to do that so it's the ik rig cinti I'm just going to call it doesn't matter when you rename it so the changes are all still there there we go everything's good now we need to do the ik retargeter asset and that is something that requires an ik rig to exist namely The Source ik rig so we can't use the cinti rig for that because that is the destination ik rigs we need a source rig so right click here head over to animation ik rig and choose ik retargetens my face isn't the way this is it in Unreal Engine 5 this wasn't in its separate section now in Unreal Engine 5.1 it is so select that and it'll it'll ask you what I carry we're using as a source it's not the cinti rig it's not the ue4 mannequin it is our ue5 Mana King I mean this one here at the top so let me go and click that rename it so it's ik retarget cinti and then I'm gonna go and double click that to open that comes in a little bit large and here I can see many so many is if you're not familiar with this many is the main skeleton and Quinn is a child of this class so that's why the skeleton looks a little bit different than this one this is Quinn this is the female skeleton but again that's a child of the parent of that one here but this is the actual Source that's driving it so up here in the top right we have the ik rig asset that I've picked we are also have the source preview mesh and then we need the target here and that is the cinti rig that we've just made so I'm going to go and drop that down and choose my ik Rick cinti and it now comes in with the same preview meta I've just selected there this gives us the opportunity to now tweak the pauses so we've got both characters in the same place my cinti character is a t-pose and Manny is in an a port so let's go and make those adjustments here if you don't want to see them on top of one another you can use the target mesh offset values here so like 150 puts it right next to that and that's nice to see these animations side by side but for adjusting them set this to zero and then go and adjust the poles like basically like we used to do and that happens in the Target so at the top here Source that's the money and the target is basically our cinti character click over here to edit pause and now we can go on we can't select anything in the viewport any more like we could do in Unreal Engine 5 so in 5.1 we have to go into the skeletal hierarchy and select the joint rotation that we want to move so in my case that's the left clavicle here and there is actually a small bug in Unreal Engine 5 that I'll tell you about in a moment I find that the clavicle can come down by about whoops that's the left isn't that sorry so the clavicle can come down by 10. and then the left upper arm can come down this is the bug actually when you go and select something and you want to make a change this doesn't light up immediately so you have to move the viewport for that to work so this needs to come down to I think 40 yes 40 is probably correct and then the lower arm needs to come forward so if I click the lower arm I can see the Gizmo but sometimes it just doesn't light up until I just move the viewport and then I can go and left click and drag this uh this ring here it's one of those things I'm going to bring this forward by 40 so that the angle is correct and I also find that the hands can also come in by about 10 so left hand I want to go and just bring that in otherwise the hands feel like they're sticking out so 10 is probably enough we can always adjust that so I can close the left clavicle down do the same thing on the right here so right clavicle comes down by 10 upper arm comes down by did I say 40 I think so yes yes indeed and then the lower arm Right comes forward by about 40 as well and then we're going to use the hand and bring that in just the tap like something perfect okay that's the arms the legs are pretty much correct but I think being a stickler for details I think they could move not by 10 but by five I would imagine so just right thigh and left thigh the 10 is a bit too much but I think five is exactly what we need to put them in the correct positions here so right thigh and then left thigh as well perfect now that is that and now we can go and leave the edit mode so just click on that and click off the skeleton anywhere here in the viewport and that'll bring your assets back and now you can go and move the target mesh over by maybe 150 and then we can go and preview some animations on our character so down at the bottom here you can pick something like I don't know this do we have run yes run forward and now we can see what our converted animation would look like on the city characters and that looks pretty neat and we have another one we have something like jog now we don't have jog we've run something something else what else we've got land we got jump we've got all the good stuff so that all kind of works if this doesn't look great then you can always make adjustments at that point and once again to stop this so you can just go click this show Target pose and make more changes that's just done with the retargeting asset the last little puzzle that we need need is our own animation blueprint and that is super easy because we're just going to go and reference the retargeted poll so we just need to reference this retargeter asset in our animation blueprint so once again just right click in here and choose animation animation blueprint over here and now we need to specify which skeleton this animation blueprint is for so this is now for our cinti skeleton which is this one here the SK character bartender so this is the one this is going to vary depending on which city pack you're going to use but it's the skeleton that has been referenced by all the cinti meshes basically so that is what you need to select not the SK mannequin from Unreal Engine or anything else we have to have this one here from the cintis so we'll create that and call it ABP cinti and open it up and this is a completely blank and empty animation blueprint so all we need to do is connect one node to the output pose that's basically feeding the output portal so click off of that and search for retarget and then we'll find this note here under misc retarget pose from mesh that is what we want and that is the node that in fact requires our ikey retargeter asset so with that note selected up here at the top right go and select the ik retarget cinti that's the file that we've just made select that and that is all we need to do here now we can essentially close this as well as the retargeter as well as the rig and hook all that up in our third person player character so this is kind of where the magic happens now with our mesh here with our Quinn mesh selected over here click the add button so not here with the with the top note here you want to parent that to the actual mesh here hit add and choose a skeletal mesh and I'm going to call that one cinti mesh and in the center mesh I'm going to go and choose my skeletal mesh down here in fact I can bring that up from my funky new content browser I'll go into meshes and characters and this can now be any of them really I might just go and stick with the bartender because we've kind of gotten used to it so select her and then just go and click this little icon and there we have her this is the mesh in the a pause now we need to select the animation blueprint up here and since we've only got one ABP cinti at the top here we can go and select that and that is almost there so nothing's happening yet but that's because nothing is saved or compiled so let's go and do that compile also maybe save all and now when we go over and play this then we see that hey this is kind of cool it looks like still two characters are moving around on top of one another so it looks like the easiest thing now is to just switch off my regular Quinn mesh and just leave the city mesh in place why don't we do that so over here this is now back in the third person character let's go and select my original mesh and then in the details panel here just search for visibility or Vis and then just disable the visibility and then we have just our city character left now this is almost everything but just in case this happens to you if you were to go and play this now it'll kind of all work or it appears to work but you'll see that the characters is going to go slide and it looks like the joint rotations are not updating on the target mesh and that is because we need to make one final change over here with visibility still in the details panel here it's this one here it's the visibility based Hannon tick options change that from always tick poses to always take poses and refresh bones that's kind of the big secret here but just in case you've forgotten that I thought I'd show you what happens when you don't do that so now if you want to compiler now you play it now the cinti character walks around and that's perfect looks a little bit ugly because she doesn't have any hair but I thought I'm going to leave that for another episode how do we attach hair and you know eyebrows and glasses and all that but for now this is how we can use Unreal Engine 5 mannequin pauses on the cinti characters without retargeting we have the foot ik and all that in another episode I'm going to show you how to translate not so much retarget it's more like a translation process re-re-jig Unreal Engine 4 poses so that they will work with the Unreal Engine 5 skeleton and therefore you can also then use them on the cinti characters that way by all means you don't have to do this you can literally just hook up the Unreal Engine 4 skeleton like we're used to and then let that skeleton drive the cinti animations that might make the retargeting process of older animation sets a little bit easier but this I think is a nice future-proof way thanks to tcmape and Angel V for making this information possible that together with some info from drug cigar that really made me understand the process thank you so much for watching and I hope I will see you next time take care bye-bye

Channel: The WP Guru

Views: 4,968

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Id: oulpvZGWYpA

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2023