VRoid to Unreal Engine workflow. How to create custom Anime characters for your game! Full tutorial.

[Music] what's up i'm super excited to share this one with you guys um really cool i just totally bumbled into this last night some uh some guy on tiktok was promoting his dev game on on um steam and wanted people to check it out so i went and checked it out and while i was in there i found this software that lets you create anime characters fully customizable it's free software and it's license free and it's perpetually going to be that way it's it's ridiculous um and the character is fully rigged and when you bring it into unreal it can take all of the unreal animations um has no issue with root motion this sit and stand when i use it with mixamo i have to do a whole bunch of reconfiguring to get the miximo character to sit because of the root bone it's got its own root bone no problem like it just works it looks fantastic and you can create it any which way you want to so awesome i'm going to show you from beginning to end how to get this working in in your project um super super simple and i guess we'll just kind of get started but i'm i'm blown away super cool so what do we need to do we need to uh get you the software off of steam if you don't want to get it off of steam or you don't have steam you can go to the website i'll put the link in the description below so no worries there will get you the software one way or another if you are going into steam just go to the store and look for v-roid studio this is what'll come up and it's completely free to download um and you can see just from this video here it's also compatible with some of the drawing software that you can put on tablets and things like that so i haven't tried that out yet but that looks freaking awesome anyways download that that's the main thing and then you'll also need let me just pull it up here you'll also need this um this page and this page just has the plugin for unreal and so if you were to use the uh v-roid studio on its own it would work fine but when you tried to load it into unreal everything would work the rig would work the mesh would work but the textures don't import the same way and so this guy's created a plug-in to ensure that the textures import properly and work properly in unreal so you'll need this again link will be below you can navigate there and yeah it's pretty cool um so i'm just going to grab 426 because 426 is the version of unreal that i have so just download that and once it's downloaded you'll just go to the folder where you downloaded it double click on the zip file double click on the plugins right click on vrm for you copy it and then you'll navigate to your wherever your unreal application is installed so for me that's on the c drive program files epic games and then if you remember uh i downloaded four to six so that's what i'm gonna focus on it you could you know i've got four two five and four two six you can put it in both if you want it make sure to make sure the versions match uh go to engine and then go to plugins and literally all you do is right click and paste and let it copy there and then you'll have your folder in i've obviously already done it because i've done this a few times already um and so there your plugins for the most part installed um the next thing you'll have to do is just start a new sorry start a new project in unreal so we'll do that fire this up and we'll create a new one you want the third person um that's where this works best we will just call this anime demo and same thing here anime demo create the project wait for that to fire up and then once it comes up here you'll just want to go to your settings go to plugins at the top you'll have to search for vrm whoops vrm and then just click the little enabled check mark there and then restart and then once it's restarted uh the plugin is installed that's it simple as that that's that's the hard part and now we get to play a little bit so we'll leave that for now and then your software should have installed by now so just go and find the link should look like this probably have a quick link on your desktop v-roid studio and it'll come up and it will look uh just like that or it should it doesn't maybe something's wrong um i'm just gonna move whoops sorry about that i'm just gonna move my face out of your way here uh and move it down here just works better for this program then i'm out of the way okay um and then next is here's all the mannequins that come out of the box you can use any of these and i don't know if i mentioned it but this is completely license free so this is creative commons you can use these pre-made characters in your projects commercial or otherwise and the really cool thing is when you export it if you spend a ton of time on your character and you want to repurpose and resell that character you can on export it allows you to choose your own license for the character that you create like insane that this is all free um there are some settings up here you by default you should have the english version but if you did something wrong maybe you're on japanese and you can just flip over to english you know provided you don't know japanese and i leave the preview quality high but you know maybe on slower machines you might have to change that and then let's just pick a character to start with you always want to pick um one of these i think to start with might as well use a base and let's import them wait for that to load up and then there's your character um and to move uh around the screen um you can use the middle mouse button just hold it down and you'll be able to have the character sort of the camera pan there and if you hold the right mouse button down you can just rotate around so that should feel pretty familiar if you've used any other sort of 3d software and even in unreal i think they do something similar right away on the first screen you could start customizing the eyes there's a million different options you can play around with the mouth and the ears like make some elf ears if you want you can change around all types of things it's crazy so you can do that the cool thing is that any of these um areas uh so i guess i'll i'll explain the layout across the top you've got face editor hair body those are all the different things that you can sort of edit and then you've got your exporter here and then on the left is where um any of these sections that you're in these are the things that you can manipulate so i have all selected so it's got all the options that we can manipulate on the face um some of them have this expression tab um where you can actually change the expression of your character if that's what you want permanently showing um on your character you can you know tweak it to certain levels of joy or anger or whatever the heck it is that you want to do i'm going to do joy here because i want to show you something in textures this is the really cool part is they bring in all the uv mapping and in real time if you wanted so you can color right on top of the uv maps in the editor here if i was going to do this for real i probably would export these and then make the changes but just to show you how awesome this is and i'm just going to do a crap job but if we go back to that expression now you can see we uh colored her tongue in purple and it's showing um so that's pretty cool um more important than just the tongue though is let's play around the face i think that does a really good job of highlighting how powerful this is so if you've used any sort of 2d software uh in the past and maybe some 3d software you might be familiar with layers if not layers are just like in terms of think about if you stacked a whole bunch of clear pieces of paper on top of each other but you know on the first paper you drew a line and then the second paper you drew a different line and on the third you drew another line if those are all laying on top of each other they'd appear as one image to someone looking down on top of them if they were all held together that's essentially what layers are and they've got layers in this software here as well you see when i click on the layers it shows the face um this part is in japanese i'm not sure why um but you can fix that so on the layers if you right click on a layer and you hit export um and let's just call this i don't know anime char one and you'll see it's a png file um we'll do that and then we'll do the same thing here export animatr 2 and we'll do it for the third layer here mhr3 and now you can see um what each of the layers are so we can actually rename those so we know what they are rename the first one was you know like a graph looking thing graph save second one was the face or skin and the last one um one thing i don't know if i read it in the manual or um the if i saw it on youtube or what but they do say that the last layer of every file just don't touch it it's got some bass information that you just should never touch so i don't rename that one because then it's a good reminder like hey don't touch the japanese one anyways you can add a layer with this plus button and then you can move the layers up or down throughout so on this top layer if i want i can now you know pick a brush and use like this spray paint brush and just you know lightly you know do the lips here and now she's got like this pink lipstick on i mean you can go crazy and do whatever the heck you want to do if i was going to do this for real i would probably just export these like i showed you edit them in a proper 2d editing program and then re-import them because in the same place if you right-click and import you can import the files back in so you can literally customize these characters as much as you want like it's it's it's insane and again like this is all for free so it's pretty darn cool um you've got some composition modes for for your layers as well here and you know you can play around with the opacity if you wanted to pretty standard stuff again if you're familiar with this type of software um nothing new so it's just cool it's it's familiar it works it is awesome um what else do i want to show you i think that pretty much covers this i think you know the other one that's interesting actually this one is really interesting in hair i'm just going to hide all of the hair layers so you can see as i click on each one of these layers um each one is a layer of hair that they've created um if i add a freehand free hand group you'll see this little mesh comes up and each one of these other layers has a mesh as well what you can do this mesh basically tells you where you can paint hair on the model so if we did something like this say how's that yeah that gives us something to work with pull this out from the back and maybe you know let's do something crazy like that now what you can do is we're doing that with the select tool if you take this pencil tool and these are the colors that you can use if you want you can start putting hair on your character however you want and there's some like awesome tutorials i mean i'm just you know cheesily doing it here um i haven't really learned or played around with this yet um but you kind of get the idea and you've seen the quality that they've produced on the models uh that are already in there that this is really powerful very cool and i mean obviously to do it right you would build multiple layers the other thing they have in here um and i haven't really learned about it yet so you know you guys can learn just like me um in this bone section you can actually add bones to the hair and you can see as i move this character around and um when the previous hair was on there the hair actually flops around the dress flops around so they've got this really cool sort of physics to these characters too um yeah and then uh you know they've got the texture for the hair too so you can export that and and customize it to your heart's content like that's the crazy part like this is so customizable um okay that's cool and then last thing i'll just show you quickly nothing new now that you've seen what we've already done but i clicked on the clothing and same thing on the texture if i wanted to um you know quickly draw on uh this girl's dress you know we could make some edits however we wanted to look at that or the cool thing is at the top right here there's this mirror tool too so if you um click that then when you draw it actually uh makes it symmetrical so that probably ended up on our butt yeah there you go but it is kind of a neat little thing that um could have some duplication of anything that you do in this editor right so kind of neat um and then you know you again right like everything in this is customizable um yeah body you can um you know as you can imagine you can make small you can make bigger uh right like you can you can oversize this too there is somewhere yeah like you can make like super cartoony right like and make their feet huge and their head huge like if we wanted boom right like so whatever you want to do this sort of lets you do um with the ability to import and export the the textures too i don't think that you have to stay in the realm of like anime like i i bet you we could customize this model um to something like real looking too would love to see what people create like if if you guys do use this and it's new and you get creative like send me some of your creations i'd love to see what people are doing with this um anyways here's the last section so i went into the camera exporter and i'll try and go through this quick but the cool thing is in the background if you wanted you could jam in this code zero zero ff three three and you can um you know chroma key that out so you could you know build captures um and send the png's out and then you know chroma key that um so that's kind of cool um you can in the pose and animation it's got animations i i haven't seen whether or not you can export these animations but the cool thing is is like while you're creating your character before you export it you can kind of test it out so imagine like i was saying before you were creating the hair bones or you were you know messing with the cloth and you wanted to make sure it was falling right well you can test it out in these animations before you export it pretty cool the other thing here it's got the female animations it's got the male ones i always do this with every everyone and then uh it also has this pose so if you're familiar with iks you can actually pose um this girl any way you want um and it works really really well it's really good um anyways and that's that's just local to this editor and then if you you know if you were to do a cop a capture you can export that picture in whatever pose you have um and then lastly this is what we're here for is we want to export uh i don't you don't need to adjust any of the settings um it's just going to export the model not any of that other craft that we're doing and obviously the changes to the model you hit export we'll give it a title her name is victoria so let's follow that the author of this fantastic model as manipulated is yours truly uh version 1.0 very important because i don't really care um and then here's kind of the cool thing i mean if you spend a ton of time on this animation here's where you can permit the use put in license information uh prohibit redistribution immediately put on the creative commons commons license for others you know this tool is free this community um can do lots together share your stuff man like what do you what are you hoarding um i mean unless you've got some huge already popular game that you want to have ip2 i mean go ahead but if epics taught you anything you know share your ip man who cares okay anyways um so that's that violence yes i don't know how many you freaks are out there but i'm not checking that commercial usage sure uh creative commons and then export this bad boy uh that name is fine save it wherever you want to save it and once that's complete then just go to where your file is mine is over here click on the file so we just did victoria and rename this dot glb so you just have to left-click once on the file and then allow you to rename it or you can right-click and rename and then just put glb and then it turns it into a glb file and then um you just go like this drag it in uh i'm going to set up the folders here and we'll create a new folder oh and this is where i can't forget i gotta move my face out of the way up here now um we will call this uh what was her name victoria victoria victoria anime cool then in that folder we just go back to where we were and you just drag and drop her in and this just comes up you want to make sure the a pose is checked every time i've imported it's always been checked um there is another setting that you're welcome to play with of course is this guy here and i did some reading on the guy who created this plug-in and what this is is this is the material type i mean that's what it says but he's created um five or six different ways the material uh imports and just with with the way that you import it it just looks a little bit different so we'll use the default you can play around with that if you're interested other than that leave all the other settings alone and it's just going to imp import everything that it needs so um you're gonna get all your shaders and everything in there okay so this is where um this is where the magic sort of happened i'll just show you this quick if you care i don't know that everybody cares about this but if you open this material it doesn't work in the same way that normal materials do so normally you have the material instance and then you have the master material and you can just manipulate those however you want this guy when you open it up you won't have a reference to the master material what you have to do is you have to go to hierarchy and it actually um references these sort of weird objects here if you click on them it will bring up the master material and you know you can edit it just like any other material but if you hit the browse function what you'll notice is that it actually takes you to this brm for you content in the vr m4uc plus class so this is actually that plug-in if you remember was we are m4u this is where he's obviously using c plus and and some coding in there to make sure that these materials work in the way that we need them to work so that's how that all works if you care um if not then you know just blah blah blah blah blah right okay cool so we got this um we got this chicken here this little chickie poo where is she uh i lost her content where are you victoria come back where did i save her she's got to be here right what folder did she go into oh i put her in the third person blueprint i realized i did that okay cool whatever that's fine um that's where she is that's where she'll be okay so she's in here you could open up the mesh you can have a look look look how awesome that imported just everything we did in there we we messed with the hair we drew on a shirt it's exactly um you know we colored her lips if we opened her her mouth you would see the purple tongue like it's just it's fantastic and it was super easy um cool so that's the mesh so the next thing you want to do is you want to set up your character to receive the animations because right now it's just a mesh um you're a mesh um so what we want to do is we want to navigate to you know we'll stay on this folder we'll set her up first we want to stay with victoria here and we want to go to her skeleton and what we're going to do is we're going to set up her skeleton to retarget and the retargeting manager allows you to send animations from one skeleton to another provided that they're like and they're in the same position and yada yada i won't go into all of that but all you need to do is you need to go to select rig select humanoid rig don't touch anything else there add a new mesh and then you'll see it just shows up there leave the default name over on this side sometimes there'll be a button to click here this is the preview mesh in the targeting manager i'll point it out later but basically it's just it's the the preview image if you don't have this setup you won't see the preview image so and then the last thing you do is you can hit view pose and you want to make sure she's in the a pose because the um unreal skeleton is also going to be in the a pose and your source and your destination target need to match they need to have the same bones they need to be in the same position and that's the beauty of this is that everything is already all set up so cool um cool so then she's good to go and then we do the same thing with the uh mannequin where's his skeleton mannequin character in meshes here's his skeleton so now we open up his skeleton and we do the same thing um he's already got a mesh you can see he's got the the male mannequin and the female one he needs to be a humanoid rig it's got a match we need to view his pose as an a-frame um so that's cool if you're in another project and he's in a t-pose or something you know you can click on them and you can move them around to match the t-pose or get them into the a-pose and then you can click modify this pose and use current pose but ours is all set up so we don't want to touch it it's fine i'm just giving you extra info okay cool we can take a look and you can see he's got all these extra animations on him and those animations i just want to show you before we do it um aren't on her right if we went into her we'd see that she's only got this one uh pose one well i wonder if that's how you could export some of those poses you make cool i'll have to check that out later anyways so you can see she doesn't have any animations on her so our job is to get these animations off of the skeleton well copied from the skeleton onto her so the way that we do that is we go and we look for those animations in the mannequin animations folder and you could do it individually you could just right click and retarget animation assets and do it there but because all of these animation assets are in this blueprint this third person animation blueprint i'll show you that if you double click on it you can see over here in the bottom right all these animations are attached to this person so if we just target the animation blueprint then that saves us a lot of time we can do it once rather than doing all of them so it depends on what you want to do for our purpose we'll just do this retarget atom blueprints and then this is the retarget manager so if you've done everything right you should see skeletons here on the left and when you click on those skeletons you should see a corresponding person show up on the right as well this is when i mentioned before that you want to make sure that that button is pressed and there's a preview mesh this is your preview so here's your source here's your target we're going to move animations from your source to your target seems pretty straightforward so we've got victoria selected they're in the same pose they look good the other thing that you can do is you can change where your animations are going to be copied to so these animations are currently in the mannequin animations folder we want them in a folder that's more suitable for her we know we put her in the third person blueprint folder and we'll put her animations with her stuff boom um the other thing i like to do is i like to put a a prefix because we have the same animations if we call them the same thing later when you're doing drop downs and from menus it makes it very complicated to know well which which third person is the third person even if you have the one prefix at the end um it makes it very difficult to tell the difference so what i like to do is you know do this put vrd underscore i mean it depends on how many assets you have you might want to put something more unique but i put vrd for the tool that we're using is that um what is it called v-roid so vrd that's how i came up with that so this will put a prefix on all those animations boom okay so we change the folder we put a prefix and now we just hit retarget and voila look at this if we open up her animation blueprint you can go through and you can see that none of them worked what the hell this has always worked how come this all of a sudden as i'm doing this tutorial all of a sudden it didn't work what the f this is worked every time what did i miss what did i miss let's try this again what did i miss i'm so upset right now okay let's do this again uh let's just try one of these v target atom asset from him to victoria prefix v or d change third person blueprint her okay i wanna underscore here retarget come on baby okay so that worked i'm surprised that the um the complete animation blueprint didn't work that's really surprising to me it worked in the past did i click something wrong there retarget i mean whoops i wonder if something mesh is fine um skeleton this is the one did we save him yeah no all that is ryan that's in there blueprint it's all good let's try it again i literally have done this like seven times now and never had an issue um cool okay so let's try this again duplicate adam and brady do it to victoria drd underscore change the folder to third person bp tada target oh weird now it's working check this out now they're all working ha weird i don't know um i don't know what happened there hopefully it just worked for you on the first time but that's a weird weird glitch in the matrix to mess with us anyways okay cool i thought i was going crazy there for a sec okay so now we have this vrd third person atom blueprint should be working all good we'll see if there's any other crazy things that happen to us um but then in the blueprints um what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate um this third person character so i'm just going to hit ctrl d ctrl c ctrl v ctrl d i've been in uh after effects all day control d is duplicating that okay and then we'll just rename this to her uh victoria anime character okay double click on that in the viewport we want to click on the default skeleton we'll go over to skeletal mesh we'll change that to victoria cool and then compile and save if you go to the third person game mode in here this default pawn class this tells unreal um what character to use by default so we'll put in vrd uh no we'll put in victoria anime character and then we'll compile and save and now if we hit play let's try this again victoria animate character compile save why is it oh because he's out here delete that hit play and then she's in there but you'll notice she's not animating yet which is fine um this is expected so that's cool so she's now our third person character um if we double click on this and then we click on her the one thing that we didn't add was she needs animations animation mode and an animation class so it says use animation blueprint that's why we retarget we retargeted the animation blueprint so check this out um we called that i think vrd click on that and instantly she starts being animated cool hey compile save boom press play and we're done you have your own custom character uh fully rigged with all of the uh animations that work with the third person character just like that done so cool eh like i'm just blown away at how well this tool works um that one little blip threw me for a second but it's cool um i wanted to show you one other thing on here i'll see if i still have it up um there's a ton of information a lot of people are using these for like custom like characters in twitch like they're being like virtual hosts and they use them to like face rig and and stuff like that um which is cool but i thought for our purposes i did find this cool tool um v-roid sculpt a speed sculpt speed sculpt i can't type um and where was it uh oh this one this dude if you work in a team you should be using monday.com it's a platform to manage any team and anywhere do what you want you don't have to use monday okay um yeah so check this out this guy flies through um yeah check this out buddy goes through and just shows you how a pro uses this thing like boom look at him go so he goes from you know one of the starting mannequins to um he's recreating this obviously he goes to that in like a couple of minutes on some yeah he goes to that final character there and you can see like her hair's going around nice with the bones and new outfit like everything so i'm sure if you follow this that's kind of my plan is to kind of watch what he's doing and and learn from that um but there's tons of tutorials um it's super cool oh there was one more thing i wanted to share with you guys um i also found that there's this booth.pm japanese site that has a whole bunch of assets available if you go down to here and turn the max price to zero yen you can go and get a whole bunch of assets so i talked about importing and exporting they have ready made models that you can import into this thing they have like shoes and different you know obviously japanese influenced assets but um there's a ton of stuff for this too that would save you even more time so i've yet to experiment with this but um you know i read around a bit on it and found that a lot of people are using this so yeah super cool just again extends the possibilities even further so i thought i'd share that with you guys so that's it um but yeah i hope you enjoy i did put a bunch of work into this tutorial and some of the other ones so if you like what i'm doing uh and finding information and getting it out to people and making it digestible then you know support me um super small just to give me a like and subscribe if you like the content um that'll help me keep doing this uh for people so i won't get burnt out and i'll know that it's of value to people but uh you know i'm not doing this for 22 subscribe subscribers every day so anyways it's cool i appreciate people um i hope this helps i hope it's fun and i hope you're nerding out like i am i know i'm gonna put this to good use and uh we'll see you around so appreciate you sticking through this

Channel: Fractured Fantasy

Views: 14,848

Keywords: anime unreal engine 4, vroid to unreal engine 4, unreal engine anime style, vroid anime character creator, vroid unreal, vroid unreal engine, unreal vroid tutorial, anime unreal engine, anime unity game, vroid unity animation

Id: 6Eu9zVjc3FM

Length: 36min 31sec (2191 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021