3D Animation in Unreal Engine: Create an Original Character

1. Introduction: My favorite part of creating characters is starting from nothing and seeing a character come to life through decisions that we make artistically and creatively. Hi, my name is Lucas Ridley. I'm a professional 3D animator and filmmaker. You may have seen my work on games like The Last of Us Part II or in films like Avengers: Infinity War. In today's class, we're going to learn how to use Unreal Engine for the first time, and we're going to create our own custom character as a metahuman. We'll also learn how to apply facial capture to it and use this character as a playable character in the engine. Creating characters is such an important part of video games because it's who our audience connects to, and they're literally playing as. It's important to create them in a way that you're putting your own thumb print on this character so that it gives it that human touch that the audience can connect with. You should take this class if you have no experience, but you're interested in creating your own short films or video games. By the end of this class, I hope you'll realize that Unreal Engine isn't as intimidating a software as it may appear on the surface. To take this class, you'll need a computer and three button mouse. Unreal Engine is free, and you can download that from the Epic Games website. Ready to bring a new character to life? Let's get started. 2. Getting Started: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to get started with all the software and things that you need to get started. We're going to start with a live link at for your iPhone, and then we're going to download and install the Epic Games Launcher, which is what we need to install Unreal Engine. You're going to want a computer and three button mouse to get all this done. Now I'm going to walk you through step by step how to actually get Unreal Engine downloaded and installed through the Epic Games Launcher because it's not super intuitive. Let's get started. To start, you want to visit epicgames.com to download the Epic Games Launcher. Click the Download button in the top right to begin downloading the Epic Games Launcher. Once it's downloaded, we'll click here to install it. If you want to explore any of the features of Unreal Engine, you can click and find all the features, as well as a step by step installation process that you can follow if this becomes confusing. Once the Epic Games Launcher has installed, you want to make sure that you're logged in through an Epic Games account. This is the Epic Games Launcher, but what we're interested in is the Unreal Engine tab here on the left side. There are tabs at the top, and where we want to start is the library. Up at the top, we have our engine versions, and I can click the Plus button to actually install Unreal Engine. This is where we install Unreal Engine, and I can choose from all of the versions that they've had in the past. What we want is the most recent version 5.4. I can click Launch to begin Unreal Engine. When you first open Unreal Engine, you'll be greeted with the Unreal project browser. This will show you all the projects that you've recently worked on, as well as some templates on the left side. We're going to start with a third person template in the games category. We can give the project a name. I'm going to call mine mytestproject, and I can browse to where I want to save that and click create project. The first time Unreal Engine opens, it's going to need to compile a lot of shaders. It can take a while to open Unreal Engine the first time, but it's going to get faster every time you open it. When unreal engine first opens, we're greeted with the third person template level. We have the viewport in the middle, and on the right side, we have the outliner, which is like a table of contents of what's inside that level. Then beneath that, we have a details panel, so whenever we select anything in the level, we get all the details for what we have selected. We also have different modes in the top left that we can navigate through, and we can actually begin playing an example game right away by clicking the green play button in the top left. Now we have our player already in the game, and we can click to enable it, and I can navigate around my character by using my mouse by just moving my mouse around, and to move the character around, I can use the W, A, S and D keys to actually have them run around. I can also jump by pressing the space bar and navigate around this test level. I can also run and collide in with physics objects and make them move around. I can hit Escape or F8, and then the stop button in the top left to get out of the game mode. Now they're outside the game mode. We're inside the level editor now and to navigate around this level, I can do it in two ways. I can hold down Alt and left mouse button to tumble around the view. While still holding Alt, I can middle mouse button to pan around, and the right mouse button will zoom in and out. I can also mouse wheel scroll to zoom in and out, and right mouse button holding Alt zooming in and out will be a more smooth zoom than mouse wheel scrolling. It's basically holding Alt and your three mouse buttons. This is why we need a three button mouse. The second way we can navigate around the level editor is by holding down the right mouse button and using the same W, A, S and D keystrokes on our keyboard to actually fly around our level as if we're playing a game. Those are the two ways that we can actually navigate around the level editor. You can see I'm moving a little bit fast for the scale of this level, and I can change this speed in real time by still enabling this right mouse button being held down and just mouse wheel scroll and it will change an attribute that we can also access in the top right. You can see a camera icon with a decimal 0.4 right now, 0.7, 0.5. I can mouse wheel scroll and actually change the speed that my camera is moving depending on the size of the level that I'm actually working inside of. I can manually click up here and just click and drag this speed as well so that I'm not always fighting the speed of the camera, and it's exactly what I want it to be. This is how you navigate around a level editor in the two different ways that is most convenient for you. One of the options I like to change from the default is the mouse pan. I like to invert it. I'm going to go to edit editor preferences, and I'm going to select the viewport settings, and I'm going to locate the invert middle mouse pan option. I'm going to check that on. You can find other custom settings here if you want to change how you can navigate with the mouse controls. Now, if you forget where this is in the editor preferences, you can use the top search box and type in mouse, and you can filter by any settings having to do with the mouse. By searching for mouse, you can see I can also find the same invert middle mouse pan option here. That's how we can control the different preferences for our navigation controls. In this lesson, we've covered how to get Unreal Engine installed through the Epic Games Launcher and how to actually navigate around inside the level editor, as well as the game mode, that we can already go ahead and play the template third person character game inside of Unreal Engine. In addition, we've learned how to navigate around in two different ways, and you're free to choose whichever one works best for you. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll talk about the MetaHuman Creator. 3. Discover the Metahuman Creator: Welcome back. This lesson is all about MetaHuman Creator. MetaHuman is a tool that Epic Games gives us for free, and it's a web browser based application. We actually don't even need Unreal Engine to follow along with this lesson. We're going to jump on unrealengine.com website to use MetaHuman Creator and create our own custom character from their template. Here we've navigated to unrealengine.com and the MetaHuman URL. We want to make sure that we're logged in to our Epic Games account, the same one that we use to install Unreal Engine, because that's going to be connected to Unreal Engine when we later need to import this character we're about to make. You can see all the features of MetaHuman here, and we're going to get started by clicking the Launch button in the top right. This is going to navigate you to the splash page for MetaHuman, where we want to make sure we're choosing the same version of Unreal Engine that we've installed. I'm choosing Unreal Engine 5.4 because that's what I installed, and I'm clicking "Launch MetaHuman Creator". This puts us in a queue that we need to wait to get connected with the service. Once we're connected, we're greeted with all the template characters they give us to start with. These are just starting points that we can use to create our own custom character. Once we've found one that we like, I've chosen Cooper here, so I've selected him from the menu. To get started editing Cooper and make him my own, I'm going to click "Create selected". Now we're inside where we can actually edit this character. You can see all the hot key reference keys here to navigate this interface. At the bottom, we have basic animations to preview what this character looks like in motion. So these are just simple preview animations to help us evaluate our custom character. We can use different expressions to see the range of emotions that our character can have to make sure we're creating them to cover all the kinds of emotions and character traits that we might want to put in them. When we're ready to begin editing, we have three different ways to edit our character: blend, sculpt, and move. Let's look at the blend option first. We can click and drag three different template characters into this blend menu, and I can click and drag different features of the face to blend between each one of those templates that we've dragged and dropped into the menu. The second way we can edit our character is through the sculpt tools. These are much finer tune controls that are specific to this character, and they are a little bit grade outs. You want to make sure you hover your mouse over these areas that we can see each one of the little dots that we can access to change different features of the face. Finally, we can use the move controls, which are just single controls for a combination of the more fine tuned sculpt controls. These are three different ways to change the face. Now that we've determined the main features of the face, we can jump into more characteristics like the skin color and texture. I'm going to make myself look a bit older here and maybe choose freckles. I can also choose the density and strength of those freckles and change different accents of the face. Maybe if I wanted to have bags under my eyes, I can change the saturation and lightness, for example. Those are all the kind of characteristics we can change for the face. For the eyes, we can choose eye color and teeth. We can even go in and change some variation there or color as well as add makeup to our face if we wanted to go that route. Once we're done with the face, we can jump into the hair category, choose a hair color, different details, like adding salt and pepper to the hair or adding different hair styles. When MetaHuman Creator first came out, they only had a handful of styles, so they're always adding new styles. That also includes eyebrows, eye lashes, and facial hair like mustaches and beards. For the body, we can choose three different kinds of heights for a character, as well as body types for large, medium and small, and also genders. We can also change the primary color of our primary fabric, and we can change different style of the shirt. I can shift the colors around here as well. The main thing I want to do for my character is choose a T-shirt and change the pattern to a graphic because we're going to change this graphic to a customizable graphic later. I'm going to also remove the pattern that came on by default. I'm going to go up here and check this none category, so we only see the graphic on our T-shirt, and this is something we can change later. Once we finish with the tops, we can jump to the bottoms and choose the style of pants or shorts that we want to have, as well as their primary colors. For shoes, we can also chose the style and colors for them as well, and the colors is what we can also change later inside of Unreal Engine if we change our mind. I'm going to jump and test all of my choices with the range of motion or body ROM animation, and I can navigate around this viewport to see it from different angles. If you ever forget what these hot keys are, they're always here on the right side of the viewport. When I like my choices, I can finish my metahuman by going to the top left and choosing My metahumans from the menu. Once we finished with our character here, all we really need to do is just close out of the browser because we're going to import them using Unreal Engine in the next lesson. In this lesson, we've used the web based MetaHuman Creator to create our own custom character, and I'd really encourage you to spend time with this lesson and go through each one of these features to make this character your own. This is where you're going to really customize it and choose all the things that's going to make this character unique to you and your project. The one thing that I would recommend is to choose a graphic for a T-shirt because in a later lesson, we're going to swap this out to our own graphic. If you have a custom logo for a company or something like that, I'll show you how to replace that, but we need a placeholder graphic, and that's why I chose a graphic over a pattern for our shirt. Meet me in the next lesson where we're going to get back inside Unreal Engine and import this character and replace that example character that we saw in the past lesson so that we can use our custom character inside that template level. 4. Attach Your Metahuman to Third Person: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to take the custom character we made in the last lesson, and we're going to import it inside of Unreal Engine, so that we can actually play as that character. Now we're back inside Unreal Engine, and we've opened that same third-person blueprint template. To navigate to the content browser, we can go to, Window, Content Browser, and we can also hit "Control" "Space" to open up the temporary content browser dock. We can dock it in the layout here, or we can go to Window and open it from here. You can see that we have four different content browsers that we can have open at the same time. All of our main content lives inside the content folder. This is where we're going to add our MetaHuman character. To add our MetaHuman character, we can do it in one of two ways. Clicking the plus button in the top here by going to Quixel Bridge or in the bottom on the content browser, we can add Quixel content. So either one gets us to the same place, which is Quixel Bridge. You want to make sure that you're logged in to that same Epic Games account that used on MetaHuman Creator, and to install Unreal Engine. So we'll click on the little person icon here, so that we can access my MetaHumans. Once I click on my MetaHumans, you can see that we have all the MetaHumans that I've created previously, and we can choose the quality that we want, which is really just the size of the textures, and you can see with the green checkbox here, I've already downloaded these. If you have it, you can click the green download button here, and once it's downloaded, you can press the blue plus Add button. It will take a little while to download the first time, so give it some time, and then click "Add" when you're ready. It creates a new folder called MetaHumans. Inside that folder, we can click on the name of our character and access the blueprint of that character. BP_Cooper. BP stands for Blueprint. Now, this looks really intimidating, and we'll get to it in a second. But first, we want to enable all the missing plug ins that will pop up as part of MetaHuman Creator. So once we've done that, it'll ask us to restart the engine. So once we've restarted the engine, we can jump back and open that same blueprint. And again, this does look very intimidating, but we can jump to the viewport tab up here in the top left. So now we're in the Viewport tab, you can see the character as we would expect to see them from the MetaHuman Creator app. Now, the first thing we want to do is make sure we force LOD sync. I'll explain what that is in a second. So we just want to jump over the forced LOD and change that to one. So what LOD means is level of detail. So if the camera is really far away, it'll have a low level of detail. We want to force it to have the highest level at all times. So as I move my camera, and you can see now it has the highest level, but I don't want that changing as the camera distance moves, I want to force it to always be the highest quality. That's why we changed it to force LOD of one. Once we're done with that, we can compile and press "Save, " and that just verifies all the changes that we've made. Now, the next step is to have this character replace the example character that we played with in this level, and the first thing we need to do is jump over to the class settings. So I'm going to click that button at the top, and I'm going to jump to the parent class. We're going to use the parent class of that example character. So I just need to find it in this drop down menu. That blueprint for that character is called BP_third person character. So I can just choose that from this menu, and that makes this character, our custom character, a child of that example character. We need that because it gives us all the animation and controls for free. So the first thing I need to do is click and drag the root of our custom character underneath the mesh. Now that our custom character is a child of the mesh, you can see we have these little Reset buttons in the right side of our transform details. So when I reset those, it will line up our custom character to match the example character. And that's important because, we're about to swap in our custom character for this third person example character. Now, I want to jump down in the lower left to turn on livery targeting, so it exactly matches up. So I'm going to check on use livery target mode, and now they exactly align with each other. Now we just need to select the mesh and turn it off. So I'm going to type in visible at the top to search for the visibility option and just check that off. So now we just won't see that example character anymore, and we're left with our custom character. Finally, we want to choose the always tick pose and refresh bones. This just make sure that on every frame it's live re targeting, so that when we play it back after we compile and save, that our custom character will be replaced with our example character. I'm going to press the green Play button again, and you can see that we still don't have our custom character. Why is that? That's because we're not spawning our custom character in yet. We need to do that in the Edit Project Settings menu. So in this menu, we can jump down to maps and modes, and we can change the selected game mode default pawn class. Under default pawn class, this is where we're going to choose our own custom blueprint for our character. So when I press "Play" now, I have my custom character, but I can't navigate with them. I can't input any WASD or my mouse. So we actually need to connect. The controls are a keyboard mouse to this custom character that now spawns in. Luckily, we can use and copy and paste the template character onto our custom character. So I'm going to navigate to the blueprint of that third person character and open up their blueprint. Now all I need to do is copy and paste everything from this event graph, into our custom characters event graph. So I'm going to press "Control C" to copy and close this out. I'm going to navigate back to our custom characters blueprint in the MetaHumans folder and open up BP_Cooper again. Now we're going to go into the technical part of this under the Event Graph tab. This is where I want to go to a clean space in the event graph and just press "Control V" to paste in all the input information that we stole from the free stuff that we get from the third person character. So now we have the inputs, and we just want to make sure that all gets initiated when we begin playing. So we want to take this event, begin play, and click and drag it over to the start of all of these input controls. So I'm just going to grab those first two nodes and get rid of the one that existed there to replace it with these two nodes. So I'm just left mouse button clicking and dragging that connection up, and compiling and saving. Now when we press "Play, " we actually can play as our custom character inside this level with all the same controls that we've seen in the example level. I can jump around, run, and do everything that you would expect. Now, say, for example, I don't really like the distance of this camera to my character, I can jump back inside the blueprint, go to the Viewport tab to see where that camera is, and just move it forward. I can press "W" on the keyboard to pull up the move shortcut, so that I can actually access the move manipulator and just move it closer to the character and compile and save, and press "Play" again, and now you can see we have a camera that's closer to our character. So that's how you connect your custom metahuman to the third person character that they give us inside of Unreal Engine. So just take your time with these steps. I know it can be really intimidating, but what we really just did is copy and pasted a lot of things to get to this point. So just follow along with the steps I gave you, and you'll be fine. Meaning the next lesson, we're going to use an iPhone to actually capture our face and use that as the blueprint for our metahuman. 5. Create a Personalized Metahuman : Welcome back. This lesson is for our iPhone users. So if you don't have an iPhone, you can use the template character that we've customized in the previous lesson, but for our iPhone users, this is where we're going to use the live link app to capture a calibration take and create also a little animation of our facial capture performance. And we're going to connect that up with custom new metahuman face that we're going to bring inside of Unreal Engine and connect that animation take up to that face. For the calibration take, you're going to want to make sure that you're looking straight ahead and turning side to side, and making sure that you also end with exposing your teeth. It's going to feel a little funny, but you need to have your teeth slightly apart and make a big smile. So now you've captured the footage from the live link app on your iPhone, and we need somewhere to put it. So we're going to jump back inside of Unreal Engine and create that custom face, and apply that animation to it. So now we're back inside our project, and I'm going to right click and create a new folder and call it MH animator for metahuman animator. I'm going to right click and go to the metahuman animator menu options. We're only concerned with the bottom 3 options here, the capture source, the metahuman identity, and the metahuman performance. We're going to go through these one at a time in that order. So if you don't see these, you need to enable the metahuman plug in by going to plug ins and search for metahuman. Make sure you check on these plug ins, and you'll probably have to restart Unreal Engine. Now that you've been able to plug ins, you have access to these menu options, capture source is where we're going to use the footage that we've taken to create our custom face. Metahuman identity is where we're going to create it, and then the performance is actually applying that second take that we took and applying that animation to our custom face. So first, let's click "Capture Source." I'm going to leave the default name and double click it to open a new window. In this window, we have two options to import the calibration take. We have the archive or the connection. I want to choose the connection version, and I can directly connect to my iPhone with this option. After choosing the connection option, you want to jump back into your iPhone, open the Live Link app, go to the settings and find the OC server listener address. This will be a number that's custom to your phone, and you want to make sure that you're on the same Wi-Fi network that your computer is. So we can listen into your iPhone and just pull the footage directly from your iPhone using this step of the capture source. Now that we have this, we can just click "Save" and close this out. Now we want to go to the tools menu to open the capture manager. Now we have access to all the takes that we've taken with the Live Link app, and we want to make sure that we're bringing in the calibration take as well as the performance take. Make sure you add to queue both of those takes. Once they're queued, we can click the "Import All" button. This is going to create a new folder with these takes inside of them. Now we can go to the next step, our metahuman identity. So we're going to use this captured footage to create a brand new metahuman face exactly like our own. Because it's going to be like my face, I'm going to rename this to MHI_Lucas_001, and double click that to open. You're going to want to make sure that you're logged in to your Epic Games account. We're going to go through each one of these steps at the top. These are listed in the order in which we're going to do them from left to right. We're going to start with create components first. We want to choose from footage and choose the calibration take. Inside this calibration take, we're going to move on to the next step and promote a frame in the front facing orientation inside the take. So we're going to scrub the timeline at the bottom, to where we're facing forward and promote this frame and click "Okay." This is going to be our front view. If you need to move these points around, you can, but this usually is fine, so I don't touch these green points, and we can unlock the camera again to scrub the timeline to move to the side view. So we want to make sure that we're choosing a frame that you can still see the corner of your eye, and click "Promote Frame" again. We want to unlock the camera just like we did previously and find the next side. Again, making sure the corner of our eye is still visible and promote that frame, and then we can move on to actually adding the teeth pose. So I'm going to go to the add button and choose add teeth, and we can scrub the timeline to where we had our teeth exposed and promote this frame while we have the teeth pose selected. You can click "Okay, " and now we have the teeth pose, and we can move on to the next step, the metahuman identity solve. Once we click this, we can go to the body and choose the body proportions we want for this new face. We can choose between genders, as well as height and body type. Once we're happy with our choices, we can move on to the next step of the top menu and go to mesh to metahuman, and just make sure we're choosing the skeletal mesh plus full metahuman, because we want the head as well as the body. This is going to take a little while to process. Once that's done, we can click "Prepare for Performance." This is also going to take a little while to process. Now we can close out this step, and you can see that it's created a custom metahuman face. So if we double click this new icon, we can actually preview our new custom face that should resemble ourselves. It even has my slightly crooked nose there, so I know it's chosen the right frames to create this character. Now we're going to move on to the next step. We can right click and choose metahuman performance and give it a custom name, which is a skill share intro. I can double click that and I can choose the footage capture data and choose the second take that we imported. This is the performance take, not the calibration take. Now I can choose the metahuman identity that we made, and I can click "Yes." Now I can choose for the head movement mode, control rig, and you can see we have control rig options here, and if I process this take, we're going to be able to watch it, process the performance take and apply it to the 3D model. So now we're going to scrub the timeline and play it back, and we're going to see our performance from our iPhone playing back on our custom metahuman character. Now we can choose to export this animation so we can use it in other places or export directly to a level sequence. I'm going to choose this option because it's going to be the best way to present our animation. It's going to ask me where do I want to save this level. So LS means level sequence, and I'm just going to accept those names and accept all the defaults here as well. So now I can close this window and I can open up the level sequence. We have a new node here called level sequence, so I can just click and drag this tab to share the same window docking as my other one, so we're not splitting them, and have greater real estate to view the timeline of the level sequence. A level sequence is really just like a timeline in a W Premiere or DaVinci Resolve or any video editing software. I can lock into this camera by clicking this camera icon here. It's going to turn blue and snap our camera to view our custom metahuman animator inside the level that we're in, and we can play back and see our animation is working on the face. It's a little dark here because it's overlapping with part of the environment, and that's okay. We're going to change that later. I'm going to control middle mouse wheel to zoom out in the level sequence editor, and write mouse button to pan to see the entire level sequence. I'm just going to click and drag this up so I can see all the attributes that we have in the tracks of the level sequence. You can see we have a camera, we have the metahuman identity, we have the actual video plane that's just behind my 3D character, the original footage of the performance. So these are all just tracks that are holding all the information that we're going to use to apply to a full bodied custom metahuman character that matches this one with textures and other customizations that we're going to apply inside of metahuman creator that you're already familiar with. You can also see the audio track is listed here, and you can see under the metahuman identity, we have the face control board, which is where all the data for the animation lives. If I select this, it's actually going to enable the animation mode once I select this track, and so I can go up to the top left and just get back to selection mode if I ever am unable to select something. So you just want to be mindful of the modes that we're in that change for you if you make selections like that. So up here, I'm going to change it back to selection mode, and now we're back to the normal navigation style inside the level editor. So back inside selection mode, I can just uncheck that camera cut lock. So now we're back viewing the level as we'd expect, and I'm going to navigate over to the content browser, and this is where we're going to actually import the full-bodied metahuman character that we're going to create in the next lesson. Meet me in the next lesson, we're going to talk about metahuman face animation. 6. Create Your Metahuman Face Animation: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to take that custom head that we just made using our iPhone captures, and we're going to apply that to a full-bodied character using MetaHuman Creator again. Then we're going to take that full-bodied character and apply that performance animation to it, so it's not just a floating head talking anymore. It's going to be a full-bodied character. Back inside our Unreal Engine project, we're going to choose the add Quixel content, and I'm going to navigate to the people icon, so I can click the "My MetaHumans". You can see here we have our MetaHuman identity that we just created. When I select that, I have the option to start MHC. That's MetaHuman Creator. When I click this, I'm actually going to get access to that same MetaHuman Creator web browser that we had in a previous lesson, and we're going to be confronted with our iPhone-created face. This doesn't really look like me yet, and this is what we'll use in MetaHuman Creator to further customize skin tone, hair, and any clothing choices we want to make. I'm going to leave this to you to further customize and make it look exactly like you. You can use the same blend, sculpt, and other tools at our disposal inside the MetaHuman Creator to customize this. Once we've finished customizing our character inside MetaHuman Creator, we can close out the browser, and we navigate back to our project, you can see that we have a preview of our character that looks like us now, and we can download it and then add it to our project. That creates a new folder with the same name as our MetaHuman identity, and now we also have a blueprint of that character when I navigate inside that folder. I can click and drag that blueprint into my level. I can press "F" to frame up my camera on that character, and now I can switch over to the sequencer, to click and drag that same blueprint character inside the sequencer. I have the full-bodied blueprint character, as well as all that animation from the previous lesson here. This is where I can copy this facial animation onto our full-bodied character. I'm just going to copy the facial animation, and "Right-click" on the face of our full-bodied character and paste it. Then now when I play back the timeline in the sequencer, you can see that I've applied that animation to our full-bodied MetaHuman character from our iPhone capture. Now, unfortunately, one thing that stands out to me is the fact that the head is still slightly floating away from the body. That's something that we can fix by copy and pasting animation from the head onto the neck controls. I'm going to navigate down the controls of the face, and I'm going to find the one at the very bottom called head_ik_switch_ctrl. I'm just going to turn that from a value of one to zero, and now when I play back the sequencer, you can see that our head is no longer floating away from our body, but it's totally static. That could work in some situations, but we can also take this a bit further and just copy and paste the animation that was there on more appropriate controls so that that animation is connecting our head and our body. I'm going toggle down the head_ik_ctrl, and I'm going to copy and paste the animation from these transforms of the rotation onto the FK controls further up in our stack of controls. I'm going to go to Rotation Roll. I'm going to click, drag, and select all these keyframes, and in the anim outliner in the top right, I'm going to navigate to where I can find the head_ctrl. I want to locate the same rotation roll attribute. Select it and have my timeline indicator at zero, and press "Ctrl V" to past that animation on that attribute. Now I want to rinse and repeat this process for the other rotation attributes from the ik_ctrl to the head_ctrl. I'm going to click, drag, select the rotation pitch, navigate back up to the head_ctrl, and find the same rotation pitch, and Ctrl V to paste that in. Find the rotation yaw, click, drag, and select those, and navigate back up and do the same thing for that attribute onto the head_ctrl. We've pasted all the head_ctrl animation. We've brought back some of that rotation value, and now we can apply some of that translation value to the body. We can further connect the animation with the body and the head agreeing with each other. Now I want to take the location of the head_ik_ctrl. I want to apply that to some other control , like the body_offset_ctrl. I'm going to select the body_offset_ctrl, and it's going to move the body now and not just rotate the head. I'm going to navigate to the appropriate location, move my timeline indicator to zero, and I want to copy and paste that in. I'm going to do that for each one of these X, Y, and Z values for location, going from the head_ik_ctrl to the body_offset_ctrl. If you're not happy with the animation you have on the body location attributes, we can click those attributes and open up the sequencer curves window. I'll click, drag, select all these keys and then select the multi-select tool. This will give me a new GUI interface that I can click, drag, select and scale down these keys globally, so I can just reduce the overall motion. If something is happening too much or too little, I can just increase those values or decrease them altogether once I click, drag, select them. Now I just want to make sure I'm saving all under file save all to make sure we're saving our changes. I'm going to navigate back to the Sequencer tab, and the best way to record this animation is to actually use something like OBS screen capture, because unfortunately, Unreal Engine doesn't export audio right now. The best way to capture the audio with the video is to just screen-capture your viewport and play back the sequencer timeline, if you want to capture this animation to post to social media or YouTube. Now it's your turn to connect your custom MetaHuman head from your iPhone to a full-bodied character using MetaHuman Creator and customizing it with your iPhone-captured animation, connecting those up in the level sequence. Meet me in the next lesson. We're going to dive into customizing materials and textures. 7. Customize Materials and Textures: Welcome back to this lesson, where we're going to dive into materials and textures and applying our own custom ones to our custom meta-human. Back inside our Unreal Engine project, I want to select the blueprint of our custom character, and I can navigate to that using the outliner. If I look in the top right here, I see, I have a little option to edit blueprint, so if I click that, it'll actually open the blueprint for this character. Now, this has all the body, face, torso, all the attributes that make up our custom character. This is where we can find the materials that are related to these body parts. For example, if I wanted to change the material of the T-shirt, I can navigate to the materials of the torso and click the folder with a magnifying glass to browse to that asset. This is where we have access to all the custom parameters that are available to us. This is what's called a material instance of a master material. These are all variables that they promoted to us to have access to. We can actually change the colors of the T-shirt here, we can change the logo that's displayed, and it's all showing on a sphere in this preview window, but it will update the viewport as well, that's why I have this docked to the right side so I can jump down into material A and change this to some branded color. I can actually use a hexadecimal value here and copy and paste that in, and I can also change the other colors that we have available to us. Now, if I jump down into the print attribute, I can scroll down to this red, green, and blue icon that has the attribute named print graphic map. Now, it's red, green, and blue, but just above it we have A, B, C, these colors are mapping on to red, green, and blue. They're actually using white for the red, they're using the gray for the green, and they're using the blue for the blue, so A, B, C could really just mean RGB, red, green, and blue. If we want to replace this graphic with our own, we just want to convert any colors on our graphic to red, green, and blue; then afterward, we can change the A, B, C and colors to remap those red, green, and blue values. For example, I'm going to jump inside a Photoshop. I'm going to select different parts of this logo and recolor them with red, green, and blue. I'm just going to select everything by control-clicking the layer and then deselecting the parts of the logo that have different colors. Now, I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm going to paint brush 100% red onto this Skillshare text. I can make sure it's 100% red by seeing that R is 255, and everything else is zero, and I can just brush in a 100% red color onto the Skillshare text. Now, for the other parts of the logo, I can color them green or blue, and then we can remap these colors inside of Unreal Engine to be whatever we want. That way, we're not always having to go back to a program like Photoshop just to change colors inside Unreal Engine, once we set up this graphic, we can change the colors inside of Unreal Engine only. I'm going to file, save a copy as a PNG. Now, I'm going to browse to this asset using the folder magnifying glass icon and click and drag the PNG that I saved from Photoshop into this content browser drawer. Then afterward, I'm going to click and drag the Skillshare PNG into the print graphic map slot. Now, it's replaced the logo on my character, and I just need to choose the brand-specific colors for A, B, and C. Once we're happy with our T-shirt logo, we can jump into customizing the face. I'm going to navigate back to the blueprint of our character by clicking it in the outliner, and I want to jump down to the face attribute. Inside of here, you can see we have a bunch of materials, and I'm just going to navigate to the first one. This is the main texture for our face. Inside of here, you can see we have a few material instances. I'm going to click the first one because that has to do with our main LOD, the highest level of detail. Inside of here, you can see all the different parameters we have for this material. We're most interested in the base color. There's multiple textures for the base color, but these are just for wrinkle maps, so when the face is animated, it activates different types of textures. Now, when we're creating custom textures, we're not really concerned with that, we can just apply our custom texture to all four of these base color textures. I'm going to use the folder icon with magnifying glass to browse to this asset. Once I have that asset in the content browser, I'm going to right-click it and choose "Asset actions", "Export". Now, I can export this texture as a PNG and bring it inside a Photoshop and paint right on top of it. You can see I've already done a few examples that we'll look at now. I'm going to import these example files I'm also providing to you. I've imported these examples by just clicking and dragging them into our content browser, now, I can click and drag them onto our character, and you can see it's immediately updated our character to be even more customized. All of these textures were just made inside of Photoshop using simple brushes. I can also just shift the hue of that texture, and now I look like an alien. I can get back to the main one just by clicking and dragging the original texture onto my face. Now, the reason why we want to make sure that we apply the same texture to all four slots is because as our face animates, it's going to activate all four of those textures. If our custom texture isn't applied to all four, we're going to have odd results, so we want to click and drag the texture that we choose onto all four slots. In this lesson, you learned how to apply your own custom textures and materials. Take a minute and use this knowledge to further customize your character to be exactly like you want. Meet me in the next lesson where we are going to talk about applying props and animation to our character. 8. Customize Props and Animations: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to apply some props to our character like sunglasses, and we're going to find out where to locate those free assets so that we don't have to model them ourselves. We're also going to find some stock animation that we can apply to our character to make them come more alive. To add props to our character, I'm going to click the add button on the top of the Components list, and we basically have two options, a static mesh or a skeletal mesh. The only difference is if the skeletal mesh has some kind of joint associated with it. For this asset that I'm going to be finding, it is a skeletal mesh, so I'm going to choose that option. I'm going to rename it to be sunglasses so I can differentiate it from the other attributes of the character, and because the sunglasses are going to be following the head, I'm going to click and drag it onto the face. Now, I just seem to tell it, where is this skeletal mesh asset. Luckily, for us, there's some free ones available on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Just to open up the Epic Games launcher and navigate to the Marketplace tab and search for the free items. The sunglasses that I'm using live inside the stylized character kit. Anytime you see these previews, you can usually cannibalize these projects and use them for your own purposes. I want to grab these sunglasses, and I want to add it to my 5.4 Unreal Engine project. Now, this says it's not good for 5.4, but that's okay, I can click "Show all projects", when I want to add it to my project to access any project that is 5.4. It's going to give me a warning, but that's okay. I can just choose an earlier version of Unreal Engine, and it will still import this asset into my project. It's just giving us a warning that it's not suited for it, but because it's just a model, there really are no model differences between Unreal Engine versions, so we can always apply custom props to any version of Unreal Engine. Once this asset is added to our project, we can navigate to this new folder that it creates and find the name of this asset. For me, it's MESH_A01, so when I jump back into my blueprint for this character, and under this sunglasses skeletal mesh that we added, I can jump over to the skeletal mesh asset and search for it in the Search Assets window. I can just type in MESH_A, and I can find it here. When I click select it, we've added it to our character, and I can actually jump to my Viewport tab to also preview it in this window so I can actually move it into place over the face. For this prop to actually follow the head when this character is animated, we need to choose a parent socket, so I'm going to choose the head joint. I'm just going to type in head under the magnifying glass folder icon, and now, we have parented this sunglasses prop to the head joint. Now, this has created a little offset that we can correct for. I can press EMI keyboard to pull up the rotate manipulator and rotate it into place and then press W to get the move manipulator to move it down back onto the face. That step is all about just making sure that it follows the head, and not just the character, so that when this is animated, it will follow the head. I can turn off snapping so that I can get some more fine-tuned control to the move manipulator. I can just uncheck this blue icon that has the grid next to the number 10 in the top right, and now I can smoothly move around the asset. I can also jump to the transform attributes under the Details window here and type in specific values or click and drag select them. Now, I just want to make sure I compile and save so that these changes are saved onto our character. Now, I can jump back into our level sequence that we made in a previous lesson and test out that this prop is actually following my character. Now, we can see the sunglasses are actually following the character's head and not just the character itself, like the body. Now that we have the prop working on our face, we can jump to the meta-human control rig inside the sequencer. There's a little bug in Unreal Engine where you can hide and unhide your control shapes, and they may not display in the viewport, but that's okay, we can still access these controls in the sequencer view. I can jump down to the upper arm, for example, and I can just dial in the rotation of this arm joint to be a bit more appealing. I can actually pose my character out by just click dragging, selecting these attributes for each one of these controls. If we'd like to reorient our character a little bit, we can do that with this control and line up our camera to view the character. Now, instead of using the control rig, if we want to use a stock animation, so the whole body has motion, I can actually do that by going to the body track and clicking the Plus button and adding an animation from this top menu. The problem is, we don't have any animations specifically for the skeleton of this character, so we can use some third-person blueprint animations and retarget them to work with our custom character. I'm going to navigate to the Animations folder of the mannequins that comes with the Unreal Engine, and I'm just going to right-click the "MM_Idle" animation and click "Retarget animation". Now, the target skeleton just needs to be our meta-human. Because there's different components that comprise a meta-human, we just need to find the right one for our meta-human. I'm going to change back to the selection mode so I can select the meta-human and see him in our outliner. I'm going to navigate to our components list and click the body to find what is the skeleton mesh asset for our body because this is what I want to retarget to. This is the name of the asset we're going to try to find in the retarget animation window. When I right-click and choose "Retarget animations", I want to choose a target that matches that name. Now, I know what to type in. Now, it's okay that we don't see the full body here, it will work once we apply it in the sequencer. I can find that idle animation that we were interested in and double-click it. Now, we can watch playback on the retarget from the source where it came from, on the template character onto our custom character. I can click "Export animations" to save this animation so that I can then apply it inside sequencer. I'm going to accept the defaults and click "Export". I'm going to close our blueprint and you can see where the idle retargeted animation lives. Now, I'm going to just jump back to the control rig and disable it by clicking this icon here. I'm going to jump to the Plus button on the body component, and now, I can type in and search for our idle. This is the retargeted idol that we just created. Now, you can see this animation face our character away from the direction we wanted, so I can actually add a transform track so that I have a way to rotate him now that we're not using the control rig. I'm going toggle down this new transform track I just added, and I'm going to change the yaw from here. Because I added the animation when my timeline indicator was at the end of the timeline, it added the animation to the end. So I want to click-drag select this idle track all the way to the beginning of our sequence. If it doesn't cover enough time, I can actually just copy and paste it and line them up back to back because they should seamlessly loop. Now, when I play in the timeline, I can see my character actually has some body animation that's making it feel more alive, and we've added our own prop to his face. In this lesson, you learned how to add your own prop star characters and where to find them. You don't have to model them from scratch, you can actually find assets on the Unreal Engine Marketplace, and most of them are free. You can also choose paid assets or go to websites like sketchfab.com and find other things that people have modeled to add to your projects. Just remember the difference between the skeletal mesh and the static mesh, you may have to choose one or the other, depending on the type of asset that you grab and import into your project. I'll see you in the next lesson where we are going to take this customized character and now make them playable. 9. Customize Your Playable Metahuman : Welcome back. We're going to take all the knowledge that we have now, and we're gonna apply it to this custom character to make them playable. Back inside our unreal engine project. Pressing play, you can see that we still have our first earlier version of our metahuman character, and we're going to replace them with our personalized one. I'm going to jump into the Cooper folder, and I want to duplicate this blueprint. I'm going to right click and choose duplicate. This is what we're going to swap in our custom character inside this blueprint that has all the information that we've already added up to this point like the input controls. Looking at this blueprint, I can see that I have all the components of our metahumen that I want to replace with our custom character. I'm going to pull up both blueprints side by side so I can copy and paste one from the other. On the left side, we have our custom character, on the right side, we have our template metahumen. You can see that it's the duplicate version because it's BP Cooper 1. If I navigate to the face, you can see I can find the skeletal mesh asset for our face, and I can click the face for the one we're going to replace. You can see that there isn't one here. I can click and drag that into the skeletal mesh asset. We get our personalized face onto this character. But there's a little glitch inside of unreal engine. We actually have to reset the skeletal mesh, and then bring it back in for it to refresh correctly. All the hair is going to be messed up, but that's okay. We're going to shift, click from the top to the bottom of all of these groom assets like the beard, and just delete them. We're going to shift click the top to bottom from the one we want to copy, and hit Control C, the navigate to where we're pasting, select the face and hit Control V, and just click and drag them under the face to make sure they're children of the face so that they follow along with the face. Now we have our personalized face and hair, and we can start replacing other parts of the body. Now, for example, this torso actually has the same T shirt. Instead of replacing the skeletal mesh, we can actually navigate to the material of our personalized shirt and just click and drag that material onto the materials element zero. Instead of creating a new skeletal mesh asset, we can just click and drag the materials on to these other components like the feet, because the style of the shoe is the same between these characters. I don't need to swap in the skeleton mesh. I just need to go to the materials. But, for example, the pants, I need to do both. Now I can click, compile and save on BP Cooper 1. Once we've completed that, we can close both of these blueprints and navigate to the right side here where we can see there's a tab called World Settings. If I click that, I can see there's game modes available right here. I the default porn class, we can choose the BP Cooper 1. When I press play, now we actually have our customized character as the playable version in this template level. I can run around and use the same WASD keys and space bar to jump and run around. This is our fully customized metahuman character, now playable inside unreal engine. Now take a moment and connect the final dots so that you two can have a personalized, playable character inside on religion. 10. Final Thoughts: Congratulations for making it to the end of this class. You've learned a lot of key skills about making a character from scratch and customizing it to look exactly like you or from metahuman template characters. We learned how to take that personalized character and leverage the assets that Unreal Engine gives us, and animate that character, and even play that character in a template level. Be mindful that Unreal Engine is a complicated software, and we've streamlined that process. But there's still bugs that you'll run into here and there, and sometimes just restarting Unreal Engine can help reset it. Always remember to compile and save your blueprints when you're making changes to them, like we did in the class. If you're interested in this as a career, this is its own discipline, creating characters. Dive deeper in and get inspired by what you find around you in games and film, and media, and start creating your own characters. This is the first class in a series of classes, where we're going to dive even deeper into Unreal Engine. In the next class, we're going to create an environment together and even design a level for a game. Until then, enjoy creating your own customizable character, and I'll see you soon.