Transcripts
1. Introduction: I love creating animation because there are
no limits to it. You can create performances
that can only happen in 3D. Hi. My name is Lucas Ridley. I'm a professional 3D
animator and filmmaker. You may have seen my work in games like the
Last of Us Part 2, or in films like Disney's
the Little Mermaid or Ready Player One. In this class, you're
going to learn how to animate a character
inside of Unreal Engine. The project we're
going to work on together today is using a character that
we've made together in a previous class
in this series, or you can use the
third person template that comes with Unreal Engine. We're going to take
this character, and we're going to
infuse it with life with our own performance
that we're going to capture with what's
called motion capture, and all you need is
your iPhone to do that. You should take this class
if you want to customize and personalize what
your character is actually doing inside
Unreal Engine. All you need to take this
class is a computer, a three button mouse, and some basic knowledge of
how to use Unreal Engine. The hallmark of great
animators is being able to apply believable weight in
authentic performances. In this class, you're going to learn the
tools to do that. Ready to breathe life into a 3D character.
Let's get started.
2. Getting Started: Welcome to this class.
In this lesson, I'm going to teach you how
to take your character, place it in the environment,
and get ready for animation. You may already have a character
in your environment if you've been following along with the classes in this series. But if you haven't,
that's okay, too, because I'll show
you how to take a template and create a character in your
environment from that. To begin this class, I want
to take a character I've already made and put it into a landscape
I've already made. I need to migrate
that character from this project inside of
this landscape project. To do that, I first need to open up this project
with a character. Once I have the scene
open, I can just select my character and hit ''Control B'' to browse to this asset. And then right
right-click and choose ''Asset Actions'', ''Migrate''. It's going to show
all the assets related to this character,
which are quite a lot, and it's going to export
them into the project of my choosing. I'll
click ''Okay.'' Now I just need to choose a
destination content folder. I need to go inside
the content folder of the landscape project that I'm interested in and
select this folder. Once it's finished migrating, we can close down
this project and we can navigate back
to our library and open the landscape project that we migrated
that character into. Now we can see we have
our character inside this new scene where we have our level ready
for animation. When you open the
meta human blueprint for the first time, you'll probably have
some missing plug-ins, and you'll want to enable those
and restart this project. If you've followed the
previous two classes, you'll have both of
these assets ready. If not, you can use the
third-person blueprint and use the third-person
blueprint character that comes along with
the starter content. You can add the third person to a blank scene by
clicking ''Add'', ''Add feature or Content Pack'', and choose ''Third Person'',
and add the project. Alternatively, you can create a third-person
template from scratch. And you can use
that template for your game level
that we're going to animate our character in and create cinematics
and animations. If you want to make
your own environment, check out my previous
class in the series where we talked about creating and designing your own environments. In this lesson, you learned
how to take a character into an environment that
you've made and also start from scratch
with a template level. Meet me in the next lesson, where we're going to
get started animating.
3. Record iPhone Motion Capture: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to have you
get out of your chair and actually perform
motion capture. We're going to need
an iPhone and a tripod and about 5-6
feet between that. We're going to be
standing over here. We're going to using the front facing camera so that we can
perform the motion capture. You're going to want to have downloaded an app
called Move one. This is a free app for the first 30 seconds
that you use it. There's other apps like this out there like Radical and Rococo. Today, we're going to
use the Move one app. How we're going to
use this app is we're going to perform
a motion capture, and it's going to record our performance as we move around, and we're going to
transfer this performance onto our digital character. The couple of things we want to keep in mind
is we don't want to be wearing baggy clothing
because it wants to be able to see our
limbs move correctly. The other thing,
especially in video games, is we need to keep in
mind the idle pose. That's important because
most of these animations, if not all of them, they're
going to need to be moving in and out
of the idle pose. You're going to want to have
that as a reference of, how do I start my performance
and how do I end it? For the third person
blueprint character we have, we have a left foot forward, and we have a right
foot back and we have just a general
casual relaxed pose. This is how we'll want to start and end all
our performances. The reason for that is
because our performance is going to blend
seamlessly back into gameplay if you're
working in video games. If you're using this
for short films, then you don't have
to worry about that. If you're creating a video game, you're going to want to
start with the idle pose, and we're going to end
in that same idle pose. We're going to sandwich our performance in
between this idle pose. Motion capture can be used
in a lot of different ways. We could create an
entire short film capturing our own performance. In this case, in this class, we're going to be using
it for the video game. I'm going to perform
either a celebration, I finish the game or a
start animation to say, Come on, let's start the game. Feel free to get creative with the performance choices that you make and how you want to implement them in
your video game. To start on the app, we need to open
the move one app. We have the Move one app open, and I can see that I have a bunch of credits
because I paid for them. But if you're using the free version,
you'll have 30 credits. We have 30 seconds of
performance that we can capture. When I want to begin, I'll click this little
circle in the bottom, and I need to stand
back and get in this APs and have five
seconds to do that. This is the calibration pose. Once this is done, I
can begin performing, and it's okay that I'm
talking because it doesn't capture
facial animation. Have fun with this and do
it for little performance. We have our performance, and
I haven't submitted it yet. That's the most important part because until we hit upload, we haven't used any
of our credits. If I want to take a
different performance, I can just click retake
and then start over. It's only when I click upload that I'm actually
using my credits. Do as many takes as it takes to get the performance that
you want for your character. Also, if I hit stop early, I can save some seconds as well. You don't always have to go
to 10 seconds on this app. If I click Upload. It will start initializing, and we can just wait
for 8-10 minutes, and it'll generate
the animation for us on the Move one character. We just need to wait
for that to happen, and we can check the gallery
to see when that happens. They'll give us a
little check mark to know that we can
download the FBX. That was just a practice run. When you're ready to start, make sure you hit that
calibration pose, then you start in the idle pose and for my take that I did, I was thinking, I want to encourage the player
to begin the game. I looked back and did
a little motion like, Come on, let's start the game. I also just stayed
in that idle pose. I didn't have to
reorient my feet. I ended in that
idle pose as well. After I did my egging on
motion to say, let's go. Let's play the game. That was
just a practice animation. Again, if I want this to work seamlessly
with a video game, I would hit my calibration
pose, so the app is happy. Then after that five seconds, I would start in my idle pose, and I'm going to do my little celebration performance
for this class, because I'm imagining, okay, we've finished this level. I want a little
celebration cinematic. I calibrated idle, performance, celebrate happy
fingerguns, holster them, and then back into
the idle pose. We just want to
make sure that we squeeze that into the 10
seconds that the app gives us. If you're working on the
free version of the app, you have those free 30 credits, which is really just 30 seconds. It's most economical if
you cut that down into 10 second takes is the shortest take you
can do on the app. But again, if you
jump to your camera and you can stop it earlier, you can use even less of those credits every
time you upload. Just be mindful of that when you're using
those 30 credits. Have a play with the app, get creative with
your performance, and remember that you can retake as many
times as you want, and you're only
committing to using your credits when
you press upload. Once it's uploaded
and processed, and you have that
little green check box, you can click that
in the project gallery to open your take, and you can see it already applied on the Move
one character, and you just want to
click the share button on your iPhone and download an FBX. I like to email myself a copy of that so I can easily
get it on my computer. Now that you have
that, save that in your project folder and
meet me in the next lesson, or I'll teach you how to
create animation from scratch manually using key frames in the sequencer
in Unreal engine.
4. Create Your First Animation: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to learn
how to keyframe animate our character inside a level
sequence. Let's dive in. Now that we have our
character, our landscape, and our [inaudible]
recorded with our iPhone, we're ready to begin animating. Let's navigate to
somewhere where we have an interesting viewpoint
in our landscape. For my level, it's over
here on this platform, so this is where
I'm going to create a cinematic animation using
my metahuman character. First things first,
when creating animation is we need
a level sequence. To create a level sequence, we're going to control+spacebar to pull up the content drawer, and I want to save
all my animations in the same place so that
they're easy to get to. Everything that I
animate is going to be related to the metahumans, so I'm going to
put the animation in the metahumans folder. I'm going to create a
new animation folder. Inside this animations folder, I'm going to right click and go to cinematics level sequence. A level sequence, you can
really just think like Adobe Premiere or any
other editing software. That's what a level
sequence is like. It's just like a timeline and
a sequence where we can cut clips together for our
animation on the character. A level sequence is
where we animate things. I'm going to name this
LS for level sequence, celebrate because
that's the kind of animation that I recorded. I'm going to click and
drag this into my scene, and it should snap
to the surface of what I'm dragging
my mouse over, and now I can open up
this level sequence. There's an actual open
level sequence button in the details panel once
I have this selected, so I can click Open
level sequence. This is going to change the
work space a little bit. You can see down at the
bottom, we have a timeline. This is where we're going
to do all the animation, and all our cameras and actors and characters
are going to live. Then these other panels are just here to support us and give us different information and
tools to use in the process. I first need to create
a camera to view this level sequence
through because right now, I'm just viewing this through the general viewport camera, and nothing is connected
to my level sequence yet. So I can quickly
create the camera and easily create it by clicking
this camera button. Now I can see that I'm
piloting this camera. It's called Cine Camera Actor, and it matches this name here. I know that the view
that I'm looking through is the camera connected
to this level sequence. I can also see that because this blue icon is enabled,
if I uncheck this, you can see that I am no
longer piloting this camera, and if I want to re pilot, I can just click this
lock button again. Now I can navigate around
with the cinematic camera. This camera is slightly
different than the normal viewport
camera because there are some focus attributes
that we can adjust to create some nice blurring
effect on the background. I'm going to leave this here for now and we can return
to the camera later. I'm going to toggle down these options so we can focus on bringing in our character. Now I'm going to
control+space bar to get back to my menu and go to the Metahumans folder
and navigate to my character. If you don't have a metahuman
character you're using, you can use the third
person blueprint character by going into the third person blueprints folder
and click and drag that blueprint in instead of what I'm doing
as a metahuman. I'm clicking and dragging in this character
and letting go. Now by doing it this
way he got dropped into my scene and not
into my level sequence. You can see this
in the outliner, if I switch my tabs up
here to the outliner, that I have a blueprint
of my metahuman. This is not how
we want to do it. I'm going to hit delete
and control+space bar. You can see I can't
click and drag this into sequencer because my content
drawer is in the way, so I'm going to open up my content drawer
a different way. Go to windows, content browser, and now I have a
side by side view. Yours may also come in
undocked like this. You may have a floating window, which also makes it easy
so I can click and drag my third person
blueprint character or metahuman blueprint directly
into the sequencer. Now, you can see it also added
it to the outliner here, but it created as
a spawn version, so it doesn't actually
live in the scene. It lives only in the sequencer, and we can see it here, or we will be able to
see it in here. Now when I move it into place, because we have the sequencer open as soon as I
close sequencer, those little lightning bolt
things will disappear. This camera only lives
in the sequencer, and this character only lives
in the sequence as well. That's what the
lightning bolt means. So where's my
character? My character is at the world origin. If I go to the details tab here, I can see that the
location is 000, which is not this platform. Luckily, I can get
this platform position by just selecting the
clapper board here. If you don't see
this, you may have accidently hit G
on your keyboard, which hides icons like this, so just hit G again if
you're missing these icons. I can get this location and actually copy it by
right clicking copy, and now I can select my character again from
the outliner and just copy and paste that location
into the details panel here. Now my character got
matched exactly to this clapper board icon
for the level sequence. It's put my feet slightly
through the ground, so I'm just going to hit
W on the keyboard to get the move tool and slightly lift up the character right now, and now we have our character in our sequence and we're
ready to animate. You can see he's
slightly blurry, and that's because
we're looking again through the Cine Camera Actor. In this camera, if
I toggle it down, we have attributes
like focal length, camera aperture, and
it's focus distance. These things affect what we actually see in the viewport, so I can reduce this
focus distance. But it's hard to know what is this value and just eyeball it. There's a helpful thing
for the Cine Camera Actor. This camera component, if I
search in the details panel, in the details tab
here for focus, I can see there's a
draw debug focus plane. So if I turn this on,
it'll actually show me a plane that
represents this distance. As I pull this in, it'll
bring that plane into focus as representative
measurement for that distance. I can place it directly on
the face of my character and then turn it off to know
that I've got them in focus. You can see that this
is also slightly blurred the background now
instead of the foreground. Now, when you
automatically bring in a metahuman or a third
person blueprint character, you get what's called
a control rig. Now, in future
versions of unreal, if they somehow take this off as being
automatically applied, you should be able to
get these control rigs by toggling down your character and going to the body or whatever skeletal mesh component there is for your character. Click this plus
button and go into control rig and choosing
from the control classes. There should be a metahuman
control rig here. We don't see it because we
already have it applied, but if you don't see yours, you can see this metahuman
control rig name. It should be found
in this menu here, so you can actually
apply it if yours is missing in the future
versions of unreal. Now, what does this
allow us to do? It allows us to
pose our character. I can start selecting
these controls using W and E to switch
between move and rotate. I can actually begin moving
and rotating this character. If your manipulator isn't facing the angle of the arm or the
joint that you're changing, you can go up to
the top right here and click this
little world icon, and it will change the
manipulator orientation, so now you can
rotate in line with the joints for the controls
that they're connected to. I can set key frames in
the timeline by hitting S, and a little dot will
pop up on my timeline. I can scrub forward in time, and if I turn on auto key here, all I have to do is just
move this control again, and it'll automatically set
another keyframe for me. So I can create a little
waving animation here. I'm going to go ahead
and hit S here as well, just for good measure because it will only auto key frame, only the values
that have changed. We can see if we toggle
down this control, that rotation roll and
rotation pitch have changed, but not the rotation yaw. We want to include the
yaw here by hitting S, so that we're not actually
bypassing that keyframe, when we create new
ones in the future. By doing this, we
make sure we lock down all the
animation attributes. So it's also just a
good practice to hit S, even with auto key on. Once I do, I can see that
I've had a keyframe, not just on rotations, but everything for this control. So I can move forward in time and begin my wave animation. By just moving my
arm up and down, and so I can click
and drag to select a key and Control-C to copy
and Control-V to paste, and I can repeat
this action now. So clicking and dragging, selecting two keys and hitting
Control-C and Control-V, so now I'm repeating that
wave animation here. That is how you
can quickly start animating inside
of unreal engine. This animation doesn't
look that great right now, and that's okay because we haven't spent a
ton of time on it. The good thing to know is
we've learned the tools, and the tools don't change, no matter how complicated
we make the animation. In this lesson, we learned how to add our character correctly to a level sequence as a spawn
version of that character, so they only live in
that level sequence, and we learned how to
animate that character with the control rig by hitting
S on the keyboard, even if we have auto key on. It's just a good
practice to have. I know I've thrown a lot of
terminology at you here, but you'll get more comfortable
the longer you work on real engine and get
started animating. In the next lesson,
we're going to take the motion capture we
recorded with our iPhone and we'll apply it to
this character to get even more believable
animation. I'll see you there.
5. Apply Motion Capture: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to apply motion
capture to our character, and we're going to take
it from our iPhone or from free websites. This is to bring our
character to life, so we can do it in a
fast and easy way with performances that we can grab
from online or our iPhone. We captured a motion
capture performance of ourselves with the iPhone
earlier in the class, so that we can apply
it to our character. Now, you don't have
to have captured it with an iPhone if
you don't have one. You can actually access
motion capture data from websites like
Mixamo for free, and all you really need is a.fbx file format to download, that has animation
on a skeletal mesh. It doesn't matter that it's not our specific character
that we're downloading it, because we can apply
any animation to our character as long
as it's the.fbx format. Similarly, with the iPhone
capture that we did, that character is
also not the same as the character we
have in Unreal Engine. We're going to need to transfer that animation to our
character as well, and I'll show you
how to do that. For now, I'm just going to
ignore this level sequence. I'm just going to hit "Save", so we can save all
of our settings, and I'm going to go
into the Content Drawer or Content Browser. I'm going to open
the content browser because we're going to spend
a little more time here. I'm going to dock this with the sequencer
at the bottom here. I'm going to navigate up to my animation folder
that I created, and inside of here,
I'm going to create a new folder called
MotionCapture. You can also call
this MoCap for short. I'm going to
"Double-click" in here, and this is where I'm going
to import my FBX that I've downloaded from
my phone or Mixamo, or some other motion
capture source. I'm also providing the
motion capture that I got with my iPhone in
the class resources. You can download mine
and follow along. Click "Open" on celebrate, and we'll have this window
pop up of FBX import options. I'm going to reset to default, so it's the same as what you'll get when you open
it for the first time. The only thing we need
to change is we want to make sure that we
import the animations. It's going to bring
in a skeletal mesh and a mesh for the character
to represent the skeleton, and that's why we don't
need to choose a skeleton, because it's going to
come in with this FBX. I'm going to click "Import All". We get this little warning.
We can just close, and we get a ton
of materials here. To clean this up,
I'm just going to filter this folder by materials, by clicking this "Filter" icon. Go to Material and
check on the material. Now I can create a
folder inside of here called Materials, and I can click one end of this list and
"Shift-click" the other, and now I can
remove this filter. I have all my materials
selected, and now I can click, drag these materials into the folder and
confirm move here. I'm also going to move
these textures as well. Now we have a little
cleaner view of what our animation is and what
consists of the import. Let me zoom in so we can
see it a little bit better. We have the skeleton, we have the physics asset which
doesn't relate to us. We could even delete
that if we wanted, and we have the actual animation
is what we care about. Here we have the
skeletal mesh as well. This is what that little white robot character
consists of, and where all those
materials came from was to make that visible. I'm going to "Double-click"
on this animation just to watch it to make sure
it came in correctly. We can see our animation here, and if you don't see the joints, you can go to Character, Bones, All Hierarchy. If you want to turn them off, you can choose Select Only. I can navigate
around this window just like I can in
any other viewport in Unreal Engine. This
is the animation. We want to take off
of this character and put it on our MetaHuman, or the third-person blueprint
template character, if you're following
along with that. I'm going to close
this window down. I'm going to "Right-click" on this animation
sequence asset, and I'm going to choose
Retarget Animations. In this new pop-up window, I just need to choose the
target skeletal mesh, and for this character it's
going to be a weird name. I'm going to drop this down, and if we were to retarget
our mannequin skeletons, we can choose one of
these manne skeletons or the quin skeleton if I'm using the third-person
blueprint. But because I'm using the
blueprint for the MetaHuman, I need to choose the
MetaHuman skeleton here. I can scroll up and try to
find a MetaHuman skeleton. The MetaHuman skeleton
comes in several pieces, but what we're most
concerned with is the body. If I hover over this, I
can see that the path for this is
/Game/MetaHumans/MHI_Lucas_001, and that is my MetaHuman. I know that this is the
correct skeletal mesh for my MetaHuman actor. I'm going to click this
body, because again, we're interested
in the body motion as opposed to something
like the face. I'm going to choose this, and we should see
these side by side. I'm going to "Double-click" the celebrate_Anim to
play a preview of what this retarget will
look like going from this character
onto our MetaHuman. It's okay that we only
see the arms and ankles, because there's an
underlying skeleton for the entire body here.
We just can't see it. We're only seeing the mesh for the arms for some technical
reasons for how they actually create MetaHumans.
I have two options here. Now I can export
retarget assets, which is making for us this
auto-generated retargeter. We can export those, so we can edit them
later, if we wanted to, if there was some
weird offsets between the source and the
target skeleton, or we can just export
the animations. For now, I'm just
going to export the animations because this
preview looks pretty good, and I don't think I'm
going to need to actually change the retarget or asset
that it creates for us. I'm going to click
"Export Animations". It's going to ask me where
I want to save these. Instead of the
MotionCapture folder, I'm going to choose
the animation folder, and I'm going to
"Right-click" and make a new folder
called retargeted, because this is no longer technically motion capture data, it's retargeted
motion capture data. I want to know the
difference between those two when I'm looking for them
in the right folders. I'm going to click "Export" and accept the default settings, and now, we've navigated to this animation sequence
in the retargeted folder. This is what we can use
now in our level sequence. If I go to sequencer
and I scroll up to the body component
of my character, I can click this
little + button here, and out of all these menu
options at the very top, the first one we can see
is called animation. Now because we've retargeted, we have the celebrate_Anim here. If I hadn't retargeted,
this wouldn't appear here. The only other thing
I would see is these calibration animations
that aren't helpful to us. Because I retargeted
now, I can see here that it appears
with an asterisk, and all that means is
just that I haven't saved that animation asset,
and that's not a big deal. I'm going to click this
and it will bring in the animation wherever my
playhead was in the sequencer. You can see the animation is all at the very end
of my sequence. I can click, drag this down to the start
of the timeline. I can control middle
mouse wheel to zoom out, and I can extend the endpoint of this level sequence to
encompass the entire animation. I also want to include
the camera cut to extend to the end as well. That's important just in case we ever had multiple cameras, and we wanted to make sure
that we have the camera enabled for the entirety
of the animation. Now when I scrub, nothing's
happening because it's currently being
overridden by the control rig. I can temporarily mute this by clicking this little
prohibitive icon, and now when I scrub, I
should see my animation. Now we've retarded animations. We've put it on our
custom character, and we're watching it play
back in our level sequence, where we could even
begin animating the camera as well by using shortcuts like S and navigating around while
piloting the cine camera. Now, if we wanted to have
a side-by-side view, I can just pull up
another viewport window by going to Window, Viewports. This will allow me to
pilot the cine camera, as well as have a
perspective view of the whole scene
in another viewport. What I can do now is
select the camera. Then in this viewport, I'm
going to make this the active viewport by
clicking the "Tab". If you don't see the tab, you may have toggled them
down here under hide tabs. You can click this button
here to show tabs. I can hit "F" on my keyboard now and it will focus on
what I have selected, which is the cine camera actor. Now it navigated this
viewport camera to this view, and now I can see the entire
scene from this view and see what the final
rendered version will be in this other view. If I wanted to begin animating
this camera as well. Now, the other thing
with this blueprint of this MetaHuman is they're
slightly off the ground, and I can see that better now that I'm in
this camera view, so I can get an even
closer view to the ground to see where the ground actually is relative to their feet, and I can move them down. Now if I try to move them down, they're just going to
go through the floor. That's because I have
snapping turned on. I can turn off snapping for the move by clicking
this little button here. This will do it
for the move tool, this will do it for
the rotation tool, and this will do it
for the scale tool. If I wanted to leave it on and adjust the amount it
snaps per increment, I can do that in this other
icon next to the blue one. I'm going to turn this
off and disable it. Now it's no longer blue, which
tells me I can move this down exactly to where I need it. Now when I play
back the animation, I can see the feet
are in a better position to the animation. Now, I'm not seeing an update, and I may want to say the level sequence and
even reopen it. In case you ever run
into any bugs like this, that's how you
want to handle it. I'm going to close
the level sequence, and you can see that made
our character disappear. Because remember, that character only exists in that
level sequence. If it's not open, then the
character won't exist. I'm going to select
the level sequence. I'm going to cancel the focus search that I
did in the details panel, so now I can see all the details for what
I have selected, and choose Open Level Sequence. Now, when I scrub the timeline, we have our animation
back, but we don't have the camera piloting
on this side anymore. I'm going to click in this
viewport to make it active, and I'm going to click
this button here to lock this one
to the rendercam. Now you may also notice
that we're having a little bit of an
LOD issue here, or a level of detail issue. That means dependent
on the camera position relative to our character, we may get lower
levels of detail. To force the level of detail, I need to go into the
blueprint itself. I'm going to find it in the Outliner tab and
click "Edit BP". In this complicated
looking window, I'm going to navigate down in the components tab to LODSync. I'm going to force
the LOD to zero. I'm going to click "Compile", and now when I close this, it shouldn't matter what
distance the camera is. That way, we shouldn't
see any pops or changes to the resolution of the quality
of the character's mesh. In this lesson, we've
learned how to take our own custom performance
from motion capture, apply it to our avatar in Unreal Engine inside
of a level sequence, so we can play it
back and see it. In the next lesson,
we're going to learn how to take
this even further by learning how to actually edit this motion capture data.
I'll see you there.
6. Adjust Your Mocap Animation: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to learn
two different ways. We can actually edit the
motion capture data we have on our character because
we're not locked in to what we have in
our motion capture data. We can actually edit
that. I'm going to show you the two
different ways now. Let's jump back
into unreal engine. The first way we can edit the motion capture is
through a layered approach. We can use the metahuman
control rig by unmuting it. Now it's currently overriding
our motion capture. But if we right click the
metahuman Control rig layer, we can go to convert to
layered and check this on. It'll change this to an
additive control rig. If I suddenly wanted
the arm to be raised higher for the entire
animation, I can have that now. Now for the whole animation, the arm is offset, and that's through a layered
control rig approach. Of course, I could
set keys and do all the normal animation stuff that we've learned
in the timeline. But that's for a
layered approach. We still can't access the actual data that's
on the motion capture. If you want to edit
the actual data from the motion capture, that's the second method and
not the layered approach. If you want to edit
the actual data, what we want to do
is convert this back to being not layered, and we want to
mute this for now. Toggle this back down and we can right click on
the body track. When we right click, we can
say bake 2 Control rig. We can choose the
metahuman_control rig that matches the same control rig name we already
have down here. When we click this,
it's going to run through once we
choose our options, and I like a tolerance of 0.1 because 0.001 is a
little overkill. I'm going to choose
0.1 and hit Create. It's going to run through the animation and bake it
down to a control rig. You can see all
the keys have been transferred now to this
little metahuman control rig. There's a key on
every single frame. It's not working because
that control rig is muted. If I unmute it, we have
our animation back. But instead of it working
on this animation track, it's now baked down
to the controls. When I select them,
I can actually see there's keys on every
single frame here. It maybe a little overwhelming
to see all of this at the same time when we only
have one control selected. There's an option to filter by only selected control
rig controls. When I check this on, we're only going to
see the layer or the track for what
we have selected. We can see the name update every time I change
my selection. Now, it's not super
helpful to see just little dots that
represent animation data, so we can actually go into the graph editor or what they call the curve
editor and unreal. It may open in a
separate window. We can dock this right next
to our sequencer as well. We have these two tabs
next to each other, and we can see values over time. Time is across the x-axis, and value is on the y-axis. This type of representation
of animation exists in almost every
animation software, whether you're
using unreal, Maya, after effects, it
doesn't matter. This is just a universal
way to represent animation. You want to get comfortable
viewing animation in this way, value over time. We can see we have a big
spike on the blue channel, and these colors actually correspond to a particular axis. We can see this is the
blue rotation here that relates to the z-axis
in the rotation here. They actually give it
names instead of XYZ, like we have for location. They give it a roll
pitch and yaw name. But if we just select on them individually, we
can isolate them. Then we can see which color
corresponds to which axis. If I click drag select
some of these keys, and I left mouse button
click and start moving them. I can actually
hold down shift to isolate the axis in
which they're moving. I can move them
just up and down, which is just value changes, and they're not
changing over time. They're just
changing the values. If I wanted to change
something in time, I'd have to move
it left and right. Now we've looked at
two different ways. We're can actually edit
the motion capture data through a layered approach, as well as baking that data down to a control rig and
editing it that way. Me in the next lesson,
we're going to learn even more tools about how
to edit our animation.
7. Customize Your Mocap Animation: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to further
customize the movement of our character and learn how
to adjust it even more. Now, when I play
back this animation, I notice that the feet don't really stay on the
ground perfectly. They're not really
locked in place. They're slipping and sliding. Especially, if I get even
closer from this camera angle, you can see the feet
are moving around. We can use this as an
example of some of the tools we have
available to us as well as maybe posing out the fingers a little bit better
and exaggerating or correcting some of the mistakes that come in from the
motion capture data. I'm going to jump back
into the sequencer, and I'm going to
find this control. I'm going to scrub to a point in time where the foot
should be on the ground. Stay on the ground
instead of right here, where we can see it
sliding and moving around. I want to lock the foot down where it should be
on the ground here. Find the keys that
are the offending keys and just delete them. The foot is on the ground, I'm going to choose this moment to be the last good moment, and just start deleting
keys after that. Now, it's just going to start to blend between this
moment and the next. In case there's ever
any jittery happening, it's going to blend. I'm going to go right up
until the point where the next time the foot should
be coming off the ground, which is here, I'm
going to delete everything just by
click drag selecting, and then hitting "Delete"
on the keyboard. Now we have just the slow
motion of the foot sliding. If you want to lock this down, we could copy paste this
key by hitting "Control C" and "Control V,"
and it shouldn't move, unless we have some weird
interpretation happening. You can see we do. We have this weird interpretation
happening, which we can lock down by click drag,
selecting the two keys, and we can autotangent the interpolation of
these tangent handles, which are these handles that are coming off of
the white keys. Now this foot should be
locked on the ground. When we get here, we can
see there's some stretching going on because our
legs don't stretch, and our body is going up higher than our foot and the
length of our leg. If I toggle this down
and look at location Z, we can see maybe it's
a little high here. We want to click, drag select, and just bring this whole
section down a little bit. There's an interesting
tool here. We can click and activate
this multi-select tool. We can actually tell it what is the pivot we
want to scale from. It's scaling from an
average point right now, and what it calls
the bound center. If we look at these tool
options on the bottom right, you can see we actually
have a change pivot type. Let's choose the last key. Now I show a pivot
from the bottom, and we can see this little
indicator just jumped. It's like this
throwing star icon. Now we're scaling
from the last key. You can see my CoG or the
center of gravity of my hips, that control is
being moved down. I'm basically
watching this camera until my knee starts
to bend again. That's how I know I've
gone down far enough to compensate for the foot
changes we just made. That feels about right. Now I can play back the
animation and check. Indeed, the leg isn't popping or doing something
weird in that moment. That's one thing you want to
look for when you're making these big changes and see if
there's another spike here, which I can just click,
drag, and select. You can see that this little
area starts to get small, so I can zoom in by scrolling
with my middle mouse wheel. I can also right
click to pan around, and I can hold down Shift
and Alt and right click to zoom in left and right
and zoom in up and down. That's Shift, Alt
and right clicking. Now I can have a little
more room to see the slider and bring this
little spike down as well. Now, there's some rough
blend moments here, I could just go in and
delete these areas as well. Now we've created a bit
more of a smooth transition or just manually moving something into have
that transition, be a bit more smoothed out. Now we can see we have
our foot pinned down on the ground where it should be. In my animation, I had finger guns in this moment
where I thought I was going to have my finger guns raised and then holster them in my fake finger gun holsters in my hips when I was doing the
motion capture performance. I want to adjust the
animation so that I can see a finger point more
clearly in this moment, where we currently have just
a generalized hand pose. In this moment, I want to pose out a more accurate
finger position. If I'm getting things
cropped out like this, that means the near
clipping plane of the camera is a
little too extreme. I'll show you a more
technical solution where you can just
start typing r., and then set near clip plane. I can select this and
then hit "Spacebar" and set the near
clip plane to 1. We should see this update, and now we can get close in with our camera and see all the
controls at the same time. I'm going to choose this
moment to pose this out. I'm going to hold down Alt, and left mouse button click to tumble
around my selection. That will make it easier to
go through this section. I want to select all the
controls here and reset them. I'm going to go one by
one and do this now. I'm clicking the Reset button on the AEM details panel
here on the right side. After I make all my selections, I can just click
that Reset button, and it should reset this
to the default values, so I can start fresh
instead of having this wankie pose in my fingers, where maybe some
things are even bent in a way that a finger
shouldn't bend. Now, I'm also holding
down Shift to be able to select multiple
controls at once. Now when I click this little
arrow on the far right, it should reset everything
to the default arm pose. I'm going to hit "F" on
the keyboard to zoom in, and then I'm going to
pose this all out. I'm going to select all
the finger controls. I'm just going to rotate
them on their local axes. If I can see the blue one, that's the one I
want to animate down the hand and turn
it into a fist, except for the
finger pointing one. I'm going to go
back to this one, and actually reset this one. Now I have a finger pointing
pose that I can use, and I actually use a
tool to save this pose. I'm going to select all the controls that
relate to this pose. I'm going to go to
the Poses icon here, and it's going to
open a new window where I can create a pose, and I can rename it Finger
point, and create this asset. I can capture this thumbnail, and I can also have these
tools to actually mirror it. With these controls selected, I can select the mirror control. We can see I have
selected the other hand, and then paste this
pose on that hand. This window, I can
look over here and make sure that it
worked the way I expected, hitting "F" and zooming in. Now I only had to make
that pose one time, and I can use it in both hands. I'm going to select all
the controls again, and I can see that it's created the correct selection
on everything. I'm going to expand this up so I can see all the
finger controls, and actually just
filter this down. Turn this back on so we can
see just the finger controls, and then I can choose the range where I want these
fingers to be pointing. I'm going to control
mouse wheel in to see just where this
new key frame is. As soon as I move off of these, it's going to flip
the animation. I'm going to delete everything
on either side of this, so I can see it more clearly
where the new pose is. I'm going to scrub out now, and I want to see where I
want this finger pose to end, which is probably somewhere towards the end of the
animation down here, where I return back to idle. It's probably somewhere in here, so I can click, drag, select all of these keys, delete them, and
then now copy paste these later in the animation. We've saved this animation
for this section. With this viewport selected in my mouse over this viewport, I can click anywhere
and hit "G," so now I can see it
without the control rig, and I can select
the controls again without needing to see
them here in that view. I can see the finger
point happening, and it will blend back
to the normal hand pose that it had from
the motion capture. I can also see if I need to
have this happen earlier, but I think this is okay. Now, I just need to do
this for the other hand. Now you've learned how to adjust motion capture data
inside of avalanche, and you've learned
a few new tools. A lot of these other ones
are self explanatory. I've been using only
select rig controls. If I uncheck this,
I can accidentally select the environment,
and stuff like that. This is one of my favorites
that I like to have on, so that I'm not accidentally selecting things when
I'm trying to animate. You saw the other filter
that I like to use, which is the Show-only
selected controls. Those are the two main
ones that I like to use. Now finally, I'm just going to delete the first part
of this animation, because it's not super
helpful for seeing the calibration pose from the motion capture at the
beginning of our animation. I'm going to start the
animation somewhere over here. I'm just going to click, drag, select all of these keys,
and then hit "Delete." Now, I could drag and move all of these keys
down if I wanted to, so that our start
frame is on Frame 0. I can just move all
of these keys down. Now I can change
the position here, and I can animate the
camera if I want, so I can just do a quick
key frame on the camera. Move this key. Maybe this
is the start position, and the end position is
something a bit more dramatic. We can see the sunlight
shining through the character, and we can maybe push
in a little bit. Final thing I can do is, add
some face poses as well. Since I do have the
face control board here, if they're hard to see, you can actually just turn
on the unlit mode here, and that way, the controls are just a
little bit easier to read. You may have to look down
so they're not black, but I can pose out the
face however I want. It'll just take a
little bit of time because there are
so many controls, but that's all
available to you there. In this lesson, we learned how to further edit the
animation data. But just keep in mind that everything we've
done here is what would be considered destructive
to the animation data. If you aren't sure about the decisions you're making on how to adjust the animation, consider using the first
approach we learned, which was the layered
control rig approach. That way, you can preserve
the animation data from the motion capture
and add onto it. But if you do want to edit the motion capture data,
this is a great approach, and you've seen some of the
tools we have at our disposal just so that we can be more efficient in how
we're editing it.
8. Render a Cinematic Movie File: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to learn
how to render out a cinematic movie file.
Why is that important? It's important
because we want a way to share all of our hard work, whether it's on social
media or YouTube, or even to a potential employer. Because a demo reel for an animator is the
most important thing, and if you want a
career in this, you want to know how to actually
present your animation. So let's learn how
to do that now. So back inside Unreal Engine, I like to use a plug in
that's called Movie Render Q. So you have to enable this.
It's not on by default. So you have to restart your
engine after you enable it. Once we're back
in, I just seem to select the level sequence
and get that open again. So I can jump back
into rendering and select this view port and
match our Sini camera to it. I can see what will be rendering
from this camera view, and I can click
the movie clapper and the three buttons
right next to it. So I can actually choose between the new plug in that we just
enabled or the old one. I'm going to choose the new one, which we just enabled. So now when I click the
movie Clapper icon, it will open that
version of this. So we can see that
we're going to render out our sequence
that we named here in the map that I created from an earlier class in the series. And the main thing we want to
do is set up the settings. So I'm going to click
unsaved Config. Now, this is up to you,
how you want to export it, whether you want a
JPEG sequence or a PNG sequence or
even an EXR sequence. Then recompile that in a
software like after effects. That's typically the
preferred method because it gives the
highest quality images. So I would recommend
one of these. You can also turn
on anti aliasing. By clicking this, we get a new option called
anti aliasing. For every temporal sample count, it will increase
the render time. But typically people like to
go with a value of around 32 or 64 and click
override anti aliasing. We can also choose where
we want to output this and whether we want a
custom frame rate or having a custom
playback range. This is where it will
save all the files, and we can navigate to where
this is going to save them. I'm going to click Accept, and I'm going to
render local because I don't have a render farm
to render them remotely. Here you can see the actual
effect of increasing the sub samples in the
anti aliasing to 32. It literally goes through
one frame 32 times. So that's how much it slows
your render time down as opposed to leaving
that value to one. Now that our render is finished, we can use a program
like After Effects. I've created a new project
and in the Project panel, I can right click and import the image files that have
exported from Unreal Engine. Click File, and I'll
navigate to where the movie renders are saved
in my Unreal Engine project. All I need to do
is select one of the images for After Effects to import
the entire sequence. You can see the checkbox is on for Imported JPEG sequence, and I can click Import. So now we can see we have all 254 images from frame 0-254. The only issue is
in on Real Engine, we are working in 30
frames per second, and in After Effects,
you can see it says 24. So to interpret the still images at the correct frame rate, we need to interpret
this footage so I can right
click the footage, go to interpret footage, main, and then choose
assume this frame rate, and I can tell you
exactly what I want, which is 30 frames a second, because that's what we
did in Unreal Engine. So when I click and drag this into kind
of a timeline here or into a new composition or into this new
composition icon, I'll get a timeline with each
of the images in sequence, and it can preview what the
whole render will look like. So now if I wanted to export this as an
actual movie file, I can do so through
the render Q. I can go to composition,
add to render Q. Then I can set the
settings that I want here, as well as the kind of codec that I want to use in
the output module. So right here in
the format options, I can choose the codec. Apple Pro Rs 422 is a little bit overkill for especially a social
media kind of sharing. So I might choose something like LT or the Light version of that or even h264
and click Accept. Now I can save this movie
file and give it a name. It'll default to the
composition name, and I can hit Render. If you notice any
artifacts in your renders, you can increase the spatial
and temporal samples that we saw in the movie render Q settings in Unreal Engine. So now you have a final
cinematic movie file so that you can share with
your friends or social media. In this lesson, we
learned how to take our animation Unreal
Engine and export a series of images so
that we can recompile it into a movie file in a
program like After Effects. Now, the one disadvantage, of course, is in Unreal. You can't actually
export that with sound. So if you want to add
sound to your movie, you actually need to do
that in another program just like After
Effects or premiere.
9. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on
finishing this class. We've covered a lot of topics. We started with
hand key animation, as well as creating
motion capture with our iPhone or getting
from websites for free, and then applying that
to our own character, and then even taking that further and editing
that animation from a layered approach
to actually going in and editing the motion
capture data itself. We've covered a ton
of information, so congratulations on
making it to the end. I would love to see
what you created, so share a link to your video
in the project gallery. If you enjoyed this class, there's one more in the series. We're going to take
this character and make it playable
as a video game. We're also going to take
this cinematic and make it lead into the gameplay of our video game.
I'll see you there.
Lucas Ridley, Professional Animator
