Character Animation in Unreal Engine 5 and UEFN

1. What you will learn in this class: Oh, Raven, you ever mess around with character animation in Unreal Engine? I just found this dope site called Mixamo. Free motion capture animations, man. Like, I slapped a backflip on my custom skin in like 5 minutes. Mixamo, huh? I've been diving into Unreals animation tools myself. Those free Mixi moo animations are solid. Tons of walks, runs, even some sick dance moves. You just drag them in and boom. Your character's moving like a pro. Right? I downloaded this Ninja run cycle, imported it into Unreal, and my guy was sprinting like the flash. But like the real magic retargeting. I can get all those cool miximo animations to work on over 1,200 Fortnight characters. Right. Retargeting's a game changer. You ever mess up the IK bones and end up with your character's arms all twisted like a pretzel. The built in retargeting feature makes it so easy. Oh, dude, I'm still wrapping my head around how cool that is. A couple of clicks, and the retargeting is done. Audio to animation tool hands down is awesome. You seen that thing? You feed it a sound clip, like, say, a dialogue track, and unreal generates a near perfect lip sync animation that sinks to the dialogue track. It's wild. No way. Audio to animation? That's next level. So what? You just import a wave file, and it automatically makes your character lip sync to it. I'm totally trying that out, my dude. Exactly. You just plug in the audio, tweak a few settings, and Unreal does the heavy lifting. And it's near perfect. You can even select the mood for the animation like angry, sad, or happy, and your character's face will reflect that mood. Yo, bro. That's sick. I'm thinking about adding sound effects to my animations, too. Like, I got this sword swing animation, and I want to layer in some whoosh sounds, maybe a metal clang when it hits. You know how to sink audio in Unreal? Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. You can attach sound cues to specific places in the level sequence, and it will trigger the sound at the right moment. I did that for a zombie growl in my last project. Scared the heck out of my squad when it played in game. That's so like you. I'm gonna mess with that tonight, maybe throw in some music for my character's victory dance. You think I could retarget a miximo break dance, sink it to some cool music, and add, like, spark effects? Go for it. Retarget the animation. Use audio to animation for the lip sync and toss in some Niagara particles for the sparks. Unreals got all the tools to make it pop. Deal. Man, Unreels animation stuff is just too cool. MiximoRtargeting, audio tools. It's like we're building our own fortnight movie. You in for a late night animation session? You bet. Let's crank some tunes, animate some dialogue, and make some fortnight magic. You're on. Let's make some unreal magic happen. 2. 03 Download Unreal Engine 5: To begin the course, the first thing you're going to want to do if you don't already have UnreLngine and UEFN is to go to unrealengine.com over to the website. And you're going to want to download UnreLEngine and also Unreal Editor for Fortnight. So for Unreal Engine, right here on the main page, right up here in the top right corner, you'll see a blue Download button. That's what you want to do is just download it. You'll have instructions. It includes downloading and installing the Epic Launcher, which is a hub kind of where everything is, you know, where you can launch nRLEngine and Unreal Editor for Fortnite or UEFN. Also, this website here, the UnreLEngine website is a vast knowledge resource for all things Unreal Engine. And you'll be fascinated at all the different things that are created in Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is used for not only top AAA games, many, many, many games, but also used in feature films for high end visual effects. It's used in the automobile industry to, you know, create automobiles as far as the mock ups and things like that. Medical community. I mean, it has a broad user base. Years ago, not too long ago, it was very expensive, and Unreal Engine used to cost $10,000 per seat. So as you can imagine, most of us that are independent filmmakers or independent artists, no way we could afford $10,000. And then, luckily, I think it was around I think it was around 2015 or 2016, somewhere around there, where they dropped the price and they made it a $50 monthly fee. So a lot of people were able to jump in and use UnreLEngine at that time. Not too long after that, they decided to make it to where you could use Unreal Engine for free. And if you were an Indie developer or a small production company and you were making less than $1 million on your project in a given year, you wouldn't have to pay any royalties at all. After that, you would pay at this time, it's 5%. So you want to learn about licensing over here, read that and see how that works. But Epic Games is one of the most fair and artist friendly, developer friendly, filmmaker friendly, you name it company that I have ever seen because they give so much and they ask so little in return. And they keep coming up with more and more things that just make Unreal Engine fantastic. I've been using UnreLEngine for about eight years now. And every time I think I'm starting to get a handle on it, new features come out, and it's just mind boggling. I mean, it's literally a world within a world Unreal Engine is, and none of us, no matter how long we've been using Unreal Engine, we always feel like there's just so much more that we haven't learned or haven't grasped. So in this course, we're going to go over some of the basic techniques that are going to get you off to a fast start, kind of a crash course. That's my goal with this, and also to make this course fun so you can have fun doing it, and you'll also be making a project. You'll be making animation so you can share that with other people. So with that, let's get going. 3. 04 Download UEFN: After you download Unreal Engine and get that all installed because you're going to need that for UEFN, go back to the website and then scroll down to the website, you'll see a section here. These are really good to click on and just read through this stuff. But what I want to point out is the Unreal Editor for Fortnight. So click on that, and this is going to take you to the link right here to get Unreal Editor for Fortnight. This is where we're going to be spending the majority of our time in this course. Here's the official documentation. So you'll want to click on that bookmark it because it's going to give you a lot of information as well. So after UnreLEngine is downloaded for you and the Epic launcher, you want to come back and get Unreal Editor for Fortnight. 4. 05 Create Project Using Animation Template: Animating a fortnight character, including facial animation and body animation is what we're going to cover right now. So we need to find one of the feature examples. So go down to feature examples and click on that. And we need to start with the animation template because this is what has the tools for happiness. Let's just say, it's got the control rigs for the body, the control rigs for the face that will apply to all the fortnight characters that we're going to use with the character device. So go ahead and select the animation template, give it a name. I'm going to call it this one animation Oops. Tutorial. Create that. Yeah. 5. 06 Create Sequence import audio: Okay. So here we are, and we can see we have a beautiful set piece to do our animation. Now, we could play this, and it's a good idea to go through here and see some of the things that they have in the template. But for our purposes, we're going to kind of start from scratch and get an animation going. So let's just position our camera right around here. And if you don't want the icons, remember, you can just press the G key on your keyboard, and that'll make them go away, so the G key, all the lights and everything go away. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new folder by animation tutorials, so I want to have it be where I'm going to import my audio. And then with the audio folder selected, I'm going to go in this area here, right click, and then I'm going to import into this folder. Now, I've got a file here. And it's called The Ghost of Goldfield Story. It has to be a wave wave format. Can't be MP three. You'll have to convert it. So you need a wave file. Now, go ahead and import this in. I'm gonna provide an audio file for you for this tutorial, as well. And then if we play it. So picture this. The Goldfield Hotel sitting all only in the middle of Goldfield, Nevada. Okay, so that's going to tell the story of Creepy Ghost story called The Ghost of Goldfield Hotel. 6. 07 Add Audio Track and Dialogue to Sequencer: Now we've got that. Let's go back to the animation, and I'm going to make another folder here and call it cinematics. And this is where I want to put my sequences for the animation. So go ahead and right click and let's make a level sequence. I'm going to name it S for level sequence, underscore Goldfield. Underscore story. Okay. Save all. Okay, from here, let's go ahead and double click on it to get it open here. Don't need the curves right now, need the sequencer. And the first thing I want to add in here is I want to add that dialog track. So go to the ad and go up to Audio Track. And now we have an audio track right here. Click on the Plus button. Wait, before we do that, let's look at the length of the animation. I have mind set on seconds. You can do it on frames as well. Showtime as seconds or frames. I prefer seconds. It's easier for me to do animations that way. So let's go ahead and move this up to about 30 seconds. I can't remember how long the audio is, but let's get it up here. Go back to the beginning, click on Audio, and then I'm going to do a search for Goldfield, the Ghosts of Goldfield story. Here it is. And I've got a little bit of space here before the animation starts, rather than the dialogue just starting right away. And if we click the AERO key here, we can see that we have volume controls, pitch controls. Mainly, I'm going to bump this up because if you see when you first put your audio in here, so picture this. It's pretty low. I like to put that up to around five, so I can hear it better. The Goldfield Hotel, so. Okay, then drag our end outpoint right to the end there. Okay, so there's our CrfieldHtel sitting all lonely in the middle of Goldfield, Nevada, a dusty little ghost town that time forgot. 11 Labs does a really good job text to audio, so you definitely want to check that out if you haven't already. 7. 08 Create MetaHuman Identity: Okay, so now we have our audio there. The next thing I want to do is I want to create the animation, the facial animation. So we need to do that in a couple of ways here. And to keep us organized, let's just make another folder here. Animation, underscore assets. And here, right click and go up to Meta human, and we need to go to Metahuman identity before metahumanPerformance. So make a metahuman identity. And I'm just going to call it MI. Oops, underscore Gold field. Okay, and double click that so we can open it up. And I'm gonna dock my tab up here. So what we do is we come up here, we click Add, and then add P, and we're going to add a face. So Okay? And what it's gonna give us is a default solver here, a generic face solver. Skeletal mesh, you'll see if you look down here in the skeletal mesh asset, it's created a little face for us here. So this is what we need. This is the identity. Now, when you're using the iPhone app, it's going to create it from all that data there, but we're doing it more of a simple direct way because we're going to be using the audio to animation tool, as you'll see in just a second. Okay, let's go back over here to our animation assets, and you can see now we have the face here and we have our identity. The next thing we need is we need to right click again, go to Metahuman and we need our metahumanPerformance. New meta human performance. We could name this. I could name it Goldfield, which is probably what I should do. 8. 09 Create audio to animation performance: Okay, now, double click. So we open up the performance. Now, in the Meta human performance tab, the first thing we want to do is go over to the right into the details tab, and you'll see depth footage. We don't want that, so click on there, and we want to go to the second one which says audio. Select audio and then under the next dropdown, we're going to choose the Ghost of Goldfield story. Bring this down so we can see this more the control rig, we've got selected as the Control rig Fortnight MH underscore face rig. That's the meta human face rig. And then the visualization mesh, this is going to be our identity that we created. So it named it the SK MI Gold field. So go ahead and select that, and look at that. Bam, we got a face right there. So the next thing we want to do, I like to take the audio and bump it up so I can hear it better. So I put it up to five. And then way up on the left hand side, you can see that our waveform is in the timeline. We've got our preview mesh up here, and now we want to process this. So just click on Process. Look at how fast this is resolving everything. It's actually creating this animation from the audio file faster than real time. So, let's go back and bump this audio back up so we can hear it. And now let's just check out what we have. So picture this, the Goldfield hotel sitting all lonely in the middle of Goldfield, Nevada, a dusty little ghost town that time forgot. Back in 1902, this place was the talk of the town fancy as heck with its sparkling chandeliers and polished mahogany, built when gold fever had everyone dreaming big. But, man, things took a dark turn. Okay, so it looks really good. We want to save that now so we have our performance captured, but we're not done here because we need to make an animation of this. 9. 10 export animation from performance: So up here where it says Export animation, click on that. And then up here, I need to make a new folder and call it animations. This is where I'm going to put all of the animations that I create so that's selected. That's where the animation is gonna go. Click Save, and then we're going to get this window that pops up. The target skeleton or mesh, I like to choose Fortnite Mannequin because that's where all of the animations are going to be overlaid onto. So pick that we select Create, and it's going to tell us it may not work with all these different things. There's a lot of controls that don't work on the Fortnite characters that are meta human. So just kind of disregard that and just say, And then it went ahead and saved that for us. 10. 11 The Character Device: Go back to our sequencer, and what we need to do is we need to first create and select our character. So I'm going to go in the content browser and then down here under Fortnight, under devices. I'm going to search for character device. And there it is right there. Drag it and drop it right here into our scene. I'm gonna hit the space bar so I get my manipulator to rotate. And actually, what we should do since this is all lit up is select that back character back there, get rid of them. And move our character device into a good stage lit position. Hit my F key on the keyboard to Zoom. Of course, you all know already Alt key left mouse button to move around. So now we have our character device, and we don't want Mr. On Germanicin. Obviously, what we want to do is we want to select one of the over 1,200 magnificent Fortnite characters out of the library that is built into UEFN. So we want to go here under Fortnight. And I've got a pink folder here because I like to color my folders, right click on it. You can set the color over here, in case you didn't know where that was or forgot. So the characters, you select that right there, and all of the characters are right here. So you can just pick out and select any one of these characters. I like Ali or Ali, whatever. So I'm going to select this character to put on the mannequin. So what we do is we click on our mannequin, and then we go into our Details tab over here or wherever you've got yours docked. And then we've got our character. So click with the left mouse button and just drag right over there. And, boom, there she is. No more mannequin. Now we got the cool character. Okay, it doesn't look like her feed her all the way. I'm going to move her around a little bit, get her spaced out, right. Okay. Back to our sequencer. Make sure we're at the start position. I want to add our character device or Allie. So I'm going to go in here and press the Add button, go up to Add Actor, add Character device. And here she is right here. Now what I want to do is I want to add that facial animation. And I forgot to name it something shorter, but here it is right here, AS New Meta human performance Goldfield. And that is their facial animation. So let's move in closer and just check out and see what this looks like. Bah. My wheels set too fast. Okay. So picture this, the Goldfield hotel sitting all lonely in the middle of Goldfield, Nevada, a dusty little ghost town that time forgot. Back in 1902, this place was the talk of the town fancy as heck with its sparkling chandeliers and polished mahogany, built when gold fever had everyone dreaming big. But, man, things took a dark turn. The creepiest story Room one oh nine. Okay, that's looking good. Now, if by chance, the lip sink was off a little bit, you can always just click and drag the audio file left to right. 11. 12 Facial Animation Bake to Control Rig: The next thing we have to do, and this is really important. This was frustrating for me because I would just slap on a body animation, and then her facial animation was it would lose half of the strength. So her mouth wasn't opening all the way or, you know, whatever the facial animation was. So I figured out what you have to do is you have to actually bake this to the control rig and then get rid of this animation. And then when we bring the body animation in, it will work. So let's do that next. We click on the character device, Right click Bake to Control rig, and we want to go down here to the Fortnight H, the meta human face rig. It's going to give us all these different options here. And I've found that just leave it on the default in most cases is fine. Click Create. Okay, now what we have here all the keyframes in here. It's all been put on all the eyes, jaw everything all the keyframes are there and editable at this point. So go ahead and click on the animation track here and delete it because we don't need that anymore. Okay. 12. 13 Add body animation: So let's just do this as a test for the body animation. Click animation. And let's do the emote banana. Even though it's really not going to match very well with what she's doing. Usually, I'll use a conversation animation or something like that. But these are the built in ones that come with Fortnite characters, so it's real easy when you're testing just to use those. Okay, so so picture this. The Goldfield Hotel sitting all lonely in the middle of Goldfield, Nevada, a dusty little ghost town that time forgot. The animation for the body and the facial animation is working, but she's going really, really fast, so let's adjust that so it's a lot slower so we can see. Let's right click on the animation in the Track. Go up to Properties. And under playback, you see here it says it's playing back at 1.0. Let's make that go really slow, like 0.25, a quarter of the speed. And we'll see that she's going back in 1902, this place was the talk of the town fancy as heck with its sparkling chandeliers and polished mahogany built when gold fever had everyone dreaming big. But, man, things took a dark turn. The creepiest story Room one oh nine. They say the hotel facial animation and body animation both working together without losing the strength of either one. So if you wanted to take this body animation and edit it, you could just click on the character device, I mean, right click and then go up to Bake to Control Rig, and then you would choose the mannequin control rig or the Fortnight body rig. Either one of these work, I usually will choose the mannequin, Fortnite Mannequin control rig. And that'll do the same thing as the facial. I'll put all the you'll get a control rig built onto her for her body for that animation. Okay, so I know that's a lot, and I know it's detailed and tedious, but all these steps have to be done, you know, in order in the correct way if you want to get it, you know, if you want to get the animation working the way you want it to work. 13. 14 Export animation sequence of combined animation: So, now that we have an animation, let's say we've spent some time and we've revised things, and now we're ready to save this animation as a combined animation. All we need to do now is click on the character device, right click, and then bake animation sequence. It's going to come up, and I'm going to click on the folder animations. And let's call this one animation sequence combined. And I'm just going to call it face and body. So we know it's a face and a body. Okay, it's going to come up with again, I just leave these the default, and I say Export. And then we've got that. So let's do this now. Let's take the animation, both of them, and let's delete them out. So now all we have is the audio again and our character device, not doing anything. Picture this. Go back to the start. And now let's go up to add that animation that we just created the combined one, combined face and body. Okay? There it is. Now, if we've done it right, it should work. Let's check it out. So picture this. The Goldfield hotel sitting all lonely in the middle of Goldfield, Nevada, a dusty little ghost town that time forgot. In 1902, this place was the talk of the town fancy as heck with its sparkling chandeliers and polished mahogany, built when gold fever had everyone dreaming big. But, man, things took a dark turn. The creepiest story Room one oh nine. They say the hotel's big shot owner, George Wingfield, chained a pregnant woman named Elizabeth to a radiator there. Awful right. Her spirits supposedly still stuck, crying out in the night. People who have been inside talk about weird stuff. Icy chills, whispers when no one's around, and shadowy figures creeping through the lobby or up on the third floor. The place has been empty forever, but it's like the ghosts don't know it's over. If you're ever out that way, it's worth a peek. Just don't expect to sleep easy after. Okay. And that's how we combine the facial and the body animation and then combine it into its own animation that contains both. 14. 15 Animate Eye Blinks: Next we're going to create some eyeblinks because this will give our animation more realism. And when we use the audio to animation tool, it does throw in a little bit of the eyeblinks. They're very subtle. From time to time, you'll see it. But if we want it more pronounced, we need to manually put these in. So what we're going to do, we're going to use a technique called an additive animation track. And we want to go down to our face rig down here. And we want to create another track where we can revise the animation separately in a non destructive way. So click on the plus and then additive, and it's going to create another track down here, and you see where it says additive down there when we hover over it. I like to rename this, and let's just call it additive. Oops. Animation. Track. And this track is blank. So any changes we make here will be non destructive. It's very easy if you don't like it to, you know, just delete the keyframes, that type of thing. So what I want to do is I want to go in here, and I want to look in the search bar for blinks. And expand this, and it's going to give me the left eyeblink and the right eye blink, which is exactly what we want. So to start off with, let's just create a keyframe here by clicking the keyframe, add keyframe. And I want to make sure that I've got the auto key on. And what we're going to do is we're going to zoom way in here so that we can see very clearly as we make these changes. I'm going to click the Play button. Dusty little And from here, I want to close the eyes. So open this up here. And here, I'm going slow because this is really technical here. Move aside, you can see that our controls are over here. We have our left eye blink, and go ahead and select our with a control key. We want to select both of them. And now I'm going to close them down like that. Press the Sky. Now let's move it forward just a little bit. Down the tot. And I'm going to take the control zoom in here so you can really see what I'm doing here. See how we have the facial control track in here and go ahead and left click and open that back up. And now we should have last least. Our blinks. There. So, we've done our very first blink right there. Dusty little ghost town. You can see it's too slow. Until we do it, we really don't know what the timing is. So what we need to do now is zoom further in here with our timeline. And then it's just a matter of Moving this in closer. The key frames. Okay, now let's take a look at that blink now. Dusty little Gudge Still too slow. Now, what I'm gonna do I'm gonna mute the audio track. Select these keyframes and move them closer. You can have this as quick or as slow as you want as a blink. Okay, I like that. That's about the right timing. But now the reason that I spend a lot of time on that first blink is because once you get one, then to duplicate it, it's just a matter of copying and pasting. So what we're gonna do is left click and drag all of these keyframes and then control C or copy those. And then I'm going to move it forward a little bit and then control V on my keyboard to paste. And there's my so from this point on, all you need to do is just figure out where you want to paste those blinks. And sometimes I'll do blink blink, you know, right after two blinks in a row. And that looks pretty good. So you see all we're going to do now is we're just going to be pasting these keyframes, these blinks in for the rest of the animation. And usually what I'll do instead of just doing one at a time like that, I will go ahead and select the whole amount like that. Control C, and then Control V, and it'll pace keyframes even beyond the end of your animation. So let's back up and see how that looks a little bit here. Put my sound back on. A dusty little ghost town that time forgot. Back in 1902, this place was the talk of the town fancy as heck with its sparkling chandeliers and polished mahogany, built when gold fever had everyone dreaming big. But, man, things took a dark turn. The creepiest story. Okay, it looks good. So the next thing we're gonna do in the next video is we're going to move her eyes so her eyes move around. And that's another key thing in an animation for realism. 15. 16 Animate Eye Movement: Now we're going to get some realistic eye movement, so we want to search for the control called Control underscore C underscore I. You can see I have it selected here, and then over here in the animation outliner, you can see it. You can also search for it and select it here. That particular control is going to move both the eyes at the same time. So over here, you can see it selected, kind of floating up here in the viewport. And if I click and drag, you can see that I get a nice eye movement where the eyellids are being affected with the eyeball. So it looks really good. So what I want to do is I just want to create a keyframe right here and move it forward. Grab my control. Move the eye a little bit. Let's zoom in here again. I always like to makes it easier to select and do the keyframes here. Time for good. And just sort of move the eyes around. You know a real person. Their eyes kind of dart around a little bit. They don't just stare straight ahead. So you can move it up a little bit. Whoops. Don't want to break the eyelid there. 19 oh. Two. This place was So I'm the talk. Kind of moving forward, making a change to the eyes. Down. So they're not just looking straight ahead. And like we did with the blinks, what we want to do now is just select these keyframes so we don't have to do each one individually and control C on our keyboard. Fuzzy. Forward, Control V and paste that. I can zoom out a little bit, and now I'll just go ahead and copy that. Dreaming bit. Paste that. Task Creek. God, all of them on there. Now, I need some in the beginning where she's walking in the beginning of the animation, so I'll just paste these in here. Field Hotel. Okay, so now I have enough eye animations. Let's just check out what that looks like. So picture this, the Goldfield hotel sitting all lonely in the middle of Goldfield, Nevada, a dusty little ghost town that time forgot. Back in 1902, this place was the talk of the town fancy as heck with its sparkling chandeliers and polished mahogany, built when gold fever had everyone dreaming big. But, man, things took a dark turn. The creepiest story you can see how much better that looks with the blinks and the eyes moving around a little bit. And you can do the same workflow, the same process with the eyebrows, find where the eyebrows controls are. You can make her smile a little bit more. You know, there's all these controls in there where you can alter her expressions and totally change the mood and the performance of the character. So the next thing we're going to do here is we want to remember, once you do all this hard work, you don't want to lose this animation. I mean, as long as you save your level sequence, your cinematic sequence separately, and you name it where you can find it again, you're fine. But it's always better to make a new facial animation or a facial antibody animation with your character, so you don't have to bake it to the control rig each time. So let's do that. Remember what we do is we go to our character, character mannequin, we select that, and then we right click, we go up to Bake animation sequence. Then I'm going to go down to my animations. And we're going to just pick a name for it. Let's say, animation sequence, underscore Blink, and then underscore I move, and we'll just save it like that. Leave these at the default settings and click Export. Okay. So this just popped up for me. So then in my animation, here is the new animation blink and eye move. And I just save the facial animation. And that's how we do that. And this way, we have a brand new animation sequence made with the new blinking eyes and the new eyes moving around. 16. 17 Fix tongue poking thru mesh problem: One of the things you may notice, especially for facial close ups, is you may notice that there's a problem or an error with the tongue animation once you've baked the animation to the control rig, let me just show you here what I mean. You'll see the tongue kind of protruding through the chin area. This was the talk of the town fancy as heck with its sparkling chandeliers and polished mahogany, built when gold fever had everyone dreaming big. But, man, things took a dark turn. So you can see that. It continues on through the entire animation, which kind of ruins it. So what we need to do is we need to make sure that we are on our face rig and then go up here in the search bar. Search for tongue. And I find it easier just to open up the original track, and you'll see there's different tongue controls here, a tongue roll, a main tongue control, narrow wide, and the tongue in and out. The one that's causing this issue is the tongue going in and out. So the most direct way to fix this problem is to just select all of those keyframes on that track on the tongue in and out. And delete them. Night So now when we go back and we play that same animation. This place was the talk of the town fancy as heck with its sparkling chandeliers and polished mahogany, built when gold fever had everyone dreaming big. But tongue no longer sticks out through the chin, poking through the mesh, but we still have some tongue movement inside the mouth that gives us some realism. So that's how you take care of that issue. 17. 18 Find and Activate Arm IK Controls: If you've ever tried to locate the hand and arm IK controls in the Unreal Engine control rig and been frustrated trying to find them, you're going to love this video because we're going to cover exactly where to find them and how to activate them so that you can animate the your character. So, you remember we added characters before by coming over here to the Add button, and add actor to track. There's also another way you can do it in the outliner. Just select your character device. And here I have character device Athena. Left click and drag, you can drag it right into your sequencer. So I've created a new level sequence, and I'm called it Activate handeK because that's what we're going to do in this one. And I have my character in here right now, Athena. And the first thing I want to do is I want to bake the character to the control rig. So with it selected here in the sequencer, right click. Go up to bake to Control rig, and then over here to CR underscore, Fortnight underscore body rig. So that's Control rig for Fortnite Body rig. You could also do it down here to the FN Mannequin, but we're going to use this one right here. The the different settings come up for us. I just leave it on default because it works fine, and click Create and now we have our control rig baked onto our character. But if you notice down here in her hands, there's the box you're looking for. The controls for her hands are not there. And so the only way you can animate her hands or the arms are with forward kinematics, which is difficult. I mean, we use it a lot in some cases, but IK for some, you know, down and dirty animations and for more simple animations is a lot easier to use. So we need to find those controls and turn them on. We want to go down here to our fortnight body rig in the sequencer, click the down arrow and then go down a little bit here to the global control. This is where you're going to find the controls for happiness. So we want to click the down arrow, and you'll see the settings come up here, rotation, all kinds of things like that. But here's where we want to zero in. You'll see that the leg IC switches for the right and left leg are already turned on. But if you notice the arm, the left arm, and the right arm are not turned on. They're unselected here in the box. And you also notice we've got keyframes when the control rig is created. It's created keyframes all the way through the animation in the negative position where we don't have the control. So the first thing we want to do is we want to go to our arm IC switch, and then with our mouse, left drag, select, all of these keyframes, Make sure they're all selected like that, and then we want to hit the delete key. Get rid of all of those. Down here on the right arm, I want to do the same thing, select all of them right there and delete them. Now, make sure that we're in the starting frame back to one right here with the playhead. And then what we need to do is we need to check the box for the left arm and then the right arm. And you'll see that I've got keyframes automatically created because I have my auto keyframe turned on. If I didn't have that turned on, I would just go over here to the plus and plus and add the keyframes manually or press the S key to add a keyframe on the keyboard. So now, if we go in here, we can see that there's our control for the arm. And here's the one for the Let me get both of them selected. And we can see we got both arms selected, and they're both working in IK. And all the way through the animation, all the way to the end, they're still showing up. They're not disappearing, which is what we want. So now from here, we can go ahead and create an additive track and start our animation. But this is step one that I like to do is go ahead and turn on the arm hand K controls, and this is how you do it. So keep this video handy, so when you forget how to do it, you can just refer back to it. 18. 19 Edit existing body animation: The next thing we're going to do is edit and revise an existing animation by putting the animation on the body rig. So let's start a little bit fresh. Let's create a new level sequence. So let's go over here to where the wrench icon is. Left click on that. And we're going to save this existing one as S for level sequence, body animation Edit. Okay, and now we have the new one. We can see over here the name LS Body Animation Edit, so we don't have to drag the character in all over again and that kind of thing. There may be some things we want to save like audio, which I don't have in here or different animations in the scene. But for now, let's go ahead and select the Fortnight body rig and delete it. We're going to start from scratch and make sure that we are in the beginning position. We want to click the plus, and we want to bring in just an ordinary idle animation. This one is in the assets of the Fortnight project. So just type Idle, and you'll see Idle noise, and it's going to bring in this idol, which is basically a looping one. So we just want to hover over it, and you'll get the little arrow, and we want to drag this out all the way to the end. Okay, now, this is going to give us the really nice looping idle animation long enough for what we want to do here. Okay, back to one to the beginning. Now what we need to do first, let's say this is an animation we got from a mocap library, and we really like it, but we want our head to move around a little bit more. We're not happy with, you know, the stationary position of her head. So the first thing we need to do is bake this animation to the rig, the control rig. Okay, so we need to select the character device, Athena, right click and go up to Bake to Control Rig. And remember, just like last time, we use the Fortnite Body rig that works really good. Keep the default settings. Those are fine, and click Create. And now this has taken that animation, the idle animation and baked it to the control rig. So we can see when we hit play, the control rig disappears so we can watch the animation. We hit pause or stop, and there's our Control rig. Now, we don't need this animation track anymore, so go ahead and select that and delete. Let's go back to the beginning. Now, depending on how you can edit any of these controls. And remember how we got the IK arm controls in a previous video? This is where you would activate that if that's what you wanted to do with your animation animate, you know, the hands and the arms. But for this video, we're just going to animate the head. So go to the search bar, type in head. And then we can see the head control right here. And then when we go over to the Animation Outliner, you'll also see all of the controls over here to the right. Now, rather than messing with you could delete all of these keyframes and start all over again. But it's much simpler and cleaner. If we go ahead, let's start over here, and we go ahead and we select our body rig, and then with this plus button right here, we want to create an additive track. So we create the additive track, and you can see here, if you hover over it, it says additive right there. But it gives us the same name which can be confusing. So what I usually do is I'll select that. And if you press your F two key, to change the name, I'll just put additive animation. That way, it's easier to see. Now, with this selected, we don't want this rig because we basically have two rigs in here. We want this one selected. And now let's go to the head, again, hit the down arrow key and move up, and you can see our head control. And now up here, let's move in a little bit closer so we can see head control. We don't want the translate control. We don't want to move it back and forth. We want the rotate control. So we're at the beginning position. Let's go ahead and create a keyframe by clicking right here or pressing the S key on your keyboard. And since this is a looping animation, we want the beginning and the end to be the same. So go to the end of the animation and set a keyframe there by hitting the S key or clicking right here. Okay, so now we have the same and the beginning and the end. From there, anything we do in here, for example, let's just hit SK here, and then I'm going to make her look this way, move forward a little bit, make her look this way. You gonna make her look up. You know, whatever you want to do, whatever you want the animation to be, it's all within your control right here. And the beautiful thing about it is since this is an additive track, if you mess up or you don't like the way things are looking, you can just delete the track and start over again or delete the key frames. And you still have your original animation intact. But this is overriding the original one and giving you some different head movements here. You'll see when you get in there the timing of it and everything like that. And remember, it's a real time saver if you control C and control V for pasting. Okay. So now let's go back here and let's see what that looks. So we can see that all of these keyframes to move the head are working exactly how we intended it to every keyframe. Obviously, this isn't a very good animation. The head doesn't look real. But from this position here, it's very straightforward to go in here and select your keyframe and move it closer. So if you want that head to snap faster, that's still very slow. So let's go in here like that. That's better. Still too slow. You get the idea anyway, how you can just go in here. Change the animation. Okay. Back to the one. Now, once you get this edited the way you want and changed on your animation, remember, the best thing to do, the best workflow is to now save this as another animation on its own. So we have to select the character device Athena at the top here, right click. And we go up to Bake animation sequence. And then we're going to go to our animation folder, and we're going to name this AS for animation sequence, underscore. I'll just call it head head move. Gives us options. I usually just keep it at the default and export. And now it has saved our animation sequence new. So that's a good workflow right there where you can take existing animations that you've gotten from Mixamo or different mocap places. And if they're not exactly how you want them to be, you can easily revise the animation without having to do the whole thing from scratch. And it's a huge timesaver. 19. 20 The Body Control: The next control we're going to use is the body control, and this is a real handy one because it can create a lot of movement very quickly. So let's go back to our additive track, our additive animation track. Go into the search bar, search for body. And then over here in our animation outliner, you can see the body control, and we can select it there as well. So we have it selected down here in our sequencer and in the animation outliner. And you can see that the control is ready to go and animate. We want to make sure this time we're on translate tools so we can move up and down. That's the thing we're going to do first. So just like we did with the head animation, the first thing we want to do is create a keyframe at the very beginning, press the key on your keyboard or click right here at the plus sign and then go all the way to the end of the animation. And create a keyframe. So that way, we don't mess up our looping animation. We have the same keyframe at the beginning and the end. Now, whatever we do in the middle, doesn't really matter. So grab the translate tool and let's just move our character down. Just bring it straight down. You can see that because of the inverse kinematics, control, everything just kind of moves. So she's just going to squat down, and it's going to create a keyframe because I have the auto keyframe selected on, which I like to work in that way. So now let's move forward just a little bit and then have her stand back up. Move forward. Now, we're not going here. The purpose is not to teach how to do fantastic animations. I'm just showing you where the controls are and how to get to the settings so you can do what you want to do. Up and down. So we're just basically doing an up and down movement here. And I'm going to go ahead and select these keyframes. Control C, and Control V. So when we go to the beginning of the animation, let's hit play, and we can see we have a super slow movement of her bending down or squatting down and then coming back up. And again, if you want to change the speed of the animation, you just select these keyframes and move them wherever you want them to be. Now, let's say that you wanted to rotate a little bit, too. Let's go. Let's go to the second keyframe here and let's select it. Select our rotate key. Actually, let's go to the next one. We're in the down position. And just move her body and turn it this way. And then let's go to the next keyframe. This setting right here is where you jump to the next keyframe, very handy. And we'll turn her this way on this keyframe. Let's go to the next keyframe, and she's down here, and we'll turn her to the left a little more. Make her swivel a little bit more on this one. You can see the total control on rotation and translate up and down. Again, we're just doing this just to show how to control these different motions. And then it's gonna be up to you to make a super cool, fantastic animation. Okay. So let's go to the beginning and let's just check out that animation. Now, here's the one where we made her rotate. So, see, we had our head movement animation that we did previously, and now we've added little body rotation and her moving up and down along with the idle animation. As you can see her arm is going right through her leg, so that would have to be fixed. All right, so this gives an idea of just how you can use those controls. Now, you can use any of these controls in the control rig and the additive track. You can also have more than one additive track. You could have one for the head, one for the hips, you know, et cetera, depending on what works best for you. Let's go back to the beginning, all the way up And remember, always best to make a new animation. So right click. You'll go up to Bake animation sequence. Choose your folder you want to save your animation to rename your animation and hit Okay, and then you'll have a brand new animation. Always good to have more than less. You can have different versions and variations. And that's how you edit the body control. 20. 21 How to blend animations: For this next lesson, we are going to delve into blending animations where we take one animation, put it behind another one, and then blend them together pretty much seamlessly. So let's create another level sequence animation. Remember how we do that over here by the wrench? Click that, take our existing one and save it. Let's just call it level sequence, blended animation. Okay, so now we have a new one called Blended Animation. Now. We are not going to need the body rigs for this particular lesson. So let's go ahead and click on the Fortnight Body Rig to select it and delete it. And the top one as well, which was our additive track. And let's go ahead and delete that. Okay, so now we just have a fresh we have our character. We're going to use the built in animations right here in the Fortnite project. So let's go to the plus. Click on that. Go up to animation. And let's choose the Idol to begin with, Idle noise. I'll select that. So now we have the idle animation in here and move forward a little bit. You can have a space for now. Click the plus. And let's go in here, and I'm looking for the banana, the emote banana. Okay, we'll put that one in there. That's her kind of dancing around. And let's pick a third one. This one's called Call Me. So we've got three animations here. Let's go back to the beginning and grab our timeline down here and let's bring it back this way so we can zoom in and get a nice look at our animations. Now, make sure we have our snap on here and watch what happens when we just butt these against each other. You're going to see it a little jerk between the animations, of course. It's very abrupt. And you'll see that it's not very smooth. So what we want to do, and this is all built into UEFN and Unreal Engine. Let me pull these apart a little bit again. I take it off snap because it's smoother. But what we want to do is just grab our second clip. And then overlap it. And if you see if we zoom in here, and you look over here, you'll see that we've got kind of a curve, like a curve editor thing where one clip is going into the other clip. So you can put this in as much or as little as you'd like to get the blending effect that you want. So let's press play here. See how smooth that went into the next animation. And let's do the emote call me as well. We'll just pull that over. Okay, very nice. And then it stops. So you can pretty much take, you know, as long as the animations are within the same area, like, it can't be if their beginning location is way far away, it's not gonna work. But if these animations are in the same proximity, this works very, very well. So we've gone from idle to the emote banana and smoothly into the call me animation. And you can just keep on blending animation to animation to animation and get much longer performances very quickly and in a very direct, simple way. 21. 22 How to fine tune the blend: Along with the blending of the animations, we can even dive deeper. If you hover over the crossover section, you'll see that on the left and right side, there's two blue kind of triangles. And what this allows us to do is to choose which clip we want more of the animation to show on, so we can actually click and drag we can shorten this clip. We can lengthen this one. And this way, you can get an exact, precise, very, very fine tuned version of your blend. So it's very, very powerful. A lot of people don't know this is just built in here and it's overlooked. But I wanted to mention that so that you would know where that is and how to adjust that and fine tune because it's a really handy and very powerful adjustment. 22. 23 Mixamo how to download animations: What we're going to do next in this section is we're going to learn how to use a great resource called Mixamo. It's a huge library created by Adobe that's available for free with high quality motion capture animation. So what I've done here and what I'd like you to do is create a new level sequence and I've named mine level sequence underscore Miximo and have our character in there. I've got character device Athena, because this is going to be where we're going to bring our animations from Miximo. Then you want to go to your browser and go to www.mixamomxmo.com. And if you don't have an account, you can sign up for free. There's no charge for this because you do need to have an Adobe account in order to access Miximo. So I'm going to go ahead and log in here. And we're going to be presented with this screen. By default, they give you this cool little kind of blocky robot kind of character, which is fine because we just want the animations, and we're going to add these animations to our fortnight character. So go ahead and just familiarize yourself. Basically, it's pretty straightforward. There's characters. If you want to download characters to use, you can use those. There's some kind of cool simplistic characters. But mainly what we want is we want the animations. So let's go up here. And there's a couple thousand of these, more than 2000, I believe. So there's quite a few. Let's go up to the search bar, and let's go on to the dance. And it's going to filter, and it's going to give us some really cool dance moves here. So how to download this is we just go over here and hover over it, click on it, and it's going to add this Rumba dancing move to our character, which looks pretty cool, right? And it's extremely well done, and it's looping, so it can just animate over and over and over. You can slow it down once we get it over there in Unreal Engine or UEFN. There's also some controls over here. You can play around with. If you want to slow it down or make the arms a little more exaggerated, character arm space, you can trim it, make it a longer animation or shorter. You can play around with these characters, so it does give you some flexibility on the animation right here. But what we want to do is we want to click on the Download button, and the format we want to use in our case is the FBX. And the first one we need with skin. We need to download the actual character. After this, we can just do it without skin, and it'll save a little room. Because they're smaller files. 30 frames for second. But if you want 24 for cinematic or 60, that's available as an option. Keyframe reduction, I usually just leave this to none, leave it on the default setting. And then I'm going to go ahead and click Download. And here it is, you can see, it's in my download file now Rumba dancing. And in the next video, we're going to import this into Unreal Editor for Fortnit. And we're going to go through the process of how we get this animation onto our Fortnight character because we have to do a process called retargeting, and we'll go into that next. 23. 24 Import and Retarget Mixamo Anim to FN Character: Next, we are going to import our Miximo animation into our Unreal Engine or UEFN project. So we start here at the sequencer where we were before. We need to go over to our content browser, and I have a folder called Animations, and then I'm going to create a new folder and call it Miximo. Remember how we do that? We right click, go up in New folder. Miximo Make sure we're on Miximo right here. And then over to the right, should be empty, nothing in there yet. So we right click, go up to import to current folder, and I find my animation from MiximoRmember, it was called Rumba Rumba dancing. Select that click Open. And since this is the animation with the mesh, the first one that we need, the rest of them, any other animations any other animations from Miximo, we can just download the animation without the skin or without the mesh. But right now, we want to make sure that the skeletal mesh is selected. Import mesh, and pretty much we leave everything just on the defaults and then click Import A. It's gonna tell us there's a little something missing here from the bind pose and all that kind of stuff. That's fine. Just close that window. And we'll see now that we have our character here with the animation. Let me bring this up a little bit. This is the skeletal mesh. Then we have our animation, and we have the tipos. And here's its skeleton. So the first thing we want to do, you can check out the animation by double clicking. Press the alt key so we can spin around. You want to zoom in closer, we can see, here's our mixi Mo animation. Looks like it's working fine. Minimize this window. But the first thing we need to do is retarget this animation to the Fortnight character. Otherwise, it won't work. So the way we do that is we highlight over the animation, right click, go up to retarget animations, and it's going to open up our window here. And our source skeletal mesh, it will say Rumba dancing. This is the skeleton from Miximo. Now, our target mesh, where we want this animation to be converted over to or retargeted to click the Down arrow key, and then we want to go down here and find our Fortnight mannequin. It's the orange one right here. And then we can see the mannequin shows up. Now, over to the right, we want to find our Rumba dancing animation. And it was called Rumba Dancing Anim Underscore Miximo. Double click that. And you'll see in the window, we have a very good almost perfect retargeting animation from the Miximo character to the Fortnight character or the skeleton. So we're not done yet. What we want to do is we want to export this animation. So down over here to the right, we export animation and then go down to my Animations folder and the one I created called Miximo select that. And to make this easy to find. Of course, it's going to be in this folder, but what I do is I put a prefix on it of retargeting. So it's a capital RTG, which stands for retargeting and then underscore like that, and then click Export. Okay. And then just leave these at their deport. Leave these at their default. And here we have it now. Retargeted Rumba dancing animation. Okay, now what do we do with that? Well, we go back into sequin, sir, and remember we have our character Athena right here. Let me back up so we can see more more of a full body shot here. And the first thing we want to do is click on this, the Plus button, go all the way up to animation and find the one that we just retargeted, which starts with RTG, so it should be way down here. RTG, Rumba dancing, anim Miximo. So select that, and we'll see that when we zoom in close, this is the animation right there. So at this point, since this is a looping animation, just go ahead and click and drag this. All the way to the end. And then make sure we're at the start of the animation in the animation sequencer here. Level sequencer. Click Play. And here we go. We've got our dancing the Rumba dance that we downloaded from Miximo so that's the process, and this is how easy it is. The simple steps to get it from Miximo bring it into either unreal or UEFN. The steps are the same, and then retarget it because when you retarget it, there's a built in re targeor that recognizes that this is a Miximo animation. And it saves a whole lot of steps. I used to be way more difficult to do this and used to take a lot longer, but now it's pretty much just a few clicks, and we're all done. So here's our animation. It's working great. Give yourself a pat on the back because you've done something really cool. It 24. 25 QuickMagic create mocap from video: Now I'm going to introduce you to a really, really powerful tool, and you're gonna love this because it's a lot of fun to use, too. It's called Quick Magic AI, and it's a motion capture tool. And the thing about this is you can take your ordinary iPhone or any video camera and videotape yourself doing motions or any video that you find, online that you have the rights to use, of course. Can be uploaded, and then it will create a three D motion capture data file for you. So let's see how that works. Now, these are some of the tests that I've been doing in Quick Magic. But I've got this one video that I want to bring in. So let's go to the AI Mocap right here. Click on that. It's going to open up a window, and it's going to ask us to import a video file. I have a video file that some people were using online. It was from an emote, a Fortnight emote, which was kind of cool. Let's see if I can open this up. And let's just take a look at this here. Right. Don't have the rights to this music, so I better shut it off. Anyway, you can see the movement. It's pretty complex. Let me play it again. You can see her feet. She's jumping around. Her fingers are doing the P sign, and hands are moving all around. So it looks like a pretty complicated move, and we're going to see just how well Quick Magic can duplicate this. So we're going to go ahead and import that file in, and it's going to analyze the video. And then what we're going to do is we're going to choose the output formula. Now, I've found the Unreal Mannequins don't work real well in UEFN. They work well in Unreal Engine, 5.5 or 5.6. But we're going to be using UEFN. So I found that the Miximo skeleton works really good. So click on that one, and then we're going to click on Next. And it's going to come up here where we can name it, and I'm naming it Fortnight Dance leave it on the defaults. The full body in the hand, 30 frames per second. Select the first key frame of the animation. I usually just leave it in the original pose. Export format, Miximo. Okay. And then you click Generate now. Now, I've already done this, so I don't want to I took about 10 minutes for it to create this motion capture animation from the video file. So rather than do that, let's just click out of that. Go back to my project here, and here it is right here. So once it's all done, what you do is you click on that and it's going to load the animation. It's put the miximo Let me get rid of this sound. Can't find the off button for that. So you can see how well that is. Look at how we go around on it, and we can see that the animation is really quite good. The feet are planted on the ground. They're not slipping and sliding or doing anything like that. There. That's how I get rid of that. The feet are not slipping and sliding. They're locked down to the ground, which is one of the most impressive things about quick magic that I've found because most of the time in these AI motion capture things, the feet are sliding all over the place, and you have a whole bunch of cleanup that you have to do. And also notice the hands, the arms and the hands and the movement. It even got the two fingers, the waving and everything like that. Check that out. So it does a fantastic job. Then from here, all we need to do, there is a two D refinement part in there. We're not going to cover that right now because I like the way it looks here. It doesn't look like it needs some refinement, so we're just going to go to the download. You click the download and it's going to download it to the folder that you have setup. 25. 26 QuickMagic import animation to UEFN: Now, the first thing that we want to do, we've got to go through some steps here. We want to make a folder. I've got animations over here, and I have a quick magic mocap folder already 'cause I had already tested out an animation, but I want to make a new folder. So let's do a new folder, and I'm gonna call it Fortnight. Oops. Dance. Double click that. And now right click in the empty area here, and we want to import our downloads. And here's the Fortnight dance right here, the folder. Double click on that. Double click on that. And here we go Fortnight Dance, Miximo. Select that press open, and we're going to get our import options here. So we want to make sure that we have the skeletal mesh selected and import mesh. Leave everything else pretty much on the default and go all the way down here. See, we want to make sure that we've got the animation is going to be imported along with the skeletal mesh, which is the miximo. Click Import A. And it's going to tell us a little errors here, like the ring finger, blah, blah, blah. Don't worry about that. Everything's still going to work. And here we have our materials and our fortnight skeleton and our animation right here. This is a good time to save everything in your project. And let's go ahead in first. Let's double click on that and open up our animation, and we can see that, sure enough, the animation is working really good. It's on the Miximoskeleton. So what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to retarget this animation, the Miximo animation onto our Fortnight character. Remember, we covered that previously in our retargeting section. 26. 27 QuickMagic retarget animation to FN: Make sure you're on the Mixamo Animation. Right click and go up to retarget Animations. It's going to open up our Fortnite Dance Mixamo as our source. And we want our target skeletal mesh to be remember? We want it to be our Fortnite mannequin. So scroll down here where we can see it better. Fortnite Mannequin, and that's going to throw our mannequin in there. Now we need to go and we need to find the animation. And remember, we've got our auto generate retarget here. Very, very important that this is selected. It's on by default, but in case it gets unchecked, make sure that's checked. Go down to our it's always fun finding the There it is. Fortnite dance Mixamo. And there we go. We just click on the animation, and we're retargeting from the Mixamo skeleton to the Fortnite skeleton. And once we save this, this particular dance animations going to work on all the Fortnite skins, all 1,200 plus characters that are built into UEFN. So now remember the steps. We go to the Export animations over here. Click on that. Then we want to go down to our folder, wherever you have it. I like to try to keep things organized. Go to our QuickMagic mocap and our Fortnite dance folder. This is where I want to save the animation. And then I want to put that prefix of retargeting, and I shorten it by saying RTG for retargeting and then an underscore, and this is going to append it to the front of the name of the animation. Go ahead and click Export. And leave them at the default export. And now it's going to be creating our animation right here. Let's save all again. 27. 28 QuickMagic create Level Sequence: Okay, so now what we want to do is we want to put this animation on our character. And in here in the level, I have a character that's called Ozy because she's wearing Ozy pajamas. And we want to get this animation to work on her in the Sequencer. So let's find let's create a new Level Sequence. I got to find my SQN cinematics folder where I have all my level sequences. And then I'm going to right click, create a new one, and let's call this one Ls Underscore Fortnight dance. And then double click. Let's open that up. Now, we got the Sequencer here. And in our Viewport, let's select our character. And remember, this character is a character device. Remember how we did that? It's one of these orange characters, the Character Device in the Fortnite devices. And then we put we chose this character for it. So click on add Add actor to Track, add Character Device one Z. Now we have our character in here. 5.5 seconds is not long enough, so go down here to the bottom right, and let's click on that and let's put 25 seconds. They'll make this a little bit longer and take our endpoint and just drag this to the end. We're preparing it for our animation. Okay, now, over here, we want to click the track, and we want to go up to the animation. And now we want to find our Fortnite dance with the retarget one, the RTG. So I usually just search for Fortnite. There it is. RTG Fortnite Dance. Immediately puts the animation onto our character. And select our character. Okay, so now let's go ahead and move our ending mark our outpoint right there to the end of the animation. And let's check out our new animation. Now, we don't have any music, so it doesn't look as good. We need to throw on some music that goes with the B to the dance. But check that out. See, the feet are even with the retargeting and everything, the feet are pretty much locked on the floor. They're moving around like the original one. And we can check it out by moving around our character here. And notice her fingers, her hands, the wave, and everything. Pretty good quality animation. So I give QuickMagic is a very, very useful tool. You can start an account and get some free animations to get you going. And then they have some affordable plans, too, if you're going to need, you know, a lot of motion capture animation, it's a fantastic tool. So you made it this far. This is pretty advanced stuff, so you need to give yourself a big pat on the back 'cause you're doing really, really good. 28. 29 You finished the course: Congratulations on finishing the course. So what's next? First, remember to use this course as a resource rather than going through it just one time. Because Unreal Engine is so vast, it's easy to forget how to do things if you're not doing them on a consistent basis. If you forget how to do something, just come back to this course and rewatch some lessons, and it will come back to you. Okay.