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Unreal Engine 5 Character Creation, Animation, and Cinematics

Unreal Engine 5 Character Creation, Animation, and Cinematics

By : Venter, Ogterop
4.7 (16)
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Unreal Engine 5 Character Creation, Animation, and Cinematics

Unreal Engine 5 Character Creation, Animation, and Cinematics

4.7 (16)
By: Venter, Ogterop

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) offers beginners and seasoned professionals the ability to create detailed movie scenes with realistic human characters using MetaHuman and combine it with custom props and environments. It also comes with built-in industry standard animation tools to develop such scenes in a fraction of the time compared to old methods. This book takes you through the entire 3D movie production pipeline using free (open - source) software. By following the step-by-step, beginner-friendly tutorials in this book, you'll learn how to create your own custom 3D assets in Blender and texture these 3D assets in Quixel Mixer. Next, you'll take these completed 3D assets into Unreal Engine 5 and use them to build a virtual 3D movie set for your 3D movie. You'll also populate your 3D movie set by using Quixel MegaScans assets and create and customize your own photorealistic human character using MetaHuman Creator and UE5. As you advance, you'll discover how to rig, skin, and animate these 3D assets and characters using Blender and UE5's new Control Rig. Finally, you'll explore the process of setting up your movie cameras and animation sequences and rendering your 3D movie using UE5's Sequencer. By the end of this Unreal Engine book, you'll have learned how to combine different elements in UE5 to make your own movies and cinematics.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
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1
Part 1 Creating 3D Assets
7
Part 2 Building Your Virtual Movie Set in Unreal Engine 5
13
Part 3 Character Rigging for Animation in UE5 with Control Rig
19
Part 4 Animation in UE5 Using Control Rig and Sequencer

Retargeting MoCap animations to a MetaHuman skeleton

In UE, there's a way to retarget or share animations between character skeletons. Retargeting an animation is like converting it to work and be playable from one skeleton to a different skeleton. So, for example, you can use the MoCap we downloaded from Mixamo on their standard female skeleton and retarget it to play on our MetaHuman skeleton.

These two skeletons have different bones and bone names, and even proportions and sizes, but UE has a built-in way to cleverly map (retarget) and interpret animations between them. But for UE to do that, we need to set it up first.

However, first, let's import the Mixamo MoCap .fbx files into UE.

Importing Maximo MoCap into UE

Here's the process to import Maximo MoCap FBX files into UE:

  1. In the top left of the Content Drawer, while in the Content folder, click on + ADD | New Folder. Name it MoCap_From_Mixamo as shown in Figure 18.14.
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