I'm one of the developers at Epic working on this feature. Thanks for the excellent coverage. I'd love to hear any feedback you have about what you'd like to see in future updates.
Thank you for your comment! I'm honoured and pleased to read it. In fact, I've noted a few remarks for future updates, and I'll be happy to share them with you. I send you a request via LinkedIn to talk about it!
Oh my lord blender needs to get that bone influence previewer ASAP, super nice being able to just increase and decrease the amount of influence on the fly
It does? That’s just normal weight painting. If you select the armature and then the mesh before going into weight paint mode, you can switch between bones to paint weights without leaving weight paint mode.
Is there an Unreal Engine workflow that would let one "retarget" a skeletal mesh to a different skeleton or something similar? Like say you have some clothing intended for one skeleton and you wanted to transfer that mesh to a different skeleton while maintaining weights?
I’m not sure what you mean here but I think Retarget is the only solution. You can transfer one skeleton to another and match weights via several features included in the Retarget. As long as you have two different skeletons with weights, you can transfer datas. Concerning clothing, you might figure out something if you have a rig on the clothing mesh. Otherwise it’s going to be complicated. I’m preparing a tutorial on clothing, I’ll cover that in depth don’t worry 😇
Thanks for sharing! Im not doing a lot of rigging, but I´m happy it can be done in engine now! Would be interested in a more in depth tutorial about setting up the control rig! Coming from 3ds max and yeah, Sculpting for blendshapes and substance style painting would be great additions to start making Unreal Engine a one stop shop for production (especially non-game). Shame Adobe bought substance before epic could...:) Shame mudbox is sitting there, standalone and forgotten, while max could also really use a solid sculpting toolset...
Hey Samuel, I don't know if you've seen this, but we've put together a quick short to warn you about tomorrow's topic and.... It's the control rig! We've made a tutorial entirely devoted to this subject, and divided it into two parts to make it easier for you to digest 😅🤣 See you tmr :)!
only useful feature I see in this is the ability to re-parent joints, and thats only because UE's importer sucks if you need to change the hierarchy of a joint chain in skeleton meshes.
I won't use it, I'll keep doing it in maya. The only nice thing for me would be to have it directly in the game environment, but I do not need it to be. Nice nonetheless.
Sorry but this is only suitable for people who want to animate for fun. UE5.3 is definitely not the future of animation unless it has built-in AI. Try doing a walking cycle and you'll see how limited it is. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, sir. Let's bring back landcape tessellation and enable bake camera shaking.
Evolving is the future ! It's just come out and it's still experimental. Give it some time and I'm sure you'll change your mind! I'll be demonstrating in the near future how you can animate almost anything in Unreal with various videos and projects I'm currently working on !
I think being able to do everything is not really as meaningful as being able to do your role well in the pipeline. I believe no 3d artist uses 1 software. UE can evolve, but so can other specialized software. I've seen a lot of people waiting for more features or patches from UE. They have been raising issues since UE4, but so far there has been no easy solution. You can animate anything with UE but if it's not faster or easier than Maya or Blender it's pointless. Especially when Blender is free software.
@@ProjProd I hate to be so negative but dont expect it anytime soon, there is a addon that imports morph targets that costs thousands of dollars, hundreds for indies, while unity has a multitude of morph target importers and editors available bunch of which are free. Its not a matter of they cant its they decided it isnt important at the moment and I dont think it will become very important soon. My best guess is its at least a year off maybe more.
wish epic would just focus on performance and fixing the years of legacy bs that's going on under the hood. We also need a scriptable render pipeline and some mobile optimization.
Dunno, you could do this in free Blender 5 times faster Thing is, in-editor tooling will never reach the level of specialized software, perhaps this is a waste of resources.
Unreal is also free for everyone and I understand what you're saying. But the Skeletal editor is still at an early stage, rather in Alpha, so we have a lot to see in the near future. The aim is to try to concentrate and stay with a single piece of software and avoid using several softwares with the problems that this can cause when importing/exporting.
@@redragon1229 Not really, because it depends on the project and the animated objects/characters in question. There is no universal solution, given that tools and scripts are often developed for each workflow, as in Maya for example, and it's always difficult to transcribe everything for import. Developing a common eco-system would make things easier, but it also requires an in-depth understanding and learning of the engine, which I admit is no mean feat.
@@ProjProd But UE already has a Blender Plugin\Maya Live link, so it's half way there and absolutely doable. You don't need a universal solution, just a convector-plugin for each software. Common ecosystem is cool, but I doubt UE animation will ever be on par with Maya, tbh
I know you might not see this, but I have a question, I've been trying to make a rig for a Rifle, however I want my root bone to be in the middle of the gun, which is already a problem, because I can't move the root bone at all, I can only move the End-part of it. Also the bigger problem is that, for a gun rig, I don't want to have a lot of useless bones, when I rigged in blender, I would just have bones that are physically separate from each other but connected with parent-child relations, is there a way to do something similar in Unreal editor?
Hey man 👋 It's difficult to tell wihtout seeing the project and rig itself, but as I mentioned in the Lego "Rig and Animate" video I made, skin assignement for rigid rig was still a bit problematic in the Skeletal Editor. We might have some improvement in 5.4, which I have to test yet. Seperate bones may not be handle yet as well. We need more time to see the tool updated ! 😉
Unfortunately this is way too fast. I'd appreciate it very much, if you could come along with a tutorial for beginners, focusing on the usage of the skeletal editor only. I'd also be happy if really everything was done using only UE5.3, i mean using the built in modeling tools. However, thanks a lot!
I hope we can custom shape and add morph targets for making in-game customizable characters with this tool at some point. if everything outside making the actual model (for complex stuff) can be done to morph, modify, and animate in UE, itll make workflows much easier, as well as boost in-game customizations. i cant wait for more tutorials utilizing this stuff come out to see whats capable within UE. hopefully theres also gonna be an easy way to convert facial shape blends from stylized custom models to the metahumans control rig.
Looking forward to seeing these features inbuild within Unreal ! I completely agree. I would love to create and modify Morph targets directly in Unreal, as you don’t actually modify the topology of your mesh. Hope it will be released soon 🙌
This is amazing, I would love to see a detailed tutorial on the Control Rig for this character, is very hard to find a step by step tutorial on this topic :)
Yeppaaaa !! Thank you !! Haha, that's the plan! I announced it in my last short with Mr Dewies 😊 Next Thursday the subject will be tackled in depth, I've done it in two parts because it's a heeeeeaaavy subject 😅
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it, I'm trying to rig a simple insect mech and I haven't figured out how, there is a tutorial on rigging a space ship with blue prints, I will give it a try :)@@ProjProd
You can only animate through sequencer. You can do it either by right click - bake FK controls or right click- create control rig and select the ctrl you created. You’ll be able to animate using bones directly or your Ctrl Rig.
Thank you for your support! Yes, I intend to make one in the near future. It's something that's often asked for and also something that's a lot of fun to do! 😇
