Since the basic characters in the starter projects come with semi-decent starting animations for idle/walk/run/etc, for prototyping my game I would love to just be able to take the existing characters/rigs and add a few animations to the model and import them right in. Problem is it seems when you export the FBX files from UE, it doesn’t give a functional rig.
Is there any way for me to export the actual rigs for these starter characters so I can just start making animations? Or is there a pipeline that would allow me to make animations for any other character and bring it in easily? If possible it would be appreciated to have a character pre-rigged, as I’m primarily a programmer and hate rigging/distributing weights. I rather limit my artwork in Maya to strictly animation itself.
I know UE4 has the Maya ART tools, and I know that may be my best option, but to be completely honest I’m holding out on it if possible as I’d rather become fully comfortable w/ all the tools in the engine itself before I start learning more art tools. It seems the tools are best for creating new rigs for existing models, but I don’t know if they actually have anything for helping me transfer animations to these existing rigs, and/or allowing me to recover the rigs from the FBX files.
Any sort of pipeline would be appreciated. Thanks.
It seems the exports from UE4 have a skeleton in place, but no rig controls. Not sure if theres an easy way to get controls.
Of course I could try to use ART to make a new rig for it… but wouldn’t that replace the skeleton? Or is there a way to just have it make new rig controls for the existing skeleton?
Basically I’m not sure exactly what to do with the model that was exported to be able to work on it myself…
On tablet I’m sure there are example skeletons somewhere for dl search the documentation. I would rely on much exporting from ue4 really only into it minus some mesh lineup work. But I’m ?sure the skeleton is available somewhere. But if u don’t want to learn more animation isn’t something simple to just pick up.
I think the ART tools in Maya are pretty solid from what I’ve seen.
There’s a really great pipeline for Blender which is primarily what I use. You can create a mesh with MakeHuman, export it with a rig, bring it in to Blender and it’s ready to begin animating. There are some good tools to retarget and fix mocap data for the makehuman rigs as well. It’s not trivial to figure out how to get it all set up to your liking but once you figure it out it’s pretty rock solid.
From what I’ve read, it seems Blender allows for mostly getting it all done… but there was something about an extra bone being exported, and something about regular bones instead of deform bones (but I don’t know what those are, so that doesn’t help!)… but they’re saying that the newest Blender (not out yet?) should -mostly-, almost completely, export skels/anims that will be usable in UE4… but not until 4.2 comes out.
So, it seems we soon will be able to use Blender for all of it, just not today. … I’m sure someone can explain the current hiccups, or you can search the forms for info (I read something about it just today in the General Discusion area).
My plan is to use Blender… but since I’m a good ways away from worrying about it, I’ve not done due diligence to learn what’s all not quite right in the process… I’m still working on getting switching from 3rd to 1st person with stock anims and holding guns… lol.
I personally have not had any issues with extra bones or anything of that nature. There’s a more updated version of the FBX exported on Github for Blender which I am using for now. Texturing wise, I don’t mess with trying to import the materials or anything with FBX, but you can certainly set up your UV maps and even paint your textures in Blender without trouble.
It does take a little extra love and time to figure out everything, but it does work pretty solidly.
