Ive started building a tutorial series for all the Indie open source devs out there, it’s taken a bit of work but I’ve now got very high quality character and animation with UE4 from Blender. These videos will take you from start to finish and point out some great free tools that can improve any workflow (even payed software). Im on a wi fi hotspot for internet so please be patient for all videos to be uploaded over the next 2-3 days.
Little quick update tutorial from 5-6 days back that managed to get uploaded by my ***** hot spot wi fi connection. This ones about re targeting Mocap data to your new skinned and rigged character ready for export to UE4.
Great videos so far! Will you be covering importing Make Human models to replace the default Shooter Game Bot Pawn Characters? I would love to have my own characters using the built in AI and animations.
After many many messages and mails begging for my pipeline routine for character export for complex IK/FK & Motion capture retargeted animation, Enjoy!
If my tutorials help people out, Encouragement is always welcome.
I think… I think I’m going to have to change my pants. Dang, dude, I think I speak for all UE4 weilding Blendheads when I say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Fabulous, and any more Blender to UE4 pipeline tips/tricks you have, I’d love to see them. So. Happy
please don’t take this the wrong way, as i mentioned to another guy using the makehuman rig is not really a good idea for game content due to the amount of bones, it would be nice if you point this out to people otherwise they might be mistaken on the fact its ok.
i’ll have a look at that new fbx io file it might help with some issues we’re having
Don’t know if you watched the whole tutorial series so far but I did make that quite clear. Even though this is a very complex setup it was done as an example of the most complex rig to ever be exported, Giving people the chance to use such complex animation setup for characters could well be used within very complex cinematic’s.
As I said in the tutorials i like to sometimes even have 3 or 4 different rigg setups for one character to fit the use case (simple game play/ More complex game play/Cut scene’s & cinematics/Facial specific animation scene’s).
Im updating the tutorial series that also covers using much simpler setups for rig export but still being able to use the main make human complex rigg for hand annimation within Blender 3D, Also Morph targets, Fixing and Blending seperate Motion capture animations for seamless state changes on the same character. There’s alot more to come. I’ve just had a quick look at your Character tutorials and may I suggest you remove them and rethink your methods as in my opinion there is all kinds of wrong work flow and misinformation that for a learner could really cause major issues. Just point point people in the direction of my completed tutorial series and they should be all good.
The whole idea of the tutorials im doing for free that are commercial quality is the fact people shouldn’t need help or get stuck. The quality of teaching should be enough to get things right and cover all angles, If they don’t it’s a failure on my part. If you ever want any help feel free to contact me, Im working on a much larger goal over all and having the support of other committed engine devs is a plus not a minus. Cheers Brudda
Hey Guys, Hope people have been enjoying the Blender & UE4 tutorials. I’ve got about 8-9 other to upload but stuck with a wireless hotspot connection (40k upload ) so getting things uploaded when i even remember to do it is tough.
In the last Lesson i explained importing characters to Blender with rig, Adding Mocap animation and exporting to UE4 with custom fbx tool. In this Lesson i take people through actualy editing the Mocap re targeted data on your character to fix the errors you always get from Mocap on custom rigs.
Takes you through the editing techniques and tools within Blender ready for the next version about creating animation cycles. Ill try to get the rest uploaded soon but a 30 min tut takes 3 hours to upload (and that’s if the wifi hotspot doesn’t disconnect me meaning having to restart all over again, so you can see the problem with getting these online ). Cheers KB
Tutorial 6 Character Mocap correction work in Blender:
While i agree with geodav that using make human might not be the most optimized way to achieve the result, I would encourage anyone wanting to very quickly get an animated character running in the engine to follow king badgers tutorial…what i liked about his method of using make human combined with blender then using the autodesk fbx converter is that you take small steps and get big results, which keeps users new to the software inspired(especially if you make a naked asian old man who dances as badger did in the tut) also there is a huge library of motion capture animations for free…personally i would use maya with epics plugins but for a new user the learning curve can be pretty steep and many quit before seeing a result…make human is also alot of fun and in my opinion you will learn more by having that base humanoid figure to start altering with your own design…i watched some of geodavs rig tutorials before writing this and they are not easy to follow…if you were new to 3d software you would probably give up pretty quick and he rambles on about concepts rather than give direction which is fine if your more advanced…i just wanted to add my 2 cents worth because i really think king badgers tutorial is useful and what harm could an extra bone or two do on a naked asian man anyway
Hey guys, Would just like to make clear Make human rigs are NO more expensive than the rigs epic use (going on their character that had the trench coat, He had 109-110 bones, even the shooter rig has 90 bones). In the last tut i just showed the export routine, not the optimised export routine. Which meant when the rig was imported it had 240 bones (still ran fine though, So people that need seriously complex rigs do not get turned out about high bone counts), but if you click the export deform bones only your end up with 150 bones not 250, let alone that rig also has facial controls and a few other bones links not needed that you can easily prune from your setup.
Without any effort of optimisation i got my character rigs down to 114 bones (5 more than epics example). Ill make another tut to explain and show my results and methods of optimisation in the next day or two. Cheers KB
Thanks a lot KingBadger3D for your efforts! I myself am a programmer, and I’m not good at 3D design and animations. Your tutorials will be very useful when I get to creating characters for my experimental sandbox which I’m doing mostly just for fun - I want to create a more-less automatically generated city where I can walk and drive and have some simple interactions with NPCs.
Just some questions about these videos:
why that Tangent Space checkbox is needed when exporting from Blender? What does it do? I’m somehat new to 3D, I’m familiar with bump maps and normals (as in normal maps or in math in general), but “Tangent Space” seems mysterious to me.
why do we need to convert the exported file through the Autodesk converter? The exported file is already in the FBX format, isn’t it?
I have seen some other videos where people check “Only deform bones” when exporting from Blender, but in your videos that checkbox was unchecked. What does it do, in what cases do we need it checked?
It still somewhat unclear in what situations we want to use Export for Rigify and what does that checkbox do if I select one of MakeHuman rigs as in your 2nd video.
I’m definitely looking forward your next tutorials about animation loops and rig optimizations. I already have some questions on my mind and I hope your next tutorials will address these questions: How do I create various LOD levels for my rigs, so characters at a distance have just a few bones and the closer NPCs have more bones? How do I tell the engine which rig to use for which LOD level? What happens if my animation has animation curves for bones which I have deleted? For example, if I have a “say hello” animation which makes my NPC to wave his hand and smile, obviously when I run this animation on an NPC at a distance, I don’t need him smiling - I won’t notice it anyway. Obviously, I should get rid of his facial bones for far distances, but I’m not sure if that won’t break the animation or crash the UE4 engine.
Also I’m wondering how do I create somewhat believable transitions between animations, so my NPC walks and then stops normally without any abrupt jerky motions.
And also facial animations - I guess, they are worth a separate tutorial video. Recently I saw some videos about the free source filmmaker tool and it just blew my mind with how easy it’s to create facial animations - just import an audio file and Source engine will extract spoken phonemes from it and make the character talk. Is something like that possible in Blender and UE4 ?
And finally importing MakeHuman models with cloth meshes and textures - in one video you mentioned that there might be issues with textures, but still it would be great to know more about that and how to make my MakeHuman characters dressed up… it’s not nice to have a game full of nude people, you know
Hi mate. I’ve yet to have a chance to view your videos (alas, I’m in a similar situation to you internet wise) but I’d been searching for something like this for a while, so I wanted to write my thanks in advance as this should prove quite helpful for myself and many others!
) so getting things uploaded when i even remember to do it is tough.