I’m using Unreal Engine 5 and want to import a UE5 Mannequin into a blank project for live stream motion capture. It needs to have it’s skeleton, meshes, etc attached, but no animation, no game controls etc. I don’t want to load it from the 3D game template like most tutorials suggest, I just want to import it into a blank level so I can setup up the project strictly for doing the live stream motion capture. Can anyone walk me through it? Thanks!
(I tried copying one of the mannequin folders into my project folder and opening UE, but it didn’t connect anything together, no materials, no skeleton etc.)
one method I know is to create a second project with the starting content you need, then use the “migrate” functionality to copy only what you need to an empty project.
you can also just delete what you don’t need from this second project
Hi there,
Just create a blank project, go to Quixel Bridge icon and open the windows. There you’ll find metahumans to download and add to your project.
The problem I had trying the migrate method is that it still copied a lot of things over that I don’t know how to remove without them breaking things. Even with the 3rd person Mannequin I couldn’t get it to stop playing it like a game, and remove controls without getting tons of errors. I figure there has to be a way to import a Mannequin just like any other character you can download, I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.
My bad, I sent a wrong answer.
If you need only the mannequins, without control rig and animations, the following will work:
Find the materials and materials instances and migrate them first. You find the materials opening the skeletal mesh editor, asset details, material slots. That will migrate everything associated, material functions, textures, etc. Then export the meshes to your drive and reimport the first mesh into your project. Assign the material instances. Import the additional meshes using the first skeleton.
If you need control rig and animations, first, make sure to enable control rig plugin in the target project. Close it and select the mesh, migrate, uncheck everything outside the folder “Game”. Inside this folder, uncheck everything outside Characters. That should work. Let me know if that helps.
Thanks LFA, I will have to give it a try in the morning. I’m pretty sure the Manus Polygon Streaming Plugin doesn’t use control rig, so I will see if I can get through all the steps you’ve outlined to set it up. I appreciate the detail and will update when I try it out.
You just need to “Add” the feature to your project.
Inside your Content Browser, you have an “Add” button. Click on the Add button and goto the “Add Content or Feature Pack”, Click on it. Then select which content/feature you want to add. (Third Person) will give you the Third Person Mannequins.
that just adds the template assets to the project. OP wants something that he didn’t explained from those assets. Since he doesn’t know what those assets are and what they do is impossible to give him a precise answer.
to OP just study the default template, get yourself familiarized on how unreal works and links assets together, you will then be able to break the assets in pieces, remove functionality, whatever it takes.
In order to do what you’re looking for is a little setup. You need to get the Mannequin skeletons. In order to do this you need to make a UE5 project with Third Person Template selected. Export the Mannequins into a Folder somewhere on your PC. Delete that project (unless you want to keep it) Create a new Blank project. Import new asset, select the Mannequins you exported. They’ll import with their default Skeletons. All you’ll end up with are the Default Mannequin Meshes, Skeletons and possible the Physics Assets assuming you left the import settings default.
After that, you’ll need to figure out the setup for your live link motion capture settings to animate the skeleton for your live stream.
This method of importing the third person project seemed to work much better than migrating assets.
It helps to use git to clean up the unneeded changes to your project.
I only kept the stuff under Characters/Mannequin_UE4 and Mannequins. That’s the stuff you need for meshes. You can actually omit Mannequin_UE4, but I kept it to help retarget.
I was also able to move those assets into a totally different module’s content folder and am working on modifying the skeleton for my game with slightly different ik bones.
When I did this previously I kept getting all sorts of odd errors or warnings or assets not cleanly migrating over.
