Hi. I was wondering if anyone could point me to some tutorials (preferably video) for creating a character customization system with sliders. Something that would explain what assets you need to create and how to put them all together. Any leads would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Could you explain what you’re trying to do? I don’t know what you mean by “with sliders”.
Create a robust in-game character creation system. By sliders I mean people being able to tweak their characters features (eyes farther apart, nose tip rotated a little more up, etc.) as opposed to just choosing from presets.
Unfortunately, unreal engine is completely incapable of that. If that isn’t an essential feature, you might want to change it to presets. What you’re trying to do is called blend shapes, which unreal doesn’t have sadly.
Of course it’s capable. Morph targets is the UE term for blend shapes. Sliders are going to be done with the UI components called UMG and some Blueprint. Im learning how to make one too.
I didn’t know about morph targets. That is awesome!
Cool. Because it is totally an essential feature to any serious game project I undertake. It’s the first thing I look for as a player and feels like a really important part of enabling players to tell their stories via the game. I will definitely be googling all these terms straight after breakfast. If anyone has any further specifics about any of this, that’d be super helpful! Thanks so much!
Ok. googled. I feel like I have a clearer idea of what I need to learn how to do, but still no idea of where to learn it. Does anyone know where I can find a good video about making and using morphs? Putting in “Unreal morphs targets how to” into youtube was really not helpful. Even just a better idea of what to google would be great. Thanks!
Shape Keys is the Blender term for Morph Targets.
Here is a video to help you http://jayanam.com/blender-shape-keys-for-unity-unreal-engine/
Thanks. So blender is a better place to do this than Zbrush?
Blender/Maya/3DSMax/Modo/Mari/C4D/Houdini are probably better suited to this than ZBrush because you will probably need to manipulate individual vertices to get the exact facial expressions you’re looking for and ZBrush does not permit this since is a 2.5D CCT (content creation tool). But I’m not an expert on ZBrush so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Of course you can use morph targets in ZBrush, there are many tutorials and videos showing that on the 'net:
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Of course you can use morph targets in ZBrush, there are many tutorials and videos showing that on the 'net:
ZBrush looks very suited to this purpose.
Zbrush morph targets are meant to be a sculpting aid for high poly meshes within the application. It is not really meant to be used as a means to export these shapes as usable morph targets for an external app like the unreal engine. I am uncertain if this is possible, even if it is you’d be stretching the functionality from its original purpose.
What do you mean with that ?
You know morph targets are just vectors … a better definition you can find here just for example:
You can create all the morph targets in ZBrush, export the FBX and key them in Blender or another software if you wish to refine them and then import into UE4.
You might want to check the commercial ZBuilder plugin for ZBrush on Gumroad and ZBrush plugins forum threads and on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWO4nk6Fo-w , I think it really shows how useful ZBrush can be with morph targets.
This has all been super helpful. However, I’m still really fuzzy on creating a morph target for the purposes of character customization. There’s a lot out there for using them for animation, but not really for character sliders. Tutorials that actually explain adding other meshes to your character base mesh are pretty few and far between, too.
There’s been a lot of really helpful leads in here, but I’d still really love to find a tutorial series that covers making a character creation system for an unreal game.
Personally, I would not want to recreate the wheel. I would go this route… for a couple reasons. One, you have something to prototype right away…2 you learn from it . 3…And, ask the maker of the content questions in Discord. just MHO
I really can’t believe no one has brought the unreal links into the conversation yet…Getting Started with Character Morph Targets | Live Training | Unreal Engine - YouTube
For “questionable features included in unreal games” you can check out the godawful implementation they went with for ARK… actually it may be a really bad idea to point people towards what can otherwise be regarded as “poop” for an example… but I guess it is an example nonetheless…
Here is a very short and clear instruction video on how to create a shape key/morph target in Blender 2.8. After this you would need to export as FBX and import the FBX to UE4.
