Real-Time short animation: Blender + UE4 ?

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello All,

I’m new around the UE Community, hopefully will find some help / supportive spirit around here :slight_smile:

Originally I’m a professional 2D Animator and a Music producer, I’m not a game developer (yet).
Recently I’ve started to mess with Blender and I already control the basics, I can model and animate original characters but still have lots to learn (all this on my spare time whenever possible…)

As soon as I ran into the Kite short animation it inspired me and amazed me at the same time.
So I’m very new to UE4 (just downloaded it few days ago), I didn’t have much time to play with it yet but I will in order to learn and use it of course.

My goal with UE4 may sound a bit weird compare to the normal usage of “making games”, I would LOVE to combine my animation skills and create animations using the powerful Real-Time of UE4.
I did watch the basics, interface tutorials but The problem is that I don’t know where to start related to create my own short cinematic cartoon using: BLENDER + UE4

I think that I got the idea of a tool inside UE4 called “Matinee” for animating camera, characters and stuff (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), I even watched a few video tutorials but they covered the very basics of animating a simple 1 animation, for example: character walk. and also it was a character that came with UE4 already so it may be different than what I want to learn and accomplish.

What I’m trying to do:

  • Model an original character (more than one, but let’s start simple)
  • Put basic bones, I don’t even need full rig, I don’t care animating old fashion: Bone-By-Bone if that’s what possible at the moment in UE4
  • Export from Blender to UE4 (I guess… FBX right?)
  • Import in UE4
  • Animating… ?? But here comes the confusion: (questions are on the way)
  • Render an output file so I can upload to YouTube or any other media I like so people can watch it on best quality.

So many questions:

  1. Do I animate the all animation inside UE4 using Matinee? or in Blender before exporting? or both… (mass confusion)
  2. What if my model is a weird creature with a really weird skeleton (not a humanoid)… will UE4 let me work with it and animate it, or use it inside the engine?
  3. If I do animate my character inside of UE4 is there a good video tutorial example to show how?
  4. Anybody here using Blender + UE4 can show how it’s done in a video tutorial example? I believe it will help many others and not just myself.

I must mention that I saw many video tutorials before I post this thread but all of what I saw was from the same “Blue Guy” character or basic camera movement, I’m looking for a totally 100% character that made within Blender and how it can be used in order to animate a short animation / cinematic using the amazing power of UE4, instead of waiting hours, days, weeks… to render inside Blender.

I have so many more questions… but it’s already a mess so let’s see if you guys can help me out here.

Thanks ahead and sorry about my bad English.
Have a wonderful day! And just for fun enjoy one of my cartoons:

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UE4 will work as a rendering platform and you can go with Matinee or even brute force by editing in place and export to UE4 for rendering.

A good starting point is the Matinee sample as it is set up with the basics of using UE4 for the purpose you describe but for doing animated flicks Blender is not the ideal application. Would be like trying to write a book using a spread sheet so if your into doing music videos then Motion Builder is the app you want.

As an example.

I did the animation using Story in MB and then export the completed animation as a single take and using the Matinee example was able to render out the completed work with in 24 hours, which was the goal of the exercise.

So the short answer sure it can be done and my guess it’s just a matter of time before the other shoe drops and a video editing app for UE4 made available.

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Thank you FrankieV for your kind reply.
BTW - Your rendered version of the trooper is so hilarious LOL! :smiley:

I’m still exploring the same scene, it’s so amazing.
Since my current tools are Blender and UE4 (no Motion Builder) also… I like to animate by myself no mo-cap.
So let me see if I understood the process I can do, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong:

Let’s say I animate a full character animation sequence (30-60 seconds or even longer) than I will import it to UE4
Than I’ll setup the scene as I want, the lights etc… and in Matinee I’ll animate the camera as I wish.

Is that going to work?
Also, what if I have 3 characters… and they need to interact with each other or something like in the original troopers scene (the fight). BUT from what I know after watching the twitch video, all the character animation done with mo-cap and what I want is to animate freely inside Blender.
I wish I could animate in UE4 but I understood it’s impossible for now.

Let’s take the “Kite short animation” example which shows a short cinematic, rendered in real time.
Where originally did they animate the Kid character? in a 3D software (maya, max, whatever… it doesn’t matter) and THAN they import the FULL long animation into UE4 to render in Matinee ?

The best example of what I want to do is more like the Kite animation, I wonder what is the pipeline because I use Blender and would love to know how to get start without missing something on the way.

As soon as I’ll understand the full progress I believe I should make a very short (few seconds) animation and try render from matinee, which I still have no clue how it works exactly hehe. I have so much to learn, that’s for sure.

Here are some tests I did while I’m learning Blender, BUT… I would love to do my next tests using UE4 !

Here is a simple example, not much of an animation but it took a few hours to render…
and I have a feeling that such simple thing could look MUCH BETTER in UE4 :slight_smile:

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Well there is a learning curve involved and took me about 6 months to figure out what some of the buttons do so to speak but my back ground is in 3d in general and I became interested in using a game engine as a rendering <cough cough> node a few years back so that experience kind of gave me a bit of a head start.

To get my head around it I just started importing FBX files into Unreal 4 and so far I’ve yet to find any restrictions that will prevent anyone from brute forcing the render that they are after and is super easy to import a complete skeletal model complete with it’s animation in tack as a single file.

So

Yup that will work and as I mentioned the Troop video was done in one take of 1:51 minuets but on a twitch cast it was mentioned you could probably go as long as you wish as long as you have the memory.

I did use Matinee for the camera control and image rendering but once imported, it does take a while, you just have to drag the animation into the scene, press play, and off it goes so the tests you did in Blender so your next test should be to try to export the mesh,rig and animations to UE4 using FBX.

It’s really easy but once again it’s all about figuring out what all the buttons do.

Baby steps. Figure out how to do one and it will be easier to understand what needs to be done to two or three characters, or more. But sure be in key frame or mocap it does not matter.

Well the animations in “Kite” is far to complex to do as a single shot but Matinee can order animation clips just like a video editor, and more, so if you know how to use one then that’s half the learning right there.

As for creating the animations I don’t know what was used but it reeks of Motion Builder.

5

Thank you for the very well explanation I appreciate it!
I have so much to learn and experiment but hopefully it will work. :slight_smile: