Custom Metahumans - Auto Blinking using additive animation in Unreal Engine 5.1

A tutorial showing the basics of using Additive Animation inside Unreal Engine 5.1 to create an automatic blinking effect for your Metahuman.
#metahuman #unrealengine #unrealengine5
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[@Jobutsu]

✨ Tip: Create improved facial idle animation by using the curve editor in UE5.1 ✨

[@Darksagan]

Tutorial please..I am new and have no idea what that is. lol

[@NextWorldVR]

Amazing! I am using this to augment my Voice Activated AI VR Chatbot NPCs. Amazing, thank you, worked like a charm!

[@rixread]

You can not imagine how much you are helping me with your videos! THANK YOUUU!

[@cemeterygate]

Great one fix for multiple characters! Work smarter, not harder. Thank you!

[@Jobutsu]

You're welcome!

[@DesignsbyElement]

Sooo awesome... My go to channel for Unreal tuts

[@carlosrivadulla8903]

Man ur channel is getting awesome by putting together all that new stuff into actual work fluently. Thnx I enjoyed this and the last one so much!. I hope u find the energy to keep growing!

[@Jobutsu]

I appreciate your kind words.

[@solarstoned]

class. thank you for your tutorials

[@iPEMiC.]

Awesome and Thnx @Jobutsu

[@JoshuaLundquist]

Yr tuts are the best, other level character design! This quote tho, lol: 0:27

[@Jobutsu]

"I have hidden the body from on screen rendering but the body skeletal mesh is still present for animating" Somehow the fixed version does not sound any better 😁

[@RugiadianL]

Thank You!!

[@550am]

thank you!

[@kazemedia]

Nice! Now I know how to animate Metahuman. 😀

[@faradaysinfinity]

Ah I wish I knew this technique 6 months ago!! I did this manually with a cc3 character and it was a pain

[@Chivu04]

A tutorial on how to randomize the meta humans faces for something like a city or a village would be amazing!

[@Jobutsu]

Crowd pack from epic games

[@DarkBarBarian]

great video 😃

[@Jobutsu]

Thanks! 😃

[@jakejuan-ue4pg]

This is absolutely great! this could play if do play in game mode?

[@Jobutsu]

You may need to make some mods for game play.

[@DarkBarBarian]

I tried this with Live Link and its working just fine, thanks a lot for this tut, i have a mocap suit but don't have finger tracking, is it possible for me to play any generic finger animation for my meta characters hands while the rest of the body get the live animation data from my mocap suit?

[@Jobutsu]

Yes. It is not exactly what you are looking for, here I explain blend profiles: kzbin.info/www/bejne/g6WkdoFvlrujla8 You could do it that way in the animation blueprint.

[@michaelb1099]

Great Tutorial easy to follow. One question how do you get your metahuman so realistic looking?

[@Jobutsu]

That is a complicated question to answer. It is a combination of lighting and adjusting materials etc. There are those who are far better than me at this.

[@marcopestana6157]

@@Jobutsu tutorial on this pleaseeeee

[@NextWorldVR]

You know on the marketplace there is a lighting setup for meta-humans to specifically that's a really good starting point. They include the lighting used on The matrix etc.

[@DamielBE]

I was wondering, can Paragon characters have facial expression as well? Like Twinblast having a smug grin, Phase looking flirty and Lt Bellica looking intense before cracking up.

[@Jobutsu]

I only have Twinblast. You would have to add the morph targets in Maya or Blender

[@borrowedtruths6955]

Works great in sequencer but seems to lose part of the animation each time I close it and then reopen it. I added head movement along with some eye movement with the blinking, but all that shows up is the blinking. Is this normal?

[@JonathonBarton]

I guess it's kind of wild to me that every developer/designer needs to DIY these, every time, for every project, and UE5 doesn't default to making some base assumptions about Metahumans and human characters (bodies) in general, like - they blink, they breathe, they look at things in the environment, they have micro-movements and macro movements as they balance or stand in place. Like, this tutorial shouldn't need to exist. It should come with just the act of creating/using a Metahuman, and the tutorial should be, say, how to create an 'emotional' subsystem, so you can introduce modifiers to the included blinking and breathing functions that animate the character by default - so a developer/designer would only have to do work to NOT do the work shown in this tutorial in the case where the character is 'inhuman' (say, an Android who doesn't breathe, or a corpse that doesn't blink, etc)

[@Jobutsu]

I must confess, I like the work. I do understand and agree with your point however.

[@martinmenso6671]

Can you add randomness to the play sequence. Random Float, Delay?

[@Jobutsu]

I would think, it would be possible.

[@heresmynovel331]

Hey there My character is from cc4, will this work with it??? And if I need it for a game mode, will it work as well?? if not... could you plz do a video about these two??

[@Jobutsu]

I never tried because you can add auto blinking in cc4 or iclone. Should be possible though.

[@schmutz06]

08:04 - select base animation - i got lost on this bit. Where is the base animation found and how does that work? I managed to get the head normal size using 'skeleton reference pose' - unsure if this will hurt me long term. Great tutorial - this is the first time outside of making a sequence play I've been able to make a metahuman custom-move automatically within a game. Big progress milestone for me lol.

[@Jobutsu]

The base animation is not essential, it is just what i do. In UE 5.1: 1. open you head/face mesh 2. go Create Asset > Create Animation > Current Pose 3. Name it base

[@schmutz06]

@@Jobutsu thanks very much. What does the base animation achieve? could you explain? Also random question but have you found that in UE 5.1 the 'fuzz' hair is not displaying on your metahumans? Looks like it from your video. This is the subtle facial hairs that appear, I don't know if you have noticed. Let me know if you figure out a fix!

[@Jobutsu]

They do appear but have been acting strange in light. I only ever work at LOD 0, maybe that is it

[@schmutz06]

@@Jobutsu LOD 0 fixed it. Appears to be a 5.1 bug under default settings.

[@Amonlith]

Thank you for the tutorial, do you know how to play this animation even though my character blueprint uses the "SetLeaderPoseComponent" node? as it overwrites the animation bp for the face, and by excluding the Face from SetLeaderPoseComponent the face isn't positioned right with the rest of the body parts. I've tried to play and animation \ montage from the Tick \ Beginplay nothing happens I guess as the SetLeaderPose component totally overwrites this.. :[

[@Jobutsu]

Perhaps set "Always Tick Pose and Refresh Bones" for one or more of the meshes. I normally would not use the leader pose node for the head/face, I would instead use a separate animation blueprint, just for the head/face and disable curves etc from the attached parent.

[@Amonlith]

@@JobutsuThank you for replying. I've created the face's base pose incorrectly that what was misplacing the head if it wasn't connected to the master/leader node, it is interesting how at first glance it looks the same ended using the first frame of the blinking animation as a reference I believe.

[@CabrioDriving]

Please explain why you delete this or that, not just "I want to X and Y" :)

[@Jobutsu]

Ok, in future I will "Z" what I can do better 😁 What was it in particular that, I deleted that I did not explain correctly ? I can then go back and learn from my mistakes.

[@Pather23]

I have another issue. I have some audio from TTS. From this audio I generate lipsync via MetahumanSDK plugin. Now comes the tricky part. Whenever I am trying to combine it with some facial animation from MH Animator, no matter what I do it seems like the sequencer is averaging the data from both animations. Even though I completely removed any mouth and jaw data from the MH Animator capture, there is still some weird averaging going on. Meaning metahuman does not blink all the way through, and the mouth is very subtle, not very convincing. If I play solo the lipsync or the facial animation, they work great. But I want to combine them in the sequencer. I was thinkin "ok there is 0 on EyeBlink from the lipsync and there is 1 on the Facial anim, so the result of this additive operation should be 1". But no, that is not the case. I am kind of desperate, because I have no idea how to combine these and not loose any of the data.

[@Jobutsu]

Sounds like animation blending. You could try evaluating animation slots for the different animations instead ?

[@Pather23]

@@Jobutsu So after digging some more and consulting with a friend I came to conlusion this could not be done. The additive animation in sequencer is simply broken. Maybe it works with some basic animations (blinking etc), but for complex curves like in lipsync a facial expressions this does not yield the results Im looking for. Once I'm finished with this project, I will run some tests from basic to complex to see where the problem should be. A friend of mine said though he resigned for this and just blend the data by hand. I did this now too and it works great. I will try to discuss this with my coworker once hes back from his time off. He is a programmer, so maybe he could come up with some automatization. Anyway I thank you sir for you videos, since they was a great help in the past and will be in the future :]

[@Pather23]

@@Jobutsu Sorry for the late reply. I ended up blending the animations together by hand. It is a bit of work, but there is a great control over the result. I would like to automatize this. How would I approach the animations slots? Never heard of this. Thank you, sir!

[@b.selyan]

And how to play an animation on the face in the character blueprint?

[@Jobutsu]

This video shows you that.

[@b.selyan]

@@Jobutsu Not the blink animation, I'm talking about if we want to add another animation in the character's blueprint. If I put a play animation in the blueprint, there is a bug, the head does weird things.

[@LIMBICNATIONARTIST]

hi, I can't find "Blink Tutorial"

[@LIMBICNATIONARTIST]

I just saw that this is a custom animation...

[@freeman1075]

how create face animation with live link?

[@Jobutsu]

I will make new tutorial, once metahuman animator is released.

[@kazemedia]

Did they remove Metahuman identity in 5.1 to make Metahuman from Mesh? Today, I had to use 5.0.

[@Jobutsu]

They have not updated the plugin yet

[@kazemedia]

@@Jobutsu Thank you!

[@robertomachado7581]

It would be nice if you would not speed up the video towards the end and instead of finishing the tutorial midway would show the finished product.