Metahuman Animator Part 3: Combining Mixamo and FBX body animations with Face Performance Capture

🥇First Part here : • Troubleshooting Metahu...
🥈Second Part here : • Metahuman Animator Par...
With a very special thanks to Ibrews for providing the clues
🎥🍿 Want to know how to combine Face Performance and Body animations in Unreal Engine and Metahuman Animator?
👉 Have a seat and give me 15 minutes to share and troubleshoot issues in this pretty dense workflow 🕒
Here we'll cover:
Timestamps :
0:00 Introduction
0:37 A bit of theory
01:44 Unreal Project pre-requisites
02:16 Getting files from Adobe Mixamo
3:37 Mixamo to UE5 Retargeting solutions
04:53 Mixamo Animation Retargeting 2 plugin in UE
06:09 Editing Metahuman Face Anim Blueprint
07:45 Face performance capture conversion
10:19 Scene setup
11:11 Preparing body tracking for external assets
12:13 Head last tweakings before adding performance
13:53 Optional Face anim blueprint rollback
14:31 Final thoughts and outro
Discussed topics:
#tuto #tutorial #UE52, #metahuman #metahumans, #mocap, #epicgames, #unrealengine , #unrealengine5 , #motioncapture, #performance, #performancecapture, #controlrig, #adobe , #mixamo , #fbx , #retargeting , and so on
Thanks for watching 💖
comments and questions are welcome, I'll do my best to help!
🪢 Useful Links:
- metahuman.unrealengine.com
- dev.epicgames.com
- @ibrews KZbin channel
Contains visuals from "Blue Dot" short movie by 3Lateral/Epic:
• Blue Dot: A 3Lateral S...
🏃‍♂️MIXAMO CONVERTERS :
1/ (Used here), paid 49.99$ : www.unrealengine.com/marketpl...
2/ Evans Bohl name-your-price blender-based converter : evansbohl.gumroad.com/l/mixam...
3/ Terribilis Studio free Mixamo Converter 2 : terribilisstudio.fr/?section=...
Hope it will be useful!
Enjoy animating ;)
By the way, I'm Paul, aka SUPER3, freelance Technical Art Director in France.
You can contact me for visual/technical projects at :
[e-mail]
or on freelance platform malt.fr/profile/paulpuaux 🖖

[@grit-mike]

This together with video 2 is saving my sanity! 😃

[@Glowyourtruecolours]

Great explanation!!

[@chippyspeilberg]

Thank you for making this! Have been looking everywhere for how to do this!!!!!

[@super3studio]

Thank you for watching, hope the process was clear !

[@orin1110]

Thank you so much, you're amazing!

[@bernard2735]

That was great - thank you for sharing this video. Liked and subscribed.

[@super3studio]

Thank you for watching and for your comment ! Hope you will have fun using it

[@lilylikesherpotato3461]

the detailed explanation really helps... I use iclone to bring mixamo to unreal, make a few tweaks for foot sliding, but this helped me understand more about the unreal process... thanks

[@super3studio]

Thanks a lot. Some parts of the process may seem basic for pro born animators, but for some learners as I am, baking, retargeting, smoothing and so on are each time spare universes ! Iclone is definitely a great tool to ease the burden of it all

[@user-kn2ih1hq1s]

even with this metod it doesn't work for me. after i modify the blueprint with the blendmask i simple lose my face animation, not the head, but the all the face animations are gone... and actually it doesn't attach the head at the body but just make it really close.. 1 week that i try to find the right workflow but seems impossible. btw i'm using unreal 5.3 i don't if is a bug or what..

[@DesignsbyElement]

Have you figured out how to fix this issue?

[@funnyfromallover1463]

Hey can't we export animated face to blender it would be easy

[@sozinho7819]

Is it possible to add a constraint and make my metahuman eyes always looking to a camera actor while the mouth is still with the recorded mocap animation?

[@super3studio]

Yes, totally, I don't remember the exact line, but you'll have to find an eye target line into the face recorded keys, and assign it the desired camera. Note that your character may still look at camera when blinking or closing eyes, which is a bit "mechanical" . Give you the line name here if I find it quickly

[@sozinho7819]

@@super3studio thank you :) but if I do that and bake the animation wouldn’t it stop following the moment I add key frames to my camera movement in the new sequencer level?

[@super3studio]

@@sozinho7819 oh I got it now. Not sure, to be honest, not tested so far using that situation. But interested for sure

[@miayoung1343]

Why my Face_AniBP looks so different with your's? I don't have 'Layer blend per bone'😐

[@super3studio]

Hey 👋 have you checked that your Metahuman imported is up to date, last version ?

[@wondernexus3d482]

Nope. Didnt work for me. Weird thing is it DID work like a couple of weeks ago, and ive done it again step by step and now its not working lol I got the animation not from mixamo but from iclone 8 live link, and used take recorder to record the motion, and the face motion is metahuman animatior, but it just wont work. The head and body wont attach

[@super3studio]

Man, you play with dark forces ;) Honestly I didn’t go so far using iclone live link AND MHA… I read you twice and wonder if there won’t be any blueprint disabling trick for the body once your move is baked. I just received my Rokoko and will have a try in the next days. Interested to follow up with you

[@wondernexus3d482]

@@super3studiohaha ikr. I also have a rokoko suit, but the motion I transferred across was just one of the box standard pre made motions that came with iclone 8, then I just used the live link add on which works amazingly well. The most frustrating part is last week I literally just removed the metahuman control rigs and added the body and face animation and it works immediately, now it won’t but from what I’ve seen I’m not doing anything different! I’ve realised with ue5 you really have to focus on what steps you do things in, it’s odd!!

[@super3studio]

@@wondernexus3d482 Totally agree. But I think it's more an animator thing when you come from generalist work and begin to dive deeper in animation, my experience in Blender is quite similar after coming from mograph/procedural jobs in C4D. Workflow steps have to be cautiously followed to avoid breaking all apart - Kind of Jenga !

[@leben9989]

🤯🫵🫡