In recent months, I have started learning Unreal Engine to become independent of our in-house engine. There are many nice animation-related features, and it is a lot of fun transferring our old concepts into the new engine!
With our focus on better deformation, I wanted to continue and get those advances into the engine with as little hassle as possible.
I can create a Range of Motion file (simple animation) that holds a few key poses and the corrective joints in the adjusted positions. In my opinion, this is a very nice format to work on deformation and skinning tweaks without being too technical.
I have a script that will then export the data into a JSON file that can be read by EPIC’s Pose Wrangler tool and implement the fixes on the clean rig in real-time. That, in turn, can be exported and implemented in Unreal with no problems.
Furthermore, I wrote a script that will recreate my twist setups from Maya inside Unreal.
This way, I was able to get my character from the ROM Demo into the Engine in mere minutes:
This was then easily implemented into the „Game Animation Sample“ that EPIC released recently:
Other Projects
I have recently been working on a freelance job where the client was building a showroom where Metahuman characters were supposed to interact with the visitors.
I first set up a prototype using a 3D scanned mesh to construct a custom Metahuman, capture my own simple performance (using my XSens suit), and an iPhone for recording the facial performance:
The client was happy, and we conducted two recording sessions with actors on set. I brought the data into Unreal, fixed facial and hand animation inside Unreal (while the body was corrected in MotionBuilder). Here is a quick demo:
Unfortunately, the project is currently on hold. While the client was really happy with the results, one of his ideal feature requests was to be able to add new animations into the system with plain text input. This is obviously not currently possible with good quality in a short time (a few hours). As far as I know, they are looking into HeyGen.ai as an alternative.
Outlook
Unreal is a very capable engine, and I really enjoy developing in it. It is nice to be able to work with animation systems that can be adapted to various needs, and I am looking forward to spending more time animating and implementing in-engine.