Engagement 13k+ views

Topics Include Sketchfab, Skeletal Mesh, FBX Import

As part of a marketing campaign for Epic Games, this video series showcases Twinmotion to Unreal Engine tutorials focused on elements in Unreal Engine that can expand projects started in Twinmotion.

In this tutorial, learn step-by–step how to import Twinmotion projects into Unreal Engine and add animated FBX models to your scene. Dive into the details of Skeletal Mesh, import settings, and material editing to enhance your projects.

Credit Epic Games

Model Epic Games

3D Environment Epic Games

Script Sam Anderson

Voiceover Sam Anderson

Editing Sam Anderson

Tools Twinmotion, Unreal Engine, Adobe Premiere , NVIDIA A6000, Atomos Ninja, Apollo Solo, RE20

Transcript

00:00 Introduction

01:08 Sketchfab animated assets

01:47 Import FBX

04:14 Edit material

06:38 Conclusion

Introduction

00:00 Hello everyone. For this tutorial series, we will be focusing on importing animated FBX imports inside of Unreal Engine that allow you to progress your Twinmotion model or CAD models. To demonstrate this, I will be using the demo scene from Twinmotion that was brought into Unreal Engine 5 using the Twinmotion to Unreal Engine Importer workflow.

00:30 In this tutorial, we will cover how to import animated FBX models into an Unreal Engine scene. Now here I have Unreal Engine 5 open and you may notice there already is some movement in some of the elements here. These are some simple material-based movements that have been brought in during the import process such as the trees and landscape using the Datasmith workflow.

00:52 For more information on compatible animations from Twinmotion, please check out the plugin page on the Marketplace. Now let's add in our own animated elements by importing an animated FBX. In order to find a model to bring in, I'm going to use Sketchfab.

Sketchfab animated assets

01:08Sketchfab is a tool within the Epic ecosystem. It is a web platform for publishing, sharing, discovering, and downloading 3D models. You can sign into Sketchfab using your Epic Games account here. I've gone ahead and signed in and searched for a creature that is not a part of the Twinmotion library currently. So I'm going to be bringing in a hummingbird. So here I have found one. It's got a nice simple hummingbird here with an animation and this is coming from user Rodriguez. If I select the Download 3d model button here, you'll see that I have the ability to bring in an FBX and I can also copy the credits for the creator here.

Import FBX

01:47 Now I'm going to go switch back into Unreal Engine 5 and import this hummingbird in order to bring in the animated FBX. I'm going to go up to the top toolbar where there is a cube with a plus sign, hit this drop down and select Import Content. Now a window is going to pop up asking you where you would like to place the content. I'll go ahead and add it to the Content folder here and select Okay. Now, I’ll navigate to my FBX model, select it, and hit Open.

02:27 Now an FBX import option window will pop up. There are a few important things that we'll want to make sure that we include. The first one is going to be Skeletal Mesh, so we'll want to make sure that this is checked here. Skeletal Meshes are bound to a hierarchical skeleton of bones, which can be animated for the purpose of deforming the mesh.

02:49 So we'll want to make sure that this is included in the animated FBX import. Now I'll also go ahead and make sure Import Mesh is on and you'll see you have a couple of different options here. Now, one important thing to make sure is that you have Import Animations checked here. Now there's a few additional elements that I won't be diving into.

03:10 I'm going to keep all of these settings as is. I'll go ahead and select Import All. Now a message log window will pop up letting us know that there are some Smoothing Group information that is missing. Now, since this is a simple animation, this is not so important to me. However, if you were bringing in a rigged character, you may want to dive into this message.

03:32 I'll go ahead and close out of this. I'll go down to the Content Browser window at the bottom, and you'll see that we do indeed have the skeletal mesh that has been brought in and a couple of different animation sequences as well as a new material here. Now, I'm going to go up and select one of these animation sequences.

03:51 And when I click on it, you'll see that the animation has successfully been brought in. I'll go ahead and save this and drag and drop it into my scene. It looks a little bit small, so I'm going to go over to the scale and raise this here. I can use tab to navigate through the different input areas. Now I'll place it next to this flower here.

Edit material

04:14 And one thing I noticed is that it is white, so it looks like the texture has not been brought in properly. So no problem, I'll go ahead and show you how you can add in your own textures and edit materials here. So when I have the skeletal mesh selected in the outliner on the right hand side, I can scroll down to control the settings for animation, mesh, and materials. In order to pull up this material, I can double click it here.

04:43 Now this window has been brought up, which is how we can connect different elements to the parameters of the material. Now you'll see that there is a simple color that has been plugged into this base color. However, we want this to be a texture. In order to do that, I'm going to hit T on my keyboard and select anywhere in the Material Graph.

05:06 And you'll see that a Texture Sample has been brought in. I'll go ahead and delete this parameter that's currently connected and drag and drop the RGB to the base color. Now you see an error has popped up and this is because it is missing an input texture. So we need to go in and attach a texture to this node.

05:28 In order to do that, I'm going to navigate back to my folder where it’s downloaded. And you'll see that I have a texture here that was included in the download. I'll go ahead and drag and drop that into my Content Browser at the bottom of the screen. So now you'll see that this texture element has been brought in properly.

05:47 I'll go over to the details panel in the material graph, go down to material expression texture base, select None here. I'll start typing in the name of the texture and I'll go ahead and select that. You'll see that it is properly applied and I could go in and add in the Roughness and Normal information as well.

06:09 For the purpose of this tutorial, I'll keep it as is. And hit Save. Now I'll go ahead and close out of this window. And in order to check the animation, I'm going to hit Play at the top of the window. It's going to jump me to where I have my Player Start in the project. But I'm going to navigate using WASD on my keyboard to go find my little creature here.

Conclusion

06:38 Now you'll see that it's been properly brought in. Now this video is just showing how to bring in a simple animation. Within Unreal Engine there are a lot of opportunities for interacting with animated features and bringing your project to life. This concludes our tutorial. Thank you for joining.