Engagement 5k+ views

Topics Include MetaHumans, expressions, facial pose library

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.

This video covers how to elevate your digital character creation game with Epic’s MetaHuman framework. Discover how to seamlessly integrate MetaHuman assets into your Twinmotion project within Unreal Engine 5 and utilize the magic of facial expressions using Control Rig.

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

00:49 Integrated Quixel Bridge

01:35 Importing a MetaHuman

02:25 Enable Plugins

03:05 Working with the Metahuman actor

04:29 Adding facial expressions

08:37 Edit your MetaHuman ControlRig

10:01 Conclusion

Introduction

00:00 Hi, and welcome to this Unreal engine tutorial for bringing metahuman assets into your project. Metahumans are high fidelity, fully rigged, photorealistic, digital humans made easy. They are a complete framework that gives any creator the power to use highly realistic human characters. One of the new features of Unreal Engine five is the now natively integrated bridge, which gives you fast access to thousands of assets.

00:34 from the Megascans library. This includes access to MetaHuman. In order to showcase this, I will be working with the demo scene project in Twinmotion that I have brought into Unreal Engine 5 using the Twinmotion to Unreal Engine workflow. To utilize the Quixel bridge, I'm going to navigate to the icon here with the cube and plus sign.

Integrated Quixel Bridge

00:56 When I click it, you'll see that a drop down appears with many different options for bringing in various elements into the scene such as primitives, lights, and more. In this tutorial, we will be focusing on the Quixel Bridge option. With your Epic Games account, you have access to all of the Quixel assets here.

01:15 This includes access to MetaHumans. Here you will find a selection of MetaHuman presets that you can choose from. If you'd like to create your own MetaHuman, you can do so using MetaHuman Creator. You can find out more information by visiting our website or going to metahuman. unrealengine. com. Let's bring in one of these presets.

Importing a MetaHuman

01:37 When you select a person you would like to bring in, you'll see a download button here in the bottom right hand side. This will be dependent on your internet speed. So I'm actually going to go ahead and use a character that I've already downloaded. So you'll notice that I have already downloaded this character because it has a check sign here above download.

02:00 Here to the left of the icon, you'll see you have some options for how you bring in your metahuman character. I'll keep these as is, and I'll go ahead and press add here to add the character Sky to my project. Once the MetaHuman is imported, it will let you know that there are some plugins that need to be enabled in the project to make sure the asset works smoothly in Unreal Engine.

Enable Plugins

02:26 I'll go ahead and select Enable Missing for each of these pop ups. After enabling each of them, we will need to restart our project so that it initiates with the plugins enabled. When I click the restart button, it will prompt me with a window to save all of the elements I have brought into the project.

02:46 Once it opens back up, you'll notice that the bridge window is here in the scene again. I can actually drag and drop this into the viewport so that I can refer back to it and bring in any assets as I continue working. So I'll go ahead and select Update here to make sure all parts of my project are fully updated.

Working with the Metahuman actor

03:06 Now my MetaHuman has been brought into my project, but I will need to bring it into the level that I'm working with. So you'll see that it restarted with a main level here. I'm going to navigate to the level that I am demoing in. Now let's zoom into the deck here and bring in our MetaHuman. So to find our MetaHuman, I'm going to navigate down in the bottom to our content browser.

03:30 So you'll see that it created a MetaHumans folder here. I can double click on this. And you'll see that we have a folder for our character Sky. I'll go ahead and navigate to that folder. You'll see that there is a blueprint actor here. This will be the actor that we want to bring into our project. I'll go ahead and drag and drop that asset into the scene.

03:53 The asset is a fully rigged asset, so it may take some time to compile in the level. You can see the status of that compiling on the top left hand side, as well as a progress bar on the bottom right hand side. Okay, everything is compiled and it looks like it has come in nicely. Now, when you bring in a metahuman, you do get access to a facial pose library, which consists of a number of pre-made expressions for metahumans.

Adding facial expressions

04:24 These expressions are implemented as control rig poses and are added into your metahumans folder. In order to utilize our character poses, we will need to create a level sequence and animation. To do so, I'm going to go up to this level sequence icon here and select add level sequence. This is going to ask me where I would like to save it.

04:46 I'll go ahead and keep it in the content folder for now. And I'll name this Sky Sequence. So you'll notice that my sequencer window popped up here. This may have popped up at the bottom. You can place it wherever you would like to work with your sequencer. I'll go ahead and keep it here so we have a lot of real estate to work with.

05:08 So now we have our sequencer here, we will need to add our actor. To the sequencer to make edits to the control rig, I can do so by hitting the track button here, select Actor to sequence. And if you have your actor selected in the viewport, you'll be able to easily select your character here. This will create separate sequencer tracks for the body and face.

05:35 So you'll notice that an animation window automatically popped up and then it automatically added a sequencer track for the body and the face. Each of these sections have their respective control rigs below. Hitting the drop down button here will allow us to see all of the controls that belong to this rig.

05:55 Now let's access the facial pose library. I'm going to go into the animation pose on the left hand side. When I click the animation pose, a new window will pop up. First, let's take a look at what expressions are available to us, and then we can save this folder to the animation poses so we can access it in the future.

06:16 So here I'm going to navigate to that metahuman folder by going to content, metahuman, common, common,pose library, and face. Lastly, we'll go to expressions. So here you can see all of the different options for the face expressions here. Now I want to add this existing folder to our view. So to do so, I'm going to click an empty space on the left hand side of this window and select add existing folder to view.

06:54 Now here I can just navigate to the face folder by going to metahumans, common, and face. And you'll see that it gets added to the control rig pose window. Now let's take one of these presets and apply it to the control rig for our character. To do so, I'll go ahead and pick one of these assets here. So maybe we want a more, uh, lively, happy look here.

07:24 I'll go ahead and select the preset I want to use. I'm going to go over to the left hand side and select all points of the control rig for the face. Now I'll go back and do my poses here, and you'll see that we have a couple of different options here. If I want to key this expression for a certain time in my sequence, I could do so here, but I will leave these both as is and select paste pose.

07:51 So now you can see on the right hand side, that our character is giving us a nice smile. So I could switch this up. If I wanted them to be sad, I could select this and paste Pose. I'll go ahead and do one more. So I'll check this satisfaction here. And since I'm happy with this look, I'm going to go ahead and close out of this control rig pose panel.

08:20 Now you'll see that there is some user interface that has popped up on the right hand side of my metahuman. Now I could go in and have complete control over those rigs, but I will not be going over those options in this tutorial.

Edit your MetaHuman ControlRig

08:37 I do, however, want to showcase some of the other options you have for manipulating your character. So this workflow was to show how you can use some of the presets that come with your metahuman characters. If I scroll back up to the top and take a look at the body metahuman control rig, I can select this control rig and you'll see that some user interface pops up, giving you some direction of how you can rig or edit your metahuman character.

09:04 I'll go ahead and select one of these bands, hit W on my keyboard, and then I'll start to control or edit the control rig this way. And you'll see that this is being edited in increments. I could go up to the top. This is where you'll find the snapping of that rotation. So I could hit this angle button here.

09:26 I can fine tune the rotation of each rig. Now, if I wanted to key in these features, I could go to the left hand sequencer, select the plus button icon next to the rig I'd like to control, move the sequencer to the end, rotate the arm once more, create a new key at frame 148. And now you'll see that I have access to control this character.

Conclusion

10:00 Now, this is just a basic introduction for bringing in a metahuman into your project. If you would like to learn more, please check out our metahuman documentation. Thank you for joining this Unreal Engine tutorial.