Welcome everyone in this video we are going to begin the process of transitioning over from controlling this guy our mannequin man to our Paragon Countess. Now, in order to do this properly, we need to do something called animation retargeting. Why do we need to do that? Well, the reason I'm going to do that for this course is a so you can learn something but also be because I want to use this Countess skeleton, but there are some animations that I want to use that belong in are specifically made for our mannequin man here. So if you want to transition some animations that are made for one skeleton onto another skeleton, they've got to go through this process called animation retargeting. So that's what this video is going to focus on now.

Just a quick primer. Hear for you all this video and the following video on animation retargeting are going to be a little bit more advanced, a little less fun. But it is necessary to do in order for us to play some of the scalability animations that we want to play later on in the course. So we're laying some more groundwork here. So if these seem a little bit more difficult than the videos to come, that's because they are this is something we're just gonna plow right on through learning a little bit about animation retargeting so that we can get to the good stuff beyond. Alright, so let's get started here.

Let's jump on over to our content browser. And you're going to want to find your Countess skeleton that I just had, and the directory which you can find this in is this location right here your content Paragon Countess characters heroes Countess meshes folder, this directory right here and in order to View the Countess skeleton. This is the one you're going to double click on. This is something referred to as the persona editor in Unreal Engine four, and we are on this left most skeleton tab. And something I just want to point out while we're here is, so all these skeletons are made up of a lot of bones, right. And if I click under this character button right up here in this viewport, and I check bones, and I click on bone names, you can see all the different bone names and their respective locations that make up our Paragon Countess here.

Likewise, I can do over here with my mannequin man's skeleton, I already have him opened up so I'm going to come under character, bones, bone names, and you can see all the different bone names associated with him as well. And you can also see a hierarchical view. I can never say that word hierarchical view of them. His skeleton tree tab over here in the left hand side. So these are all these bone names that you see on our skeleton and their relation to one another. So you obviously have things like middle fingers pinkies ring fingers all attached to a hand bone.

For example, same thing over here skeleton. With our contest, we've got a skeleton tree, which shows us hierarchical view of all the bones and their relation to one another. Now, many of these bones are named the same. Sometimes they're a little bit different, but their relationship to one another is slightly different between our Countess and our mannequin man, so to help ensure that animations from a one skeleton work correctly on the other one, we need to use an intern intermediary called a rig. So this is how it's gonna work. Right here with your S counters, Skeleton asset open, click on this retarget manager tab over here.

Clicking on this button will also point you to that tab. And over on the left hand side here it is asking us to set up a rig and by default, there is this Paragon proto retarget rig. Let's click on this little drop down, and we're going to set this to be a humanoid rig. Again, this is an intermediary that will go between our Countess and our mannequin man. So the way this works is it lists off different main portions of the regular route, pelvis, spine, it cetera. And then over on the right, we get to associate certain bones with each of these sources.

So if you click automap, right here that will fill this in automatically. Most of the names were the same, but some of the bones here in our Countess were not capitalized. So that's why things like the pelvis here are not capitalized as well. And with that, Done, we can go ahead and save this asset. So that's good. Now we need to do the same process over here for our mannequin man skeleton as well.

But I did not show you where this is located in the Content Browser. So to get to this YUI for mannequin man's skeleton, you're gonna find this guy in this path right over here content mannequin characters mesh and it is right here this YUI for mannequin skeleton. And again, we are over in this retarget manager tab. You can also get there by clicking on this button and we need to select a rig for this guy. So we're going to set this to be a humanoid rig right along the top here. And if you automap those bones, you will see them retargeted as well.

We will also save this. Now to ensure that any retargeted animations work as well on the new skeleton as possible, we got to make sure that our base poses are as identical as possible. You can see that our mannequin man right here is in somewhat of an a pose. If we look over at our Countess skeleton, she's also in the a pose, but I would say her arms are down a little bit more. So let's just do a little fine tune adjusting here to try to ensure that the skeleton poses are as identical as possible. This is what we're going to do with our s skeleton s Countess skeleton here.

Down in the lower left hand corner of your retarget manager tab we are going to choose to view the pose. This will allow us to edit it. It will now say hide pose after you click on that. Just to make this a little bit easier to select these bone names I like to come over into the skeleton tree and there are just a few bones Within the hierarchy here that I want to adjust one of them being this upper arm, that one right there. I'm just going to move this out, I'm going to grab this green handle here and move it out 10 degrees. So note that I do have my Angular snap settings on to 10 degrees.

So with my upper arm l here, I'm just going to move this out 10 degrees. Then with my lower arm L, I'm going to grab this green handle and move that out 10 degrees. Then I'm also going to sort of adjust my camera angle and grabbing this blue handle, move her left hand forward 10 degrees like that. That's all I want to do with that hand. Then I'm gonna come over to her upper arm are that bone right there. I'm gonna grab this green handle and move her arm out a little bit like that.

I'm going to select the lower arm are again grabbing that green handle going to move that up 10 degrees. And then I'm also going to move it forward by grabbing this blue handle moving that up 10 degrees as well. So now if I come back to my retarget manager tab, and you can see actually that this pose right here on our counters is looking pretty identical to our mannequin man. Jumping back over to the counters skeleton, I can choose modify pose down here in the Manage retarget base pose. And I can say use current pose. All right, let's save this.

And now we are going to jump out of our skeletons here back to our content browser. And I'm going to direct you to this pathway right here content, mannequin animation Inside this folder is something called the third person animation blueprint. Now if you haven't worked with the characters a lot in Unreal Engine four, this animation blueprint is a special kind of blueprint that is currently assigned to our BP player under the mesh component, animation class. And what this particular animation blueprint does is it dictates what animations that this character can play and when it's basically the home for the list of rules for when to transition from say, a walk, to a jump, and so forth. So this is something that we want to retarget to our new skeleton, this is how it's gonna work. We're going to right click on this asset we're going to come under retarget anim, blueprints, duplicate and a blueprints and retarget it's like that.

And here is are just auto saved and kind of took me out of there. So I got to bring that window back up here. So here is our source skeleton or mannequin man, it's going to ask us to choose a target and there is our s counter skeleton like that. And you can see our poses are roughly identical now maybe not perfect, but that is okay. And then we're going to simply flip it over my page and notice here, we're going to select re target down in the lower left now, we could change just FYI, we could change the pathway here. I am, you know what, I am going to do that I'm going to choose change right here and I'm just going to make sure that I dump this into my Metroidvania.

Yeah, let's, let's make sure that this is our Metroidvania animations folder. Okay. So there you can see the directory we're going to be dumping this too. So yes, I do recommend clicking on change and pointing out which folder where you want this to live in. And then we will select retarget. And now you can see it's jumped me over to this folder Metroidvania animations.

And now we've got this animation blueprint as well as all other animations that it references here in our Metroidvania animations folder. This is pretty cool. Um, I'm just gonna click Save All right away just to ensure that I've saved all these assets and that's gonna get rid of these little asterisk symbols. Save selected. We're not quite done yet. I need you to jump back to your counters skeleton for just a moment.

And coming over to your skeleton skeleton tree tab. Again, we got skeleton up here selected skeleton tree tab. We just need to do a little bit more to ensure that our animations translate appropriately to the skeleton right here under the skeleton tree tab under options. We're going to select Show retargeting options. And there's just a few things that we want to alter in here to ensure that the animations retarget Okay, under our spine oh one which is a rather key bone off to the right, we're going to right click right click where there's this animation drop down. And we're going to set this to be recursively set translation retargeting skeleton like this.

You can see how it changed everything down below in the hierarchy. I also want to choose thigh L. Let me scroll down my list here. Where is thigh l file file? There is my thigh L. I want to do the same on this right click recursively that translation retargeting skeleton and that's going to change all the bones underneath it and also thigh are so select that right click recursively set translation, retargeting skeleton. So those are all well and good there's a couple clavicle bones I believe they're near the top here. clavicle, clavicle, clavicle there is clavicle, L. for clavicle L and clavicle are I want to simply select the drop down next to each of these and choose animation.

There's clavicle, l, clavicle, are is right down below here. Animation Okay, we are going to save this asset again. And guys that was quite a little bit of work we have done some animation style retargeting so that we ensure Some of the animations we want to work with our counters will work just fine. We have some retargeted animations now existing in our animations folder. That is going to do it all for this one guys. We will see you in the next one.