Best $15 asset for game development. It does everything he promised, with additional editing features to fine tune your model. I have searched so many tutorials and they always manage to skip over a major detail. A few recommendations to the Developer; keep your tutorials up-to-date with each update and add a feature that imports the textures with the model. Thank you brother! I look forward to seeing your next application.
Thanks for the nice words! I admit that we need to keep the tutorials up to date. The UE addon is actually fully covered, I think. The tuts for the Core GRT addon need an update tho. As for textures, the addon does not currently handle export and import so this is not planned for now.
you have no idea how much i love you after this video and your send2ue video as well :D i have now subbed because i have been really struggling with rigging for like a month now but this way worked flawlessly... you have all my respect dude because you just made my life much more enjoyable haha
I have tried so many different tutorials and this is by far the most reliable. Thanks for walking us through it! Also, very interested in a solution to the arm clipping/frog thing if you can. 👍🏽👍🏽
I will gladly give it an try! From what I see so far it’s indeed an “MUST-HAVE-ADDON” for blander + unreal users! I am in my learning in blander, after it I will jump into unreal! Thanks you all for hard work and yes! Cheap price !
Great tutorial! A few things have changed since this release in Unreal Engine 5.3.2, but this was very helpful in figuring out some issues I was having with IK bones being pulled too far, etc. A new tutorial with UE 5.3's new retargeting system would be monumentally helpful!
I really like this business model, as right now I need something like this for some quick testing but if I were to end up in positin where I need to use it in something proper, well I'd say at least double of the asking seems like fair price
Ive been rigging lego characters and it was not importing properly from the epic fig rig addon but this video helped massive and its imported to unreal and working
Thank you so much this video was much needed, incredibly helpful, and easy to follow. I have been needing this exact setup for my game but haven't been able to find anything like this until now.
The model has since been deleted, and it took some tracking down, but for anyone curious, the model he used in the video did not have a skeleton/armature before he started using the addon.
Here it is all good on my side, I managed to solve all the errors that I encountered, even the textures, it was a model that I had created and therefore there were two UV maps, there just had to delete the one that wasn't used. Now, I'm going to find out how to correct the weight errors, I mean by the weight painting which is not optimal but you made a video on the question so I know what I have to do :)
I have a humanoid character that I used this on and it works almost perfectly, but the foot bends a little weird when the character is performing the ue animations (especially idle and walking). I've checked many times to make sure the bones are placed properly (and redid the rig a few times), but the issue persists. Do you know how I might go about solving this issue?
Thank you so much I have tested it already and it works like a charm! Well done with this addon. Is there any chance in the future for a control Rig to come to the addon. Also a video dedicated to creating a control rig for this Mannequin would be awesome. That being said this addon is already very usefull! Thanks agian!
I think with the Uefy pluggin you dont need to use too much or your addom, mainly the bones positioning tools, because the Uefy set the rolls for UE5 compatibility, maybe if you can pass the the skeleton of the Uefly tool to your exporter tool that can be another plus too. and another problem is like procedular bones that need to be animated in Unreal base in another bones, they dont have a easy way to changed to Unreal rolls so they are easy to setup in unreal. if that can be done with your addon in the future can be really useful. One example imagin an armor bone in the lower arm that need to be rotated relative to to hand rotation to avoid penetrations, or a Shoulder pad armor that ajusted relative to the shoulder and Upper arm bones, basically to this one to works better in unreal they need to have the same bone rolls orientation of the parent bone in the case of the Shoulder pad is the Clavicle bone. for solving this problem I got a trick that copy the bone orientation when I apply the Unreal rolls to my custom procedular bones, but the problem is that is copying the orientation for a existing order I can not create one
[Solved, see reply] I got a 'failed to merge bones' error when importing the character to UE5.3. Anyone else running into this problem? I have no idea how to fix this or where to start.
possible fix: A mistake on my part. I had two rigs (from an earlier attempt) and I exported rig 'root.001'. I remove the old rig and renamed the new one to 'root' and this fixed the issue.
For fixing "Bone Heat..." warning without another add-on; select your mesh, enter edit mode, select all of the vertices, from menu Mesh - Merge - By Distance; and then parent it. If you still get same warning, change merge by distance's distance by deleting a zero after the comma on tool options; and then parent with auto-weights.
But this will merge vertecies that are close together and destroy your topology and UV map. The bone heat issue normaly appears on high poly meshes, or when vertecies are placed too close together. I avoid this by changing the scale of my scene, to make my mesh 10 times bigger before I parent it to the rig with auto weight. Then I scale it back down with export options.
@@TommyGunsXL I am currently testing to find a workflow from Blender to Unreal Engine 5 with default mannequin skeleton; and right after seeing your comment i checked my UV islands of my "merged by distance" mesh. There was no weird stretching or merging on UVs, nor any topological problems. I used "0.001 m" distance at most ( 0.0005 m also worked) while testing and had none of those problems. I am using Game Rig Tools & Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning Addons; and for hands/fingers or any close parts of the body it is better to be weighted by Blender's native auto weight for the best result on my tests. One of the addon solves bone error with Surface Diffuse Heat Skinning, but that gives worse results than the native auto weight. I'll keep "scaling" tip in mind just in case, but i really dont want to mess around with scaling, especially after parenting. Unreal barely accepts my models without giving warnings and i dont want to add more by playing around with scaling while it is already working. Thanks for the warning though.
I'm also still looking for an fast and easy way to export UE5 skeleton based rigged charachters from Blender to Unreal 5. I bought Auto Rig Pro for Blender and it works very good so far. I Didn't change the scaling in Blender to match Unreals unit system and it exportet it in the correct size, without the bone heat issue or anything else. It also auto renames all bones when you export with Unreal settings. I added custom bones for some testings (bouncing breast bones... for the sience) and it also worked. Very promising so far, but it's not a free addon. And if "remove by distance" merged vertecies on the default value, you most likely had some bad geometry. I think the default value is 0.0001 m which would be on a microscopic level.
@@TommyGunsXL If you do not have watertight one continueous mesh; which is the usual case where your character has layers of clothes/leather parts/metal parts and bags etc. on top of each other, some vertices can exist really close, that does not mean it has bad geometry. That is also the reason you need voxel heat for weights of those seperate parts unless you dont mind manual weight painting which i am avoiding to have a fast workflow. Auto Rig Pro have it's own exporter for Unreal but i do not use that one for rigging, so i use native Blender fbx export.
Great video! Is it possible to go back and tweak bones once you've applied rig and weigh painted? I originally made the shoulder bones too high and want to edit them without rigging from scratch.
Also lol, it didn't select some part of the armature in the beginning I guess and the scale difference is huge so switching armature did something crazy... I wonder if re scaling helps...
Great addon. I'm using it for quite some time now, but recently I encounter one problem with a project, where I have worked with metahuman character. I was needed to attach metahuman head to custom body and I wasn't able to do it currectly this skeleton. Because it's simple version of manny. Metahuman requires full many skeleton version with all these additional torso bones. They used to properly attach head to the body. It will be great if full manny skeleton will be also available in the future.
Well, I ended up getting there on several characters to memorize your workflow well, No errors to encounter, verdict, voxel heat diffuse skining is essential. Now I have to find how to import my skin shader and for the deformation of the body it is always present but this time if it only appears in Unreal engine when I control the character. In the viewport everything looks correct. This time I can't find info on this other problem, deformation, for the textures I should manage, there's a lot of info available on it.
There is something going on other than voxel heat. I would do the following: -select your character, press alt+P and unparent it -delete any existing Armature modifiers -delete all vertex groups if possible. Use Voxel Heat again. Don't forget that you can get your money back if you don't like the addon. Just contact Blender Market.
@@Comic_Fan Probably the best place to ask such question is our discord. discord.gg/j8SQCjFsXP Please understand that solving such issues is not my job. I will try to help if the solution is obvious. For deeper issues, get in touch with the developer of Voxel Heat.
I didn't get an error, but it didn't work parenting with the automatic weights. I did 2 things: M->by distance for the whole mesh, and selecting "keep transform" when parenting and it started working now. Don't know which of these things did it.
Excellent tutorial! A tip for everyone having problems exporting to unreal, try the better fbx exporter plugin, it fixes all the fbx issues with importing morphs, bones being rotated etc when using fbx as a format. Something i would want some tips on is using the workflow in the video for clothing. If i do everything for a character that i want separate clothing meshes for (that will be separate from the character but needs the same skeleton/weightpainting), what would be a good workflow to set up the clothing meshes (im using daz stuff).
Where can we find this fbx exporter plugin? That is where I hit a wall, the new version of pipeline :send to unreal , says "push assets" and then nothing comes up in unreal after? Please help me ahhh
@@mostafaahmed9441 Thank you!! got past that one but ever have "multiple roots are found in bone hierarchy" error with this rig? is it the rig causing the error?
When I add an animation to my character in ue5 the feet seem to slide around a bit. They also go through the floor in certain animations. What would cause this? Also will mention my characters body was different than the UE mannequin so I had to move the bones around a little.
Tip: someone released "Blend File Importer" for free on the UE marketplace. If you want to review it, or if it imports better for workflow, or if it can help you make your plugin better. A comment already said that UE doesnt update the textures if changed in Blender?
why i cant pick any of mannequin? Dont have a bar to select one like u in 3:10. EDIT: Turns out i had some confilct with i dont know what to be honest but after i deleted "game_rig_tools_Unreal" Folder from addons list in %appdata% folder and installed it again it works now. I can pick the Quinn5 or Manny4
Hi, I followed the instructions and everything works fine, but as soon as I replace the quinn model with my own, her Upper body works perfectly but her lower body gets messsed up. The legs gets raised up in the air like she's doing yoga in mid air😂😂
Hey this one worked perfectly for a cartoony character. All the retargeting worked and the animations work in play mode but I am having problems with a singular animation which is the “land” animation. the scaling of the character multiplies by almost x10 and then it revert to normal after that animation is over
It sounds like a scaling/squash/stretch problem. I am not sure why it happens in your particular case but I have a video which might help you understand the issue. czcams.com/video/8PSj_1-E9uY/video.html
Hi, I am hoping someone might have an answer for me. When I bring my rigged character into unreal, the characters hands wing out to the side at a 90 degree angle instead of up and down. I do not know what I need to adjust in blender to make it correct in unreal. Any suggestions would be helpful.
One thing that I'd like to ask: The first character is in A pose, the second character is in T pose. What happens if I rig using the U5 mannequin from GRT, but adjust the arms to be at 65º A pose angle? will they work? (I'm rigging a human character).
But how do you actually use it? Can I attach it to the animated rig? Is there any module to work with these rigs or are they only made to export the A-posed model to the engine?
This is the greatest thing ever!! It's easily the best workflow for UE skeletel meshes I have just two doubts: 1. When making animations, I should animate on the Tweak armature, right? 2. I assume this does not have an impact on the Blendshapes animation export? Since it's object data, Unreal should read them from the mesh, although I'm not sure this works across different meshes...
Good questions, I should have addressed this 1. The tweak rig is not a "control rig", it is not meant for animation. Currently, there is no simple solution for creating custom animations. I'll try to cover how it could be done at some point. 2. Shape keys should work.
I have used ARP's quick rig shown at the end of this video. i have made my first idle animation but i then realized i created the control rig for the DEFORM armature instead of the Root/Game armature. How badly did i mess up? i am trying and failing to bake/move/copy the animation that's now on the control/deform rig to the root/game rig so i can export it to unreal to test. i'm at my wits end right now
Had an issue where my fingers came outscrewed up. The metacarpal bones were shortened in UE5. I'm still experimenting so meh. But more importantly as for the "Heat Map" error. Bind only the Skin or "body" of your character. Then transfer the weights to the clothes using " Object > Link/Transfer data > Mesh data > Vertex Groups " In options the window that shows up at the botom of the viewport set: Source Layer Selction = All Layers Destination Layers = By Name Then parent the clothing to the rig using "Ctrl + P > With Empty Groups" as the mesh/vets already have weights. No issues and no heat map errors as long as the geometry is separated. If the geometry is joined separate it, transfer the weights, and parent like clothes.
Thank you very much; your tutorials are excellent. Can you tell me if, after rigging the mannequin for Unreal Engine 5, retargeting Mixamo animations onto the root armature, and exporting with the Send2UE addon or manually as FBX, will the animation work properly in Unreal Engine 5 beyond the 3rd person setup, or is the root armature only suitable for the 3rd person setup?
Just wanted to mention that it does not work out of the box with models from Mixamo, Send-To-Unreal throws a bunch of error messages because it can't create the needed textures. This is NOT a fault of your plugin or Send-To-Unreal but with Mixamo because they are to stupid (as per default with products from Adobe) to correctly pack the models in the first place. Just a heads up if anyone runs into problems with models from that site.
Really nice guide! Was going to ask how to adjust the bones after applying rig, is it possible just to go back and edit a bone, or do you have to restart all over again?
I was really confused because I didn''t have the part of the window where you can select between body parts, fingers, joint tweaks, etc. Turns out it's because I was using the latest alpha version... oops! Stable release works fine.
I love the addon and could add some additional bones for the face but the position of my shoulder was wrong and I wanted to adjust it after the first export but am unsure how to handle this case because you have to apply the transforms before you export but this will **** up the UE5 rig after the adjustments and reapplying the changes. So, any tips on the workflow if you have to make edits?
maybe someone here can help me out. My question is this: when making a character that can change shoes for a game. Do I rig the character bare foot and at 0 on the z scale and then when I rig the shoes I move the armeture up to fit the shoes? or do I have to rerig the character or what is the workflow for that?
loved the last version of this add-on... and this just makes it even more useful!!! Really helpful for imports. gotta test for mocap tho... but is super cool ur still supporting it. Thnk u so much :) Any hope you guys will make a face rig, or 52 face key frame tut on it?
@@CGDive one question about the scaling. Should the Unit scale inside the Scene Properties still be 0.01? Or the add-on compensate for the terrible scaling that damages the physics asset if its not 100 scale going into Unreal?
@@CGDive thnk u!! the world scale (in Metric) is the Unit Scale, right? u have no idea how many headaches this conversation thing has caused me. It messes EVERYTHING in UE5. Thnk u again for the tutorials! they always help me out!!!
Thank you for making this available, I'm having some issues, the head doesn't seem to rotate even though I've weight painted everything (it is a separate mesh and is conjoined when exported). And I can't use the mannequin 5 physics asset because it says it doesn't have the head bone. But the head bone appears in blender. Any suggestion?
The issue was actually “name clash”, fixed by renaming my character’s head mesh to another name besides head. Kinda different the way unreal deals with names, even though they are different kind of things.
I tried to follow this so many times and doesn't matter what I do, It simply will not work properly. 1) Pipeline can't find the Unreal Window even with remote ticked and everything set up. 2) As soon as I add my Skeletal Mesh to BP it gets locked into a T-pose and bones will not move, character just moves around like a scarecrow??
When I change the mesh to my fbx, the pivot seems not to be at the bottom of the feet, so when I play the game, the leg clipped below the ground. How to fix? From Blender, the character center is already at the bottom of the feet.
@@CGDive Yes, I have make sure that the root armature pivot is at the bottom of the feet. I have recorded the problem if you please could see it? It is the "feet clipping" one.
Do you think it is practical for me or my viewers to teach manual weight painting in every single video that may be related to it? I don't. That is why I have a separate playlist about it. czcams.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJsFEdlMJ7To0Iu9s-XCFV3W.html
Hi, this tutorial is awesome but what if you don't want fingers? Do you edit the tweak rig and delete the fingers, or simply just ignore the fingers? Also, when I edit on the deform rig, it becomes a different rig and doesnt align with the body, is there a way to fix that? NVM just had to apply rig
what do you do if it doesnt work? i got this to work before but i dont know whats happening. root exe is enabled, add-ons enabled and even did a restart. any ideas?
when i click "automatic weights " my character becomes giant and stays in a horizontal position, as if he's layed down on the floor, and the armature stands still. Can someone kindly explain why this happens?
@@CGDive Maybe going from GRT to ARP to making a control rig inside unreal would be fantastic. I loved the closing the gap series and I would love to see what you can create with those topics. Thanks for the reply.
@@re1 Hmmm, what do you mean by going from GRT to ARP? If you mean creating an ARP rig based on the UE bones, that's possible with Quick Rig (paid extension addon for ARP) and it's very easy. Will cover it.
@@CGDive Awesome, yes. Creating the rig with Quick Rick, then exporting custom animations to Unreal and making a control rig there. I'll have to check Quick Rig. Thanks!
Great video, thanks! Quick question: if I have a character that is already weight painted to a Daz3D rig, what do you think I could do to transfer those weights to the GRT-UE5 converted character? Your demonstration works well with characters that don't already have a skeleton, but I'd like to match the weights as closely as possible to the original.
@@CGDive Okay, I'd also like to learn how to convert a rigify character to an unreal skeleton. In other words, I'd like to keep the rigify rig for animating but be able to send that work to UE5.
@@surreality2008 Yeah. I don't have a definitive solution for that yet but there are some leads. There is an addon called "one-click rig" that might do the trick. Also, Epic's UE2Rigify could be used for that purpose. I am just not 100% sure at this point. And it might be possible to integrate Rigify into our addon but it's not a priority right now.
@@CGDive I didn't know about one-click rig. Thanks, I'll start experimenting. We're getting closer now. Amazing how difficult it is to get a solid character pipeline working well. I just went back and watched your entire weight painting course yesterday. I really appreciate all the efforts you've put into this domain.
A question if you don't mind: what would be the best, least painful way to rig a character to ue5 skeleton while keeping existing weigths and facial bones or shapekeys? (like from a daz character). I tried to use quick rig, and edited the ref bones to be more in line with the standard (6 spines, 2 twists etc), but the result is bad. It's not even perfect with ARP ue5 spec rigging from 0-but then I would need to transfer the facial bones/shapes somehow. Note what I wrote is about using the default skeleton in ue5, I haven't actually tried to retarget yet, that could work.
I have followed your videos for creating a rig in Rigify for my humanoid character. I downloaded the voxel heat and your game rig tools add-on. Finally got my mesh weighted nicely and I'm trying to get it into UE5. I don't know if you have a video where you show how to convert the Rigify rig into the GRT Unreal Module. I was trying to follow with this video and just use the generic rig but when I generated the game rig my control rig no longer deforms my mesh. The game rig does, I can deform it with the game rig that's now seperate but I lost my control rig functionality. Am I doing something wrong? I'm not an experienced rigger but I do appreciate your video guides.
There is no workflow to convert Rigify to a UE rig or vice versa. For now. It is possible but the workflows are not something I can explain in a short comment. And I haven't figured out all the details as I like to do...
I spent all day recovering everything needed for this tutorial, but in the end it doesn't work. First of all there is no longer the send tu unreal option, but push asset. And when I press it unreal it gives me an error. I performed the whole procedure perfectly as in the video, my model in Blender is rigged and works very well. But when I press push asset unreal it gives me an import error. Saying the file is corrupt. I tried exporting the file directly to disk as FBX and opening it with other 3D programs and they also tell me it is corrupt. Everything works great on Blender.
Thanks for this tutorial! I hope ull answer because i cant find any solution.. My character has wraps around his hands. With the Deform-Rig it moves all along nicely but if i switch to Unreal Armature it becoms buggy and doesnt move with the character. Do you know why this happens ?
There shouldn't be a difference between Deform and Unreal rig deformations. If you can share your file, get in touch with me via email or discord. See here: cgdive.com/contact/
My send to ue wasnt working because i followed another tutorial,on yours you teach something, the python settings inside project settings and the dialogue show menu, it helps a lot for me! thank you. now i need to manage the texture (materials too) and join face with body (im using vroid model so it is separatedly exported)
Unfortunately it is not working in my pipe line i am unable to send to unreal that option doesnt show up and i have it installed and turned on to use on preferences
Hello, I'm trying to follow the tutorial exactly as you are doing it, however, none of the tweak gizmos show up and I cannot change the transform of any TWEAK bones in pose mode? Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Are you using Blender 2.93 or earlier? Sorry if I didn't mention it in this video but the addon works with Blender 3+. In the future I may make it compatible with 2.93.
Deleting parts of the rig is not something that is officially supported. Do so at your own risk. You could delete then in the "root" rig. Also when weighting the character with the Deform rig make sure no weights are assigned to the finger bones. That can be achieved by removing the "Deform" bone property in the Bone tab.
![[Addon] Blender to UE4 : Rig Any character wth the Mannequin skeleton](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/uH52niTccLU/mqdefault.jpg)
**IMPORTANT: Here is a video about how to solve Bone Heat error without addons:**
czcams.com/video/FuiY0wtxdHQ/video.html
Yesterday I found out and watched your video about the addon for UE4 and was like 'This is awesome. I wonder how long till we get an addon for UE5"
Best $15 asset for game development. It does everything he promised, with additional editing features to fine tune your model. I have searched so many tutorials and they always manage to skip over a major detail. A few recommendations to the Developer; keep your tutorials up-to-date with each update and add a feature that imports the textures with the model. Thank you brother! I look forward to seeing your next application.
Thanks for the nice words!
I admit that we need to keep the tutorials up to date.
The UE addon is actually fully covered, I think. The tuts for the Core GRT addon need an update tho.
As for textures, the addon does not currently handle export and import so this is not planned for now.
That Voxel Heat Diffuse skinning addon is incredible things for mentioning it.
Glad you like it. I have a video just about it
czcams.com/video/QoKwjvuXb9I/video.html
you have no idea how much i love you after this video and your send2ue video as well :D i have now subbed because i have been really struggling with rigging for like a month now but this way worked flawlessly... you have all my respect dude because you just made my life much more enjoyable haha
Awesome and thanks for subbing!
I have tried so many different tutorials and this is by far the most reliable. Thanks for walking us through it! Also, very interested in a solution to the arm clipping/frog thing if you can. 👍🏽👍🏽
I will gladly give it an try! From what I see so far it’s indeed an “MUST-HAVE-ADDON” for blander + unreal users! I am in my learning in blander, after it I will jump into unreal! Thanks you all for hard work and yes! Cheap price !
Only this tutorial tells you how to do the "Fix" part, I love this!
Nice!
Great tutorial! A few things have changed since this release in Unreal Engine 5.3.2, but this was very helpful in figuring out some issues I was having with IK bones being pulled too far, etc.
A new tutorial with UE 5.3's new retargeting system would be monumentally helpful!
When AccuRig exports UE5 I’ll be a happy man.
Another marvelous explanation from CGDive! Great video! I can't wait to try this on my U5 project. Thanks for the update!
Very welcome!
@@CGDive can you make a tutorial how to change the characters in lyra using the cartoon animal for example
@@samsunga5634 I'll keep it mind but I haven't even looked into Lyra yet.
I really like this business model, as right now I need something like this for some quick testing but if I were to end up in positin where I need to use it in something proper, well I'd say at least double of the asking seems like fair price
Thank you so much. I gotta try out UE5 really soon
Great tutorial, fantastic addon! Thanks for everything!
You're very welcome!
Ive been rigging lego characters and it was not importing properly from the epic fig rig addon but this video helped massive and its imported to unreal and working
Thank you so much this video was much needed, incredibly helpful, and easy to follow. I have been needing this exact setup for my game but haven't been able to find anything like this until now.
The model has since been deleted, and it took some tracking down, but for anyone curious, the model he used in the video did not have a skeleton/armature before he started using the addon.
now im in love with this guy
You are just simply amazing! Will support your plugin definitely!❤
Extremely helpful. Thank you, man.
Here it is all good on my side, I managed to solve all the errors that I encountered, even the textures, it was a model that I had created and therefore there were two UV maps, there just had to delete the one that wasn't used.
Now, I'm going to find out how to correct the weight errors, I mean by the weight painting which is not optimal but you made a video on the question so I know what I have to do :)
thank you for the tutorial,this is what i looking for
I have a humanoid character that I used this on and it works almost perfectly, but the foot bends a little weird when the character is performing the ue animations (especially idle and walking). I've checked many times to make sure the bones are placed properly (and redid the rig a few times), but the issue persists. Do you know how I might go about solving this issue?
Same issue, trying to figur it out myself
really bless you for being you love you great job we need people like you your appreciated!!!!!!!!!
Thanks, Mike!
Thank you so much for this. I cant get AutorigPro to work with UE5 but your stuff is basically better. Cheers!
definitely check this out when i have a chance
Thank you so much I have tested it already and it works like a charm! Well done with this addon. Is there any chance in the future for a control Rig to come to the addon. Also a video dedicated to creating a control rig for this Mannequin would be awesome. That being said this addon is already very usefull! Thanks agian!
You saved my game, thanks!
what up hope this works fo me had nothing but trouble with the other again THANX FOR YOUR WORK
this helped me so much!!! Thank you!
This is so helpful! 💞
This is the tutorial I was looking for. You brought me out of hell.
Thank you teacher :) !!
Happy to help!
I think with the Uefy pluggin you dont need to use too much or your addom, mainly the bones positioning tools, because the Uefy set the rolls for UE5 compatibility, maybe if you can pass the the skeleton of the Uefly tool to your exporter tool that can be another plus too.
and another problem is like procedular bones that need to be animated in Unreal base in another bones, they dont have a easy way to changed to Unreal rolls so they are easy to setup in unreal. if that can be done with your addon in the future can be really useful.
One example imagin an armor bone in the lower arm that need to be rotated relative to to hand rotation to avoid penetrations, or a Shoulder pad armor that ajusted relative to the shoulder and Upper arm bones, basically to this one to works better in unreal they need to have the same bone rolls orientation of the parent bone in the case of the Shoulder pad is the Clavicle bone.
for solving this problem I got a trick that copy the bone orientation when I apply the Unreal rolls to my custom procedular bones, but the problem is that is copying the orientation for a existing order I can not create one
[Solved, see reply] I got a 'failed to merge bones' error when importing the character to UE5.3. Anyone else running into this problem? I have no idea how to fix this or where to start.
possible fix: A mistake on my part. I had two rigs (from an earlier attempt) and I exported rig 'root.001'. I remove the old rig and renamed the new one to 'root' and this fixed the issue.
For fixing "Bone Heat..." warning without another add-on; select your mesh, enter edit mode, select all of the vertices, from menu Mesh - Merge - By Distance; and then parent it. If you still get same warning, change merge by distance's distance by deleting a zero after the comma on tool options; and then parent with auto-weights.
But this will merge vertecies that are close together and destroy your topology and UV map. The bone heat issue normaly appears on high poly meshes, or when vertecies are placed too close together. I avoid this by changing the scale of my scene, to make my mesh 10 times bigger before I parent it to the rig with auto weight. Then I scale it back down with export options.
@@TommyGunsXL I am currently testing to find a workflow from Blender to Unreal Engine 5 with default mannequin skeleton; and right after seeing your comment i checked my UV islands of my "merged by distance" mesh. There was no weird stretching or merging on UVs, nor any topological problems. I used "0.001 m" distance at most ( 0.0005 m also worked) while testing and had none of those problems. I am using Game Rig Tools & Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning Addons; and for hands/fingers or any close parts of the body it is better to be weighted by Blender's native auto weight for the best result on my tests. One of the addon solves bone error with Surface Diffuse Heat Skinning, but that gives worse results than the native auto weight.
I'll keep "scaling" tip in mind just in case, but i really dont want to mess around with scaling, especially after parenting. Unreal barely accepts my models without giving warnings and i dont want to add more by playing around with scaling while it is already working. Thanks for the warning though.
@@TommyGunsXL Just relax all the vertexes, thank me later. I didn't even have to merge anything! (Maybe once for a clean up?)
I'm also still looking for an fast and easy way to export UE5 skeleton based rigged charachters from Blender to Unreal 5. I bought Auto Rig Pro for Blender and it works very good so far. I Didn't change the scaling in Blender to match Unreals unit system and it exportet it in the correct size, without the bone heat issue or anything else. It also auto renames all bones when you export with Unreal settings. I added custom bones for some testings (bouncing breast bones... for the sience) and it also worked. Very promising so far, but it's not a free addon.
And if "remove by distance" merged vertecies on the default value, you most likely had some bad geometry. I think the default value is 0.0001 m which would be on a microscopic level.
@@TommyGunsXL If you do not have watertight one continueous mesh; which is the usual case where your character has layers of clothes/leather parts/metal parts and bags etc. on top of each other, some vertices can exist really close, that does not mean it has bad geometry. That is also the reason you need voxel heat for weights of those seperate parts unless you dont mind manual weight painting which i am avoiding to have a fast workflow. Auto Rig Pro have it's own exporter for Unreal but i do not use that one for rigging, so i use native Blender fbx export.
Very useful, thank you!
Great video! Is it possible to go back and tweak bones once you've applied rig and weigh painted? I originally made the shoulder bones too high and want to edit them without rigging from scratch.
u saved me - and for that, i thank you sir!
ha, Awsome!
Thanks a lot !!!!!!!!!!!
Also lol, it didn't select some part of the armature in the beginning I guess and the scale difference is huge so switching armature did something crazy... I wonder if re scaling helps...
Yes, scaling is one of the factors :) Again here is my video czcams.com/video/FuiY0wtxdHQ/video.html
Great addon. I'm using it for quite some time now, but recently I encounter one problem with a project, where I have worked with metahuman character. I was needed to attach metahuman head to custom body and I wasn't able to do it currectly this skeleton. Because it's simple version of manny. Metahuman requires full many skeleton version with all these additional torso bones. They used to properly attach head to the body.
It will be great if full manny skeleton will be also available in the future.
Yeah, we are considering that. Thanks for the suggestion!
Great add-on. Thank you.
Thank you!
You're welcome!
Well, I ended up getting there on several characters to memorize your workflow well, No errors to encounter, verdict, voxel heat diffuse skining is essential.
Now I have to find how to import my skin shader and for the deformation of the body it is always present but this time if it only appears in Unreal engine when I control the character. In the viewport everything looks correct.
This time I can't find info on this other problem, deformation, for the textures I should manage, there's a lot of info available on it.
Thank you very much!
first 20 mins i was like wow this is a lot easyier.... 4 mins later..... i'm dooooommmeeed :))) i'll figure it out :)))
Haha, what's the problem?
It would be awesome to see Uefy to U5 rig from Blender.
Yeah, uefy looks good and I bought it a long time ago but I found the learning curve a bit steep. So I never went too deep into it.
thanks you
I just spent money on this thing, followed alone with your video (with my own character), and Voxel only deforms my character!
There is something going on other than voxel heat. I would do the following:
-select your character, press alt+P and unparent it
-delete any existing Armature modifiers
-delete all vertex groups if possible.
Use Voxel Heat again.
Don't forget that you can get your money back if you don't like the addon. Just contact Blender Market.
Update:
I found your twitter page, and sent you a P.M. with the screenshot.
@@Comic_Fan Probably the best place to ask such question is our discord. discord.gg/j8SQCjFsXP
Please understand that solving such issues is not my job. I will try to help if the solution is obvious. For deeper issues, get in touch with the developer of Voxel Heat.
I didn't get an error, but it didn't work parenting with the automatic weights. I did 2 things: M->by distance for the whole mesh, and selecting "keep transform" when parenting and it started working now. Don't know which of these things did it.
Regarding the Bone Heat Error, I now have a video about it outlining all possible solution I know of
czcams.com/video/FuiY0wtxdHQ/video.html
Excellent tutorial!
A tip for everyone having problems exporting to unreal, try the better fbx exporter plugin, it fixes all the fbx issues with importing morphs, bones being rotated etc when using fbx as a format.
Something i would want some tips on is using the workflow in the video for clothing.
If i do everything for a character that i want separate clothing meshes for (that will be separate from the character but needs the same skeleton/weightpainting), what would be a good workflow to set up the clothing meshes (im using daz stuff).
For cloths the Data Transfer modfier can be used to get the weights from the main body onto the cloths. I will make a tutorial about that soon.
Where can we find this fbx exporter plugin? That is where I hit a wall, the new version of pipeline :send to unreal , says "push assets" and then nothing comes up in unreal after? Please help me ahhh
@@nathanp.3909 You must apply transforms first before exporting it
@@mostafaahmed9441 Thank you!! got past that one but ever have "multiple roots are found in bone hierarchy" error with this rig? is it the rig causing the error?
@@nathanp.3909 I'm having the exact same issue, any fixes?
When I add an animation to my character in ue5 the feet seem to slide around a bit. They also go through the floor in certain animations. What would cause this? Also will mention my characters body was different than the UE mannequin so I had to move the bones around a little.
Tip: someone released "Blend File Importer" for free on the UE marketplace. If you want to review it, or if it imports better for workflow, or if it can help you make your plugin better.
A comment already said that UE doesnt update the textures if changed in Blender?
I saw it. I think it's for static meshes only. Still need to test it.
why i cant pick any of mannequin? Dont have a bar to select one like u in 3:10. EDIT: Turns out i had some confilct with i dont know what to be honest but after i deleted "game_rig_tools_Unreal" Folder from addons list in %appdata% folder and installed it again it works now. I can pick the Quinn5 or Manny4
my character is slightly off the ground as in the root bone is slightly off the ground compared to the standard mannequin?
Is this a question? :D
@@CGDive actually Its weird it is off the ground when viewing Skelton in editor but when playing game it's slightly below the ground lol
When I import the character and stick the manny 5 control rig on it, the character's arms end up flipped all over the place. What am I doing wrong?
Hi, I followed the instructions and everything works fine, but as soon as I replace the quinn model with my own, her Upper body works perfectly but her lower body gets messsed up. The legs gets raised up in the air like she's doing yoga in mid air😂😂
Nice thing! You should make Metahuman presets next, its hard to weight new clothes for them.
Hey this one worked perfectly for a cartoony character. All the retargeting worked and the animations work in play mode but I am having problems with a singular animation which is the “land” animation. the scaling of the character multiplies by almost x10 and then it revert to normal after that animation is over
It sounds like a scaling/squash/stretch problem. I am not sure why it happens in your particular case but I have a video which might help you understand the issue.
czcams.com/video/8PSj_1-E9uY/video.html
problem solved!!!!!! thank you!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi, I am hoping someone might have an answer for me. When I bring my rigged character into unreal, the characters hands wing out to the side at a 90 degree angle instead of up and down. I do not know what I need to adjust in blender to make it correct in unreal. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Hi CGDive is there a way to preview the mannequi or manny animations in blender on my rigged character with this addon?
31:25 how can I do this arm offset? thank you cgdive you a legend bro
Thank you
One thing that I'd like to ask: The first character is in A pose, the second character is in T pose. What happens if I rig using the U5 mannequin from GRT, but adjust the arms to be at 65º A pose angle? will they work? (I'm rigging a human character).
In my tests the pose of the character did not affect the result even when animations are applied in UE.
But how do you actually use it? Can I attach it to the animated rig? Is there any module to work with these rigs or are they only made to export the A-posed model to the engine?
This is the greatest thing ever!! It's easily the best workflow for UE skeletel meshes
I have just two doubts:
1. When making animations, I should animate on the Tweak armature, right?
2. I assume this does not have an impact on the Blendshapes animation export? Since it's object data, Unreal should read them from the mesh, although I'm not sure this works across different meshes...
Good questions, I should have addressed this
1. The tweak rig is not a "control rig", it is not meant for animation. Currently, there is no simple solution for creating custom animations. I'll try to cover how it could be done at some point.
2. Shape keys should work.
@@CGDive Creating a Control Rig in UE5 and animating in UE's Sequencer is also a possibility. It's just that Blender is a lot easier for animation
Amazing
I have used ARP's quick rig shown at the end of this video. i have made my first idle animation but i then realized i created the control rig for the DEFORM armature instead of the Root/Game armature.
How badly did i mess up? i am trying and failing to bake/move/copy the animation that's now on the control/deform rig to the root/game rig so i can export it to unreal to test.
i'm at my wits end right now
Is it possible to convert an existing rigify Rig, with animation ? I don't want to redo everything I've made so far
Had an issue where my fingers came outscrewed up. The metacarpal bones were shortened in UE5. I'm still experimenting so meh. But more importantly as for the "Heat Map" error.
Bind only the Skin or "body" of your character.
Then transfer the weights to the clothes using " Object > Link/Transfer data > Mesh data > Vertex Groups "
In options the window that shows up at the botom of the viewport set:
Source Layer Selction = All Layers
Destination Layers = By Name
Then parent the clothing to the rig using "Ctrl + P > With Empty Groups" as the mesh/vets already have weights.
No issues and no heat map errors as long as the geometry is separated. If the geometry is joined separate it, transfer the weights, and parent like clothes.
Thank you very much; your tutorials are excellent. Can you tell me if, after rigging the mannequin for Unreal Engine 5, retargeting Mixamo animations onto the root armature, and exporting with the Send2UE addon or manually as FBX, will the animation work properly in Unreal Engine 5 beyond the 3rd person setup, or is the root armature only suitable for the 3rd person setup?
Awesome!
Thank you! Cheers!
Just wanted to mention that it does not work out of the box with models from Mixamo, Send-To-Unreal throws a bunch of error messages because it can't create the needed textures. This is NOT a fault of your plugin or Send-To-Unreal but with Mixamo because they are to stupid (as per default with products from Adobe) to correctly pack the models in the first place. Just a heads up if anyone runs into problems with models from that site.
Thanks for the info!
Really nice guide! Was going to ask how to adjust the bones after applying rig, is it possible just to go back and edit a bone, or do you have to restart all over again?
It's safest to start over. In the future, I hope to make it more robust so that you can tweak things as much as you like.
I was really confused because I didn''t have the part of the window where you can select between body parts, fingers, joint tweaks, etc. Turns out it's because I was using the latest alpha version... oops! Stable release works fine.
Excellent video. When do you think you can do the riggify part using this method? I'm having a hard time finding a solution
Not sure yet, sorry.
I love the addon and could add some additional bones for the face but the position of my shoulder was wrong and I wanted to adjust it after the first export but am unsure how to handle this case because you have to apply the transforms before you export but this will **** up the UE5 rig after the adjustments and reapplying the changes.
So, any tips on the workflow if you have to make edits?
Adding bones is covered in the video. 18:49 That is the only way I recommend doing it.
maybe someone here can help me out. My question is this:
when making a character that can change shoes for a game. Do I rig the character bare foot and at 0 on the z scale and then when I rig the shoes I move the armeture up to fit the shoes? or do I have to rerig the character or what is the workflow for that?
loved the last version of this add-on... and this just makes it even more useful!!! Really helpful for imports.
gotta test for mocap tho... but is super cool ur still supporting it. Thnk u so much :)
Any hope you guys will make a face rig, or 52 face key frame tut on it?
Will think about it. I think there may be a workflow to make your character metahuman-compatible which would be cool :)
@@CGDive one question about the scaling. Should the Unit scale inside the Scene Properties still be 0.01? Or the add-on compensate for the terrible scaling that damages the physics asset if its not 100 scale going into Unreal?
@@Tenchinu I always keep the World scale to 1. Setting it to 0.01 is too crazy. Bless Send to Unreal for solving these issues.
@@CGDive thnk u!! the world scale (in Metric) is the Unit Scale, right? u have no idea how many headaches this conversation thing has caused me. It messes EVERYTHING in UE5. Thnk u again for the tutorials! they always help me out!!!
@@Tenchinu Sure! But if you want to keep Scale to 1, make sure you're using Send to Unreal :)
Thank you for making this available, I'm having some issues, the head doesn't seem to rotate even though I've weight painted everything (it is a separate mesh and is conjoined when exported). And I can't use the mannequin 5 physics asset because it says it doesn't have the head bone. But the head bone appears in blender. Any suggestion?
The issue was actually “name clash”, fixed by renaming my character’s head mesh to another name besides head. Kinda different the way unreal deals with names, even though they are different kind of things.
Cool, glad you solved it!
I tried to follow this so many times and doesn't matter what I do, It simply will not work properly. 1) Pipeline can't find the Unreal Window even with remote ticked and everything set up. 2) As soon as I add my Skeletal Mesh to BP it gets locked into a T-pose and bones will not move, character just moves around like a scarecrow??
When I change the mesh to my fbx, the pivot seems not to be at the bottom of the feet, so when I play the game, the leg clipped below the ground. How to fix? From Blender, the character center is already at the bottom of the feet.
You should check the pivot of the armature, not the character mesh.
@@CGDive Yes, I have make sure that the root armature pivot is at the bottom of the feet. I have recorded the problem if you please could see it? It is the "feet clipping" one.
When i try to Push Assets it gives me an Error
you didn't cover how to do the weight painting.. so everyone is stuck with their custom character
Do you think it is practical for me or my viewers to teach manual weight painting in every single video that may be related to it? I don't. That is why I have a separate playlist about it.
czcams.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJsFEdlMJ7To0Iu9s-XCFV3W.html
Hi, this tutorial is awesome but what if you don't want fingers? Do you edit the tweak rig and delete the fingers, or simply just ignore the fingers?
Also, when I edit on the deform rig, it becomes a different rig and doesnt align with the body, is there a way to fix that?
NVM just had to apply rig
what do you do if it doesnt work? i got this to work before but i dont know whats happening. root exe is enabled, add-ons enabled and even did a restart. any ideas?
when i click "automatic weights " my character becomes giant and stays in a horizontal position, as if he's layed down on the floor, and the armature stands still. Can someone kindly explain why this happens?
Fantastic upload! thanks! Autorig pro workflow next :)?
What workflow do you have in mind?
@@CGDive Maybe going from GRT to ARP to making a control rig inside unreal would be fantastic. I loved the closing the gap series and I would love to see what you can create with those topics. Thanks for the reply.
@@re1 Hmmm, what do you mean by going from GRT to ARP?
If you mean creating an ARP rig based on the UE bones, that's possible with Quick Rig (paid extension addon for ARP) and it's very easy. Will cover it.
@@CGDive Awesome, yes. Creating the rig with Quick Rick, then exporting custom animations to Unreal and making a control rig there. I'll have to check Quick Rig. Thanks!
Great video, thanks! Quick question: if I have a character that is already weight painted to a Daz3D rig, what do you think I could do to transfer those weights to the GRT-UE5 converted character? Your demonstration works well with characters that don't already have a skeleton, but I'd like to match the weights as closely as possible to the original.
Yeah, I understand but it's not something we support at the moment. I'll add it to the list of ideas tho!
@@CGDive Okay, I'd also like to learn how to convert a rigify character to an unreal skeleton. In other words, I'd like to keep the rigify rig for animating but be able to send that work to UE5.
@@surreality2008 Yeah. I don't have a definitive solution for that yet but there are some leads. There is an addon called "one-click rig" that might do the trick. Also, Epic's UE2Rigify could be used for that purpose. I am just not 100% sure at this point.
And it might be possible to integrate Rigify into our addon but it's not a priority right now.
@@CGDive I didn't know about one-click rig. Thanks, I'll start experimenting. We're getting closer now. Amazing how difficult it is to get a solid character pipeline working well. I just went back and watched your entire weight painting course yesterday. I really appreciate all the efforts you've put into this domain.
@@surreality2008 Oh, nice! And thank you. It is a lot of effort but people appreciate it so it's worth it!
A question if you don't mind: what would be the best, least painful way to rig a character to ue5 skeleton while keeping existing weigths and facial bones or shapekeys? (like from a daz character). I tried to use quick rig, and edited the ref bones to be more in line with the standard (6 spines, 2 twists etc), but the result is bad. It's not even perfect with ARP ue5 spec rigging from 0-but then I would need to transfer the facial bones/shapes somehow. Note what I wrote is about using the default skeleton in ue5, I haven't actually tried to retarget yet, that could work.
I am not sure about that sorry. Maybe you should just retarget in UE. The unreal retargeter is quite powerful.
My model is all weird in game, body is warped what did i do wrong
Let me get my crystal ball :)
Seriously, it is not possible to help based on what you described.
I was able to fix the bone heat weighting warning by removing duplicate vertices. [ In Edit Mode, M ⇾ By distance ]
I have followed your videos for creating a rig in Rigify for my humanoid character. I downloaded the voxel heat and your game rig tools add-on. Finally got my mesh weighted nicely and I'm trying to get it into UE5. I don't know if you have a video where you show how to convert the Rigify rig into the GRT Unreal Module. I was trying to follow with this video and just use the generic rig but when I generated the game rig my control rig no longer deforms my mesh. The game rig does, I can deform it with the game rig that's now seperate but I lost my control rig functionality.
Am I doing something wrong? I'm not an experienced rigger but I do appreciate your video guides.
There is no workflow to convert Rigify to a UE rig or vice versa. For now.
It is possible but the workflows are not something I can explain in a short comment. And I haven't figured out all the details as I like to do...
I spent all day recovering everything needed for this tutorial, but in the end it doesn't work.
First of all there is no longer the send tu unreal option, but push asset.
And when I press it unreal it gives me an error.
I performed the whole procedure perfectly as in the video, my model in Blender is rigged and works very well.
But when I press push asset unreal it gives me an import error. Saying the file is corrupt.
I tried exporting the file directly to disk as FBX and opening it with other 3D programs and they also tell me it is corrupt.
Everything works great on Blender.
@@jumbleeanimation_ i Just export from Blender in standard mode.
Thanks for this tutorial!
I hope ull answer because i cant find any solution.. My character has wraps around his hands. With the Deform-Rig it moves all along nicely but if i switch to Unreal Armature it becoms buggy and doesnt move with the character. Do you know why this happens ?
There shouldn't be a difference between Deform and Unreal rig deformations. If you can share your file, get in touch with me via email or discord. See here:
cgdive.com/contact/
My send to ue wasnt working because i followed another tutorial,on yours you teach something, the python settings inside project settings and the dialogue show menu, it helps a lot for me! thank you.
now i need to manage the texture (materials too) and join face with body (im using vroid model so it is separatedly exported)
Unfortunately it is not working in my pipe line i am unable to send to unreal that option doesnt show up and i have it installed and turned on to use on preferences
Sounds like an issue with the Send to Unreal addon, and not ours :)
Hello, I'm trying to follow the tutorial exactly as you are doing it, however, none of the tweak gizmos show up and I cannot change the transform of any TWEAK bones in pose mode? Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Are you using Blender 2.93 or earlier? Sorry if I didn't mention it in this video but the addon works with Blender 3+.
In the future I may make it compatible with 2.93.
@@CGDive This was exactly the problem, thank you very much!
@@CDifferently Nice, thanks for the report!
which armature would I go to, to delete fingers?
Deleting parts of the rig is not something that is officially supported. Do so at your own risk. You could delete then in the "root" rig. Also when weighting the character with the Deform rig make sure no weights are assigned to the finger bones. That can be achieved by removing the "Deform" bone property in the Bone tab.