Rigging, Retargeting, and More

Last week I was out of town, so I did my best to make up for lost time. I started by Modeling one of our characters. They were around 35% complete, and I would say that I've gotten them to around 80%. First picture is where I picked the model up from, the rest show off my progress, including mouth and eyebags.

I haven't done character modeling work for at least a year at this point but it seemed like this character had been getting left behind, and I needed something to do. It isn't complete, but it is much closer and can be used, rigged, and mocapped in our scenes now.

Speaking of Rigged and Mocapped... Our team has spent a lot of time recently collecting motion capture data and acting out large movements and beats of our stories, and I felt that we needed to make sure it could be represented within the Unreal Project as soon as possible, and possibly even on our actual character models too. I explored the Mesh to Meta Humans tool, hoping that it would be usable to create rigged Meta Humans of our characters, but found that It does not take well to overly stylized characters, Particularly, It seemed that the tool can not deviate from a normal human eye shape, which is a deal breaker for our use case.

With Meta Humans out of the way, I moved on to Advanced Skeleton and rigged up the first iteration of our main character's body rig. It took me some time to re-familiarize myself with Advanced Skeleton but I was able to get a rigged, skinned, and controlled character out of it all.

The Skin Weights are crude, and there is no facial rig yet, (because we have no facial animation yet so i didn't bother with it), but it's our first character rig for Dim and an exciting step forwards for sure.

From here I imported the Xsens Skeletal Mesh into our Unreal Engine Level, to import the Xsens Animation onto without issue. I was able to smoothly apply the Mocap Animation to this Skeletal Mesh, as an easy placeholder for some of our characters who aren't rigged yet. Poor video Quality, but proof of concept with Mocapped Character in Dim for the first time!

I wanted to get one step further though, as not having this pipeline figured out was honestly just stressing me out, and I didn't want to lose the momentum. I continued doing research, this time though on how to Retarget Animation in Unreal Engine 5. after a couple hours of troubleshooting and tweaking, I was finally able to get Finn, our main character, into our scene and ANIMATED. (minus most of his face, and well the proportions didn't line up quite right, and the skin weights aren't really painted very well. . . BUT ITS THERE!)

So with this work being done, Within a week I was able to accomplish our first Rigged Character Body, Our first Mocap in Unreal Engine, and our first Mocap Retargeted onto a Rigged Character. lots of momentum!

Did I mention I worked with a teammate to make our first actual Niagara Particle Effect System?

It's already been dwarfed by their particle effects they've made in the past week, but those aren't mine to share! Overall It has been a very technical week, I've been testing out various pipelines and paths for our production as we move into animation, rigging, and effects, I'm hoping that with these general tools and techniques understood I will be able to teach them to some of the team and have them pick up some of the polish as I continue to experiment with more new tools and parts of the production, but who knows, maybe by the next blog post I will just be doing a lot of rigging. Either way I'm excited to see the short picking up a so much momentum and it's exciting to finally see things beginning to come together. Whatever happens, I will make sure I have a lot more cool stuff to show off.