Thank you for the last part explaining Unreal's default bone orientation, and how we need to export with the same orientation but can create a control rig on top in Blender to manipulate the Unreal Bones. Very helpful! The bone constraints are little awkward mapping our custom control rig constraints to the Unreal Rig. I'll post some notes here after I get it working. Here are some notes on how to setup bone constraints from your custom Control Rig onto your Unreal Rig used for exporting: Step 1) Import the Unreal Rig without checking "Automatic Bone Orientation" (NO), so you have a rig with bones pointing out of the mesh. [This is our Export Rig] Step 2) Import the Rig again but now check the box "Automatic Bone Orientation" (YES), so you have a rig with correctly oriented bones in Blender. [This is our Control Rig] Step 3) Delete the Mesh attached to the Control Rig Step 4) Select your Export Rig -> Go into Pose Mode -> Select a bone Step 5) Press Ctrl+Shift+C while you have the bone selected and add a "Copy Location" Constraint Target: ControlRig Bone: The corresponding bone on your ControlRig Owner: World Space Target: World Space Step 6) Add a "Transformation" Constraint to the same bone. This will allow us to map Y rotations from the Control Rig to X rotations on the Export Rig: Extrapolate (YES) Target: Local Space (owner orientation) Owner: Local Space Rotation Option Selected Map From: X in (-180, 180), Y in (-180, 180), Z in (-180, 180) Map To: Y in (-180, 180), X in (-180, 180), Z in (-180, 180) Repeat this for each bone on your Export Rig, so it has a corresponding bone "Copy Location" and "Transformation" constraint coming from the Control Rig bones. Last, you want to select all the bones in your Control Rig and uncheck "Deform" (NO) in the bone property panel since these are not deform bones. This step will also making exporting your animation easier since we don't want to export any of the Control Rig bones. Then when you animate you'll be keying the bones of your Control Rig only. The Export Rig will automatically pickup the transformations due to the bone constraints you set earlier. When you export, you want to only export your Deform bones are the only ones that are part of your Export Rig. Good luck!
The copy location and transformation were not working for me, don't really know the reason. However, I tried copy transforms using CG Dive's video ua-cam.com/video/hdGkKbtQxE0/v-deo.html at time stamp 10:26, he mentions how to relate control and export rig using copy transforms Then I created my animation on control rig and used game rig tool addon to bake animation for me. It worked for me. I don't know why copy location and transformations were not working for me.
The "copy transforms" Constraint gives an issue on some rigs, it doesn't bake animation according to IK controls. While, "copy location" and "transformation" constraints serve the purpose, they just make a mess of legs. the knee is misplaced by quite a few metres/cms (whichever the scale you are using). Same happens with foot and toe. Do you know why is it happening?
Thankyou for your simple explantions on bones and orientation. As a beginner its hard to understand the "why". Lots of people explain where to click and what a setting does. But its so valuable to learn why you should do something. So thanks!
how do you have only 42k subs man I've been on a blender animation binge for a month you literally have a video for every situation I've encountered man thank you very much for your hard work and dedication man
I just wanted to thank you for all the awesome videos you've provided on your channel. You're definitely my go-to when it comes to rigging and animating in Blender.
11:49 i think the reason the bones point in opposite directions like the legs arms is because when animating they want to work with positive values, so when rotate a left and right arm it goes down the same way
This is EXACTLY what I was looking for! I'd love to see a video on constraining the export rig to the control rig. This would greatly help me out with a project I'm working on
Thank you for the excellent explanation as always! I would definitely be interested in the control rig + constraints solution you mentioned at the end. I figure another workaround for weirdly oriented bones may be widgets? If the display of the bones is all that needs fixing, maybe a good option would be to just use custom widgets to change the display of the bones in the rig, instead of using a second rig and constraining the first rig to the second. I suppose both solutions will have their use cases! Thanks again for the tutorial!
It really depends on what you want to do. If you want to build a control rig with IK and so on then you need properly oriented bones because Blender works much better with them. I guess that's one more important use of the default Bone orientation but it didn't occur to me to mention it.
Thanks for the video. I have one Question I brought fbx from Maya to Blender the shoulder bone is twisted without any reason. can you tell me why? and how to fix it.
I would love to see a video on how to use the unreal orientation as an export skeleton! thank you for this video it finally helped me understand what's wrong with the UE bones
@@CGDive Importing skeleton of Manny Character and animate using ue2rigify addon for standard rigify workflow shown by epic team for hand key animation. Ps: i had no problem previously with UE5 but it started after updating to UE5.1
You're my savior. I face the last issue with bone orientation and now understand it. If I already imported the bones, do we have any solution to fix (without touch the Automatic Bone Orientation checkbox). Thanks.
FYI this is why I dont import any character in Blender using their default importer. I recommend using Better FBX (paid or preview version) to Import in Blender.
@@CGDive Yeah I would like to consult you if there is an easy way to fix bone orientation that is not through Blender importer nor roll each bone manually in Edit mode.
i have question . i imort rig from other collection then i apply scale rotate it disturbe my mesh .can you have soution video for that ....i dont see any vide regarding apply scale on rigs.after increasing the rig size.
You are not supposed to rescale complex rigs. There are solutions but there are too many different problems that can occur. If you're on discord, try asking on our server discord.gg/YFH5HUv
I'm using Blender 3.5 and I imported a rig into Blender using FBX and I have watched every video and nothing is working for me to make the bones that are sticking out to disappear and the bones wont attach to the mesh.
@@CGDive bone is chest_fk and the weight painting 1.0 values influencing also right when I rotate the custom shape of that chest_fk...!! But,only issue is after generating the custom shape is placed at the face center....and from there its working fine but why its re-located there as it should be located where the chest_fk bone is there...!! I checked the scale of rig also....and transform values also but didn't get where the issue is....?
So I think blender and unity use the same orientation, will it break animations in unity if you reorient or is it just programs that use different axis?
No sorry. You can try UE to Rigify or One Click Rig addons. They do something like that automatically and are free. Also Auto rig Pro + Quick rig are paid addons that do something like that :)
@@CGDive when importing fbx the bone orientation and length is wrong please help, like the last part of your video, you said i will cover it in another video. please i need the full video about it.
@@CGDive how unreal engine armature bone orientation can be fixed you didnt explain on the last part of this video, you said you will cover another video. you need to watch your video again on the last part of this video.
"See notes above." Is there another video in the notes? I'm using my phone and I'm not sure what you mean by "notes." Thanks for the video, I really appreciate it. I have two rigs, and both models are the same. The supported rig has a bad skin weight, and the second rig, which is not supported, has perfect skin weight. I want to transfer the skin weight between these two rigs. I did my best, but it didn't work, so I used Maya to copy the skin weight between these rigs, which works perfectly fine. Now, when I import the rig into Blender, the orientation is wrong 😢. The skin weight is still perfect. If there is a way to transfer skin weight between rigs (not the models) then I won't use Maya and everything will be perfect 😁 💗
No but this workflow can be applied on any character. Even tho the example character is humanoid I am not using the default Mannequin so working with a horse or a wolf will be exactly the same :) ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJvS4rui1CyKuFQLBGE4rnas.html
@@CGDive totally! currently working with character someone else exported, with a rig just like that was clearly not from blender bones were rotated and also too big I was so confused 🤣 this helped so much!
Hey man! Huge thanks for informative videos! Is there still a chance you can explain how to constrain export rig to a rig with proper blender orientations? I tried to copy transforms with different settings, but this isn't working for me. :(
@CGDive Been able to import a Maya rig into Blender smoothly thanks to your advise about bone orientations. However, when exporting that skinned rig to Unity, the bone translations of the Blender-changed FBX are not identical compared to the Maya-created FBX source file. Most of the bones seem to be globally in the same place, but some bones are way off and mess up the rig. Do you have any idea what might cause that? Tried all settings of the BetterFBXexporter, without success..
If I am not animating in Blender but In Unreal using Control Rig, can I export with the automatic bone orientation? Also, when i add bones to the hierarchy without interrupting the hierarchy, it crashes unreal when parenting to the SK_Mannaquin
Great Tutorial/overview. Like 9b8ll I would be very curious to see how the last part could be done. It would be nice to perfect a Blender to UE5 workflow
Have you messed around with any of the "deep motion" or similar video to animation data, and integrating into blender - to create animations from your own movements in your room, for instance? Any thoughts on which is best for blender?
I've not tried this myself, hopefully next couple of weeks I'll give it a test drive and see how good it is. Check out "EasyMocap" for blender. Might be something there for you, if you use it yourself in the coming days, give me feedback, I'd be keen to see what it's like.
Hi, sorry that's not how it works. You can't request a video and have it tomorrow :) Making videos takes a long time. I'd recommend trying to solve your problem instead of waiting around for the tutorial guy :)
haha It's not necessarily weird. The whole 3d app world is complex so when you start exchanging data between them you encounter weird stuff. Things will probably get more unified in the future.
![[Blender addon] Game Rig Tools: UPDATED v. 2.2.0](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9Fj9PQNeX_8/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Blender addon] Game Rig Tools: UPDATED v. 2.2.0](/img/tr.png)
*Take your Blender Rigging to the next level with my advanced Courses*
academy.cgdive.com/courses
Thank you for the last part explaining Unreal's default bone orientation, and how we need to export with the same orientation but can create a control rig on top in Blender to manipulate the Unreal Bones. Very helpful! The bone constraints are little awkward mapping our custom control rig constraints to the Unreal Rig. I'll post some notes here after I get it working.
Here are some notes on how to setup bone constraints from your custom Control Rig onto your Unreal Rig used for exporting:
Step 1) Import the Unreal Rig without checking "Automatic Bone Orientation" (NO), so you have a rig with bones pointing out of the mesh. [This is our Export Rig]
Step 2) Import the Rig again but now check the box "Automatic Bone Orientation" (YES), so you have a rig with correctly oriented bones in Blender. [This is our Control Rig]
Step 3) Delete the Mesh attached to the Control Rig
Step 4) Select your Export Rig -> Go into Pose Mode -> Select a bone
Step 5) Press Ctrl+Shift+C while you have the bone selected and add a "Copy Location" Constraint
Target: ControlRig
Bone: The corresponding bone on your ControlRig
Owner: World Space
Target: World Space
Step 6) Add a "Transformation" Constraint to the same bone. This will allow us to map Y rotations from the Control Rig to X rotations on the Export Rig:
Extrapolate (YES)
Target: Local Space (owner orientation)
Owner: Local Space
Rotation Option Selected
Map From: X in (-180, 180), Y in (-180, 180), Z in (-180, 180)
Map To: Y in (-180, 180), X in (-180, 180), Z in (-180, 180)
Repeat this for each bone on your Export Rig, so it has a corresponding bone "Copy Location" and "Transformation" constraint coming from the Control Rig bones.
Last, you want to select all the bones in your Control Rig and uncheck "Deform" (NO) in the bone property panel since these are not deform bones. This step will also making exporting your animation easier since we don't want to export any of the Control Rig bones.
Then when you animate you'll be keying the bones of your Control Rig only. The Export Rig will automatically pickup the transformations due to the bone constraints you set earlier. When you export, you want to only export your Deform bones are the only ones that are part of your Export Rig.
Good luck!
The copy location and transformation were not working for me, don't really know the reason.
However, I tried copy transforms using CG Dive's video ua-cam.com/video/hdGkKbtQxE0/v-deo.html at time stamp 10:26, he mentions how to relate control and export rig using copy transforms
Then I created my animation on control rig and used game rig tool addon to bake animation for me. It worked for me. I don't know why copy location and transformations were not working for me.
The "copy transforms" Constraint gives an issue on some rigs, it doesn't bake animation according to IK controls. While, "copy location" and "transformation" constraints serve the purpose, they just make a mess of legs. the knee is misplaced by quite a few metres/cms (whichever the scale you are using). Same happens with foot and toe. Do you know why is it happening?
Oh man, I am interested in the last part. I really hope to see how you perfectly orientated the rig bones from blender to UE 5
I am using Unreal Engine 5
Yep I'm really interested in constraining the export rig to the blender rig
Same here
See notes above.
Is the retargeting worng bone orientation available yet for rigs that come from other software packages?
Thankyou for your simple explantions on bones and orientation. As a beginner its hard to understand the "why". Lots of people explain where to click and what a setting does. But its so valuable to learn why you should do something. So thanks!
Awesome, thanks. It's not the kind of video that most people appreciate so I'm glad you liked it.
how do you have only 42k subs man I've been on a blender animation binge for a month you literally have a video for every situation I've encountered man thank you very much for your hard work and dedication man
That's great! I am glad you find my videos useful.
YES, you tell that to the UA-cam algorithm haha
I just wanted to thank you for all the awesome videos you've provided on your channel. You're definitely my go-to when it comes to rigging and animating in Blender.
Thank you, Darryl!
11:49 i think the reason the bones point in opposite directions like the legs arms is because when animating they want to work with positive values, so when rotate a left and right arm it goes down the same way
This is EXACTLY what I was looking for! I'd love to see a video on constraining the export rig to the control rig. This would greatly help me out with a project I'm working on
Yes, same!
I love all the rig/bones help you give us! Thank you so much:)
Pfffff most unsatisfying blender tutorial ending every
See notes above
I would absplutly love a video about the last part. I work with both blender and UE and to know how to solve the problem would be amazing.
This was the best tutorial, so in depth and helps get rid of counter intuitions
Awesome!
yes plsss very interested to see the retarget from ue5 rig to any rig animation
Thank you for the excellent explanation as always!
I would definitely be interested in the control rig + constraints solution you mentioned at the end.
I figure another workaround for weirdly oriented bones may be widgets? If the display of the bones is all that needs fixing, maybe a good option would be to just use custom widgets to change the display of the bones in the rig, instead of using a second rig and constraining the first rig to the second.
I suppose both solutions will have their use cases! Thanks again for the tutorial!
It really depends on what you want to do. If you want to build a control rig with IK and so on then you need properly oriented bones because Blender works much better with them. I guess that's one more important use of the default Bone orientation but it didn't occur to me to mention it.
15:00 thanks to you my animation is not horror show anymore 🙏
You are an excellent teacher. Love your videos.
Wow, thank you!
Very interested in future video covering how to constrain rigs together. top stuff CGDive
Thanks for the video. I have one Question I brought fbx from Maya to Blender the shoulder bone is twisted without any reason. can you tell me why? and how to fix it.
I would love to see a video on how to use the unreal orientation as an export skeleton! thank you for this video it finally helped me understand what's wrong with the UE bones
We have an addon for that ua-cam.com/video/U23WyAd8o_8/v-deo.html
Seriously, ur really good with rigs :] i struglling with this.
What do you struggle with exactly?
@@CGDive Importing skeleton of Manny Character and animate using ue2rigify addon for standard rigify workflow shown by epic team for hand key animation.
Ps:
i had no problem previously with UE5 but it started after updating to UE5.1
Thank you. I hope you do series for bone constrain which I could not any person explain it with example. I hope you do it with my thanks
The moust intersting the last part... thx for ur work !
You're my savior. I face the last issue with bone orientation and now understand it. If I already imported the bones, do we have any solution to fix (without touch the Automatic Bone Orientation checkbox). Thanks.
FYI this is why I dont import any character in Blender using their default importer. I recommend using Better FBX (paid or preview version) to Import in Blender.
Not really unless you want to move the bones around manually. Not sure what you are trying to achieve tho so I don't know what to suggest.
@@CGDive Actually I write python script to import bones from a binary file. So there is no "Automatic Bone Orientation" to tick.
@@rice_powder you write a python script to import bones from a binary file ... and you're asking me for advice? :D haha
@@CGDive Yeah I would like to consult you if there is an easy way to fix bone orientation that is not through Blender importer nor roll each bone manually in Edit mode.
amazing tut! waiting for second part 🕺🏿
You got me interested in the last part. Looking forward to it. Tried making multi-layered armature systems, but they all were failures.
i have question .
i imort rig from other collection then i apply scale rotate it disturbe my mesh .can you have soution video for that ....i dont see any vide regarding apply scale on rigs.after increasing the rig size.
You are not supposed to rescale complex rigs. There are solutions but there are too many different problems that can occur.
If you're on discord, try asking on our server discord.gg/YFH5HUv
I'm using Blender 3.5 and I imported a rig into Blender using FBX and I have watched every video and nothing is working for me to make the bones that are sticking out to disappear and the bones wont attach to the mesh.
Not sure what you mean. Pasting this comment under multiple videos doesn't help either :)
Incredibly helpful!! 👌
bro make another part to solve this probleum. your video help me alot
automatic bone orientation is no longer an option what do we now
Of course it is still an option.
ye it was the orientented bones ty for the vid
hey!! can you tell why after generating the bone custom shapes are re-located to another location......?
Generating?
@@CGDive yes!! After generating...!! I mean rigify...!!
@@anmol6836 I need context :)
What rig type is the bone?
@@CGDive bone is chest_fk and the weight painting 1.0 values influencing also right when I rotate the custom shape of that chest_fk...!!
But,only issue is after generating the custom shape is placed at the face center....and from there its working fine but why its re-located there as it should be located where the chest_fk bone is there...!!
I checked the scale of rig also....and transform values also but didn't get where the issue is....?
@@anmol6836 I am not sure what steps you take exactly. Here is how to edit the shapes
ua-cam.com/video/beVtWATcw9U/v-deo.html
Please don't leave the most important part unexplained
See notes above.
Hey ! how I can constraint the orinted rig to the original rig?
So I think blender and unity use the same orientation, will it break animations in unity if you reorient or is it just programs that use different axis?
did you end up covering the constraining of the export rig to the fixed rig?
No sorry. You can try UE to Rigify or One Click Rig addons. They do something like that automatically and are free.
Also Auto rig Pro + Quick rig are paid addons that do something like that :)
Is there any part 2 of the last part of this video?
No. What are you interested in? I may have covered it somewhere.
@@CGDive when importing fbx the bone orientation and length is wrong please help, like the last part of your video, you said i will cover it in another video. please i need the full video about it.
@@CGDive I have searched on youtube but there is no in-depth video, how to fix this problem.
@@MJA-33 Everything about bone orientation and length was covered in this video. Please watch it again.
I said I might make a video about control rig.
@@CGDive how unreal engine armature bone orientation can be fixed you didnt explain on the last part of this video, you said you will cover another video. you need to watch your video again on the last part of this video.
i always have the question in my mind when i open unreal engine 5 and the skeletons look like upside down seven. Why is that so?
"upside down seven" ? :)
Doesn't ring a bell :)
Thanks a lot for this video, I learned a lot! :)
Would it be useful to have an option to only show bone heads without length and tails?
I guess it could be :)
"See notes above." Is there another video in the notes? I'm using my phone and I'm not sure what you mean by "notes." Thanks for the video, I really appreciate it.
I have two rigs, and both models are the same. The supported rig has a bad skin weight, and the second rig, which is not supported, has perfect skin weight. I want to transfer the skin weight between these two rigs. I did my best, but it didn't work, so I used Maya to copy the skin weight between these rigs, which works perfectly fine. Now, when I import the rig into Blender, the orientation is wrong 😢. The skin weight is still perfect.
If there is a way to transfer skin weight between rigs (not the models) then I won't use Maya and everything will be perfect 😁 💗
Do you have any tutorial Importing Non humanoid character into unreal?
No but this workflow can be applied on any character. Even tho the example character is humanoid I am not using the default Mannequin so working with a horse or a wolf will be exactly the same :)
ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJvS4rui1CyKuFQLBGE4rnas.html
@@CGDive ok cool, Thank you :D
Thank you so much
HI, im still having a lot of difficulty with models and such, are you willing to help me
I don't guarantee to help personally but you can post your question on our discord and you may get help from me or others
discord.gg/j8SQCjFsXP
Awesome video. Exactly what I was looking for and I love that you explain what problems arise with certain methods. But that animation at 14:55 lol!!
Glad it was helpful!
14:55 Kill it with fire 'D
omg you saved me!!!
haha, I did?
@@CGDive totally! currently working with character someone else exported, with a rig just like that was clearly not from blender bones were rotated and also too big I was so confused 🤣 this helped so much!
Biblically accurate rig
Huh? 😆
That was helpful indeed!
Awesome!
Hey man! Huge thanks for informative videos! Is there still a chance you can explain how to constrain export rig to a rig with proper blender orientations? I tried to copy transforms with different settings, but this isn't working for me. :(
Maybe sometime in the future, yeah :)
@@CGDive Any advice on where to start looking for more info on that in the meantime?
Does this apply to Maya, too?
You have to be a bit not specific than “this”. In general I spoke about things highly specific to Blender.
@@CGDive Never mind. Thanks for the reply. I think I'm getting things figured out.
is the part2 out?
no, sorry :)
@CGDive Been able to import a Maya rig into Blender smoothly thanks to your advise about bone orientations. However, when exporting that skinned rig to Unity, the bone translations of the Blender-changed FBX are not identical compared to the Maya-created FBX source file. Most of the bones seem to be globally in the same place, but some bones are way off and mess up the rig. Do you have any idea what might cause that? Tried all settings of the BetterFBXexporter, without success..
No sorry, I am not famiar with Maya and BetterFBX so I am not sure what gets messed up and where...
@@CGDive Fair enough, thanks anyway for replying!
If I am not animating in Blender but In Unreal using Control Rig, can I export with the automatic bone orientation? Also, when i add bones to the hierarchy without interrupting the hierarchy, it crashes unreal when parenting to the SK_Mannaquin
You can't export with Automatic bone orientation. You can only import into blender with that setting.
I love the thumbnail.. ‘is this normal?’ Lol no..
hahah well in a way (in a Blender way) it is normal :)
Great Tutorial/overview. Like 9b8ll I would be very curious to see how the last part could be done. It would be nice to perfect a Blender to UE5 workflow
I will be working on Blender and UE stuff. Will take some time.
Have you messed around with any of the "deep motion" or similar video to animation data, and integrating into blender - to create animations from your own movements in your room, for instance? Any thoughts on which is best for blender?
I've not tried this myself, hopefully next couple of weeks I'll give it a test drive and see how good it is.
Check out "EasyMocap" for blender.
Might be something there for you, if you use it yourself in the coming days, give me feedback, I'd be keen to see what it's like.
@@MarcV_IndieGameDev = thanks, will take a look
@@jeffg4686 I don't know if I can paste a link to main page, but I'll try. If nothing appears in the next comment means links are blocked.
Not with deep motion. I did a video about plask but I haven't put the tools to use.
@@CGDive - gotcha, thanks. I'll check out the plask one. These seem incredibly useful if they work well, and your work involves humanoid animations.
Sir plz also make video on mixamo which i requested you in last video
How to combine animation using control rig and change location etc
Hi, sorry that's not how it works. You can't request a video and have it tomorrow :)
Making videos takes a long time. I'd recommend trying to solve your problem instead of waiting around for the tutorial guy :)
@@CGDive ok sir i'm waiting for your tutorial :)
14:59 GTA SA vibes
11:11 looks like a cyborg metal hacker.
Lolz
Thanks for help!Like
Why is Blender so weird?
haha
It's not necessarily weird. The whole 3d app world is complex so when you start exchanging data between them you encounter weird stuff. Things will probably get more unified in the future.
@@CGDive That is true. Could have been worse. Could have had Zbrush's camera controls...
But also I believe in Y Up supremacy.
Hey this helps
\good to hear!
unreal engin 5
Genuinely feel this video is a mess
Genuinely useful to know.