Building Modular Characters in Unreal Engine | Unreal Fest 2022
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- Опубліковано 7 лют 2025
- The stories you create aren't static, so why should the look of your characters be? Using the UE5 Lyra Sample Project as a starting point, this session will discuss various techniques available to add, swap, and customize your characters.
We’re excited to bring you sessions from Unreal Fest 2022, available to watch on demand: www.unrealengi...
Resources used in the talk:
Lyra Starter Game - www.unrealengi...
Stylized Character Kit: Casual 01 - www.unrealengi...
Additional Resources:
The Gritty Reality of Real-Time Cloth and Rigid-Body Character Physics - • The Gritty Reality of ...
Animating in Unreal Engine 5.1 - • Animating in Unreal En...
The Future of Animation in Unreal Engine - • The Future of Animatio...
Lyra Starter Game Overview - • Lyra Starter Game Over...
0:33 What is a Modular Character?
1:24 Where to start?
1:52 Demo 1 : Leader Pose Component
9:04 Demo 2 : Attach a Backpack
20:07 Demo 3 : Customize a Jacket
29:30 Demo 4 : Facial Animation
36:15 Demo 5 : Lyra Cosmetic Character Parts Overview
44:03 Demo 6 : Generating Random Outfits
57:42 Demo 7 : Creating a Modular Character Manager
1:02:00 Demo 8 : MetaHumans
I have a similar system set up in Lyra but there are a ton of gems here. Always good to see the pros do it so you can know where your own system is lacking!
The God himself
Thanks for pioneering that early on!
Really love those large tutorial style videos
We gotta crowdsource this guy a new microphone.
His microphone is fine, he just happens to be a robot.
I'd say it is more of a need for headphones :P
He's recording with two mic sources. Simple mistake, but someone should have helped him set up and test, given the size of the company.
I heard they spent all their documentations budget on his current mic
@@DylonDylonDylon A couple reflection dampening panels would be reasonable to expect too.
Wooooo, been looking forward to this talk being uploaded. Awesome stuff, Thanks Jeremiah! Ugh I need to learn rigging :)
Can i get an explanation for 45:30 ? I have the same issue as you do in the video, except you cut our how you fixed it.
Edit: you need to manually select skeletal mesh from the bottom the the list. Simply dragging in the blueprint and upgrading to a variable does not get the right type. it gets skeletal mesh component type.
Excellent presentation, Jeremiah, you are a prenominal tutor.
thank you guys this is huge
cant say how much i wanted a video on how to use leader pose component and children with physics! thank you
Nice Work! please make more of this tutorial videos Great Tutor
Great video, but by using such a high resolution is really hard to read the screen if your monitor is not 4K (and the video is only 1080p), or you're not watching fullscreen (so good luck following along). (specially if the font at 4k is small for you)
That 'Q' is soooo good!
It would have been nice to include the backpack and jacket skeletons in the description
also the microphone, holy crap lol
45:47 why was there an abrupt skip here? i was trying to follow along, but somehow, im not able to add my modular parts into the new array elements. What happened there?
Even with the leader pose optimization this looks insanely expensive, a dozen skeletal meshes per character and multiple animation blueprints
I know its possible to bake new skeletal meshes at runtime
Very usefull and well done! Thank you alot.
at 46:00 you add a variable 'BodyParts' but there is nothing to pick in the dropdown. Then you skip and all of a sudden the BodyParts variable is populated with 3 upperbodies. What did you do there to be able to put them in?
yes - its not the correct tutorial - I'm asking the same?
he skipped few tings.. and didn't explain the important part....
we hope he answer us
@@nade1231 found the fix. Just forgot to compile after picking skeletal mesh - object reference :DD:
Thank you very much!
Thank you for the session.
I hope you can make a more advanced session on this topic covering "optimization"
as this will increase the draw calls, imagine having > 20 player in a battle royal lobby this will be hard especially on lower end devices.
I heard its possible to make a texture atlas in runtime then change uvs coordinate and scale at runtime to match that atlas, so you will end up with only 1 draw call per character without having to modify the meshes outside unreal
hopefully someone can share a tutorial on how do that
I was hoping they would touch on this too. The best resource I've found for this topic is PrismaticaDev here on youtube. They've got some great videos on it although it's relatively complex.
ua-cam.com/video/ncwW5KNQ1Eg/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/A-P0llMckSw/v-deo.html
I did manage to follow along and build a simpler version that fit my needs tho so hope it helps
I really do hope they do more of these cuz there was some great info in here but it also didn't touch on 1st vs 3rd person views, multiplayer shadows, I'm pretty sure there's a new overlay feature in 5.1 that could be used for shields or effects instead of duplicating the whole character. Obviously these are all hour long topics in themselves but I hope we get more cuz this was great 😊
Prismatica. You're welcome.
@@Yggdrasil777 I said without having to modify the meshes outside
Prismatica's video is great but it's a painful method
the one that I'm looking for is modifying the uvs and creating atlas in engine during runtime, it's been done but in private projects
Thank you 🍿
Where is the link on creating physics assets from scratch?
After finishing the video I have a question about performance. With so many different animation blueprints ticking how does this affect player experience on the client and more importantly how does this fair over the network of a multiplayer game. Though we would get some insight on that.
Most of the leaf level ABPs are doing very simple logic, like copy pose from mesh.
And ABP count doesn't really effect networking in normal circumstances.
The most complex ABP is the one on the legs, reposible for all the core aniimated body movement. All the others are simply copying pose from that, and/or doing some simple dynamics on some new leaf bones that are only relevant to the specific piece of equipment/clothing.
@@JeremySwigart thanks for clearing that up! I still confused on how animation is kept in sync over the network. With that advanced talk from the Valorant devs I figured that animation was expensive for multiplayer. I’m still a complete noob in this department
Your exactly right …. As your approach 50+ skeletons with duplicate skeletons with drivers all set to override optimization and always tick you’ll approach performance issues as well as issues with net relevant issues if the sockets or bones cull on listen server due to net culling. These are definitely things to be aware of and keep in your mind. Great question 👍🏼
@Dev Gods animation state(broadly speaking) isn't replicated, so it doesn't have any effect on multiplayer. These additional ABPs have no effect on mp
@@JeremySwigart okay. I’m going to do some more research of my own because I’ve seem to have it confused. Maybe sometime in the future you can put together a short talk about animation in a mp environment. I’ve only been able to put together a few fragments from the valorant talk and the epic talk about optimizing Fortnite. A lot of these more intermediate.advanced topics aren’t covered enough and I feel that’s the info that can take an indie game dev like myself to that next level. Else I’d have to get a job at a AAA studio to figure it out lol.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge :)
Finally something useful
Epic has 23rd century technology but 1995 microphones :D Great tutorial as always
Love the channel 💗😍
Good stuff.
Realy realy need to have explanation on how to make the physics bodies
How do you reconcile the floatiness of the gun when the retarget mesh isn't 1:1 with the underlying manny_invis driver skeleton?
I know of sorta 2 ways. Make an invis driver skeleton for every mesh (I don't know how to do this, or don't want to do this for every core different mesh) or in the retarget, blend 100% from source for hand IK positions (this works okay so long as the proportions aren't too different). I feel like there should be a 3rd easier way?
Where is this link to the physics bodies setup you talked about?
lets hope unreal can get this person a proper microphone for creating presentations. sounded like they were using realplayer.
How would you apply this to switching out complete Metahumans? E.g. toggle between a male and a female Metahuman with a button press
Question: Does every piece of the modular bodies have it's own custom made weight painting?
yes-of course - they are different meshes
But that will probably be a same mesh splitted anyway
Your engine is great, but your documentation is HORRIBLE.
It's so difficult to learn how to do stuff.
Why are they using unreal engine 4? Shouldn't they completely shift to Unreal Engine 5?
glad u casted it from ur toilet this tutorial would have been sus perfect
lmao
Очень классная, качественная информация. Спасибо!
Who are those haters disliked this video 😡
Get out from this community who disliked it.
How do you even see dislikes, aren't they hidden?
@@Cpt.TrippsI can't say here
/ *Bold* ones are in Unreal Engine 4
/ Non-Bold ones are in Unreal Engine 5
( 1 - Most photo-realistic / 23 - Least photo-realistic )
1) iLL
2) Project M (by NCSoft)
3) Exp War Trauma
4) The Complex Found Footage
*5) Routine*
6) Layers of Fear
7) Fort Solis
8) Silent Hill 2 Remake
9) Senua's Saga Hellblade 2
*10) Callisto Protocol (minor work from UE5)*
11) Recode (by Occlusional)
12) Tekken 8
13) Ark 2
14) Vigilance 2099
15) Paranormal Tales
*16) BIAS by KUROSAWA CREATE*
17) Instinction
18) LOTR Conquest Reimagined
19) Shadow of Conspiracy - Section 2
20) Project LLL
21) Blight Survival
22) Project Ryu
*23) Unholy*
____________________________(1-23 -- Photo-realistic level)
24) ArcheAge 2
25) Black Myth Wukong
26) Stalker 2 Heart of Chernobyl
27) Gray (by in-D)
28) The Invincible
29) IGI Origins
30) Backrooms Escape Together
31) Rooted
*32) The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me*
*33) Crimson Snow by (Steppe Hare Studio)*
*34) The Finals*
*35) Luto*
*36) Atomic Heart*
*37) Project M - Battle Prototype*
*38) Karma: The Dark World*
*39) Hubris VR*
*40) Dead Island 2*
*41) Quarry*
_________________________________(24-41 -- Realistic Level)
( 24 - Most realistic / 41 - Least realistic )
/NOTE:
Even though Paranormal Tales uses a body cam footage style, its textures are not on par with the other games (1-14). Any of those other games (1-14) that uses body cam footage mode, would have made their graphics look even way more photo-realistic by a mile.
What happened to Metahumans explanation?
UGH.
Come on, guys.
I need to learn how to animate these things ( facial expressions, apply animations, etc).
Ok this quickly turned into a geek fest over backpack straps physics. YAWN! What happened to the modular characters tutorial?
first one!