A change to the workflow would be not to bring the redundant block shape mesh at all. Or,rsther than adding a 0 opacity material to it, you can just hide it in game.
Im trying to replicate this process, but I dont want to be doing my animation in an outside program, like you did with the side to side wobble and then using it is an animation clip. This is probably to complicated to answer here, but how would this process go if you wanted to setup a control rig inside UE for animation, instead of using prebaked anim clips? I tried following this process for my own model, and it seems to work.... though Im not sure. I cant test to see if the swapped-in nanite meshes are sticking to the bone because I cant access the joints in this new blueprint to do a simply fk test. (its just 'Rig" and thats it, no bone hierarchy). if I open up the skeleton or skeletal mesh imports and move the bone there, nothing updates in the new blueprint. Furthermore, if i try save the skeletal mesh (or skeleton) files wih the moved bone, still no update in the new blueprint, and when I go back and reopen the skeleton or skeletal mesh files, the bone is back in its original position - like it didnt save my transform. Any thoughts on if Im doing something wrong here? Or does this whole thing only work with an animation clips type workflow? Again, my end goal is to be able to setup a control rig....
thank you so much for this! (for my future reference) 12:25 for FBX export rigLP from blender options Include> limit to: selected objects [x](select) Geometry> smoothing groups : Face Armature> add leaf bones [_](de-select) (select)[x] Bake Animation> Sampling Rate: 0.1, Simplify: 0.0 Export
Thank you, our project just turned on Nanite (after the more recent updates) and I'm now testing it with our guns Cross fingers on finding no hidden performance issues
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox we ran into an issue in 5.1 where nanite didn't support custom depth and stencil rendering which broke some stuff. But apparently that's been fixed in 5.2 so trying this again
That sounds like a good idea.. Let me recap this.. you basically retargeted skeletal mesh using a nanite static mesh? Although that looks like it. I am wondering what would happen if the skeletal joints are weighted? I don't think that would work for that case..
Yeah no deformations. This approach works great for mechanical designs. You can however create a hybrid between deformable non nanite meshes and nanite meshes.
Normally I would just ignore these sorts of comments as they are very unhelpful. But I appreciate the feedback. Please be mindful there are loads of people out there who need a lot of hand holding to achieve results in a software they are still learning. I am unsure why people think that short form tutorials for their own benefit is also the benefit of the creator. This is free content after all, I also need to make a living. If you feel you have wasted your time, please formulate a brand new tutorial that is lean and that stops people from falling in the same trap as you have.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox not this workflow but I had a few unsuccessful attempts. One decent attempt locking the mesh location and rotation to sockets. But was not a good solution overall.
Great stuff man! I have a problem: would this give me better performance over a normal skeletal mesh actor with an animation playing on it? My current skeletal mesh has 6k tris but I have to spawn about 150 of them at the same time which tanks performance, would using this nanite trick help? The "rig" skeletal would have a simple 500 tris mesh just for the bone and then the 6k poly mesh would become the nanite one
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox I did test it. Vertex animation works well in 5.1 with nanite but there are still some weird lighting bugs and distortion, it's still a preview so I suspect it will improve in the future
dos this method count as socketing the nanite mesh onto skeleton? Im working on RTS and need every little bit of performance i can get, and somewhere i read socketing onto skeleton is the way to go since the socketed thing takes its world info from the bone instead of keeping track of its own
I wound say yes but not really got any tech info to back it up. You could always do a test mesh with and without nanite and see the performance comparison
Does this reduce the benefits of nanite? Part of its benefits come from the fact that the mesh is static and it can work with that. If the mesh moves does that have a performance penalty? Is that performance penalty greater than the savings nanite gives?
So a question.. I've got this entire workflow in successfully, however if I introduce a new animation, which uses the same skeleton, naming and hierarchy, the newly introduced animation imports correctly, but the nanite meshes are not aligned correctly in the new animation. Is this an issue you are familiar with?
That shouldn't be the case as this setup just ensures your meshes are aligned to the original skeleton you've created. So not sure why that is happening, but I did not experience this issue.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox So update on what I've learned.. every animation has to start in the same pose you exported the original rig and mesh parts from. EDIT: Workaround appears to be just making each initial frame the same in every anim then trimming that frame off in Unreal.. EDIT: Workaround breaks when BP is compiled.. so scratch that.
I watched the tutorial a bunch of times and my static meshes don't rotate properly with the skeleton. Like the legs are fine on my character but the arms are still T-posing but still moving with the skeletons animation, but the animation has the arms down and rotated. I did find a way to fix it by snapping to target and changing all the origins to where the bones should be, but that's tedious and I feel like it should work the way you did it.
Simple solution for my problem is to merge all the meshes that need to be animated with one bone only. I did it in Maya and everything works. Thanks for the tutorial!
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox You can also use traditional skinned meshes alongside with nanite meshes. I did it for organic and some smaller parts of the car rig I work on.
WARNING: If the skeleton's mesh is completely encased by a nanite mesh, Unreal will not think to render it, and that will cause animations not to play. Just make sure the original mesh is physically appearing outside the nanite pieces, before you add the material that hides it, and Unreal will understand it correctly and play the animations.
Oh, haven't noticed that. Thank you for the tip. My newest method of doing this doesn't include an invisible mesh at all, I just export bones for it and ensure that the program where the skeleton originates from (blender) has the "transparent mesh" so that I can align everything properly.
Dude this probably sounds stupid but I am having a lot of trouble starting new projects and opening existing projects in UE5. It keeps getting stuck at 45% compiling shaders. I hear people say you only have to do it once but mine does it sometimes opening an existing project. Plus you need to be able to start different projects regularly without having to wait an hour each time. Any way at all you could make a quick vid on this topic maybe showing how you start a project or open existing or is this just how it always is?
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox I have tried both ray tracing and without. No difference for me. I have followed tons of videos on changing config files and everything no luck. How long does it take you to start a new project on average? Is there a certain template that is more efficient than others?
Really sorry to hear that. Haven't experienced it myself but a simple blank scene with no Ray tracing takes about 2 mins to open, sometimes less than a minute.
Only time I have trouble like that is usually because I needed to update to a studio driver. Running UE5 I learned to check daily for new studio driver updates to my mother bored.
Or set it to automatically update upon new drivers. Hope help. But I could be something else of sorts. This is one thing that work for me tho when I learned to keep my motherboard updated just as like the operating system.
outstanding stuff.. this workflow is still valid in 5.3 as of today. :) Thanks man!
Glad you found it useful!
A change to the workflow would be not to bring the redundant block shape mesh at all. Or,rsther than adding a 0 opacity material to it, you can just hide it in game.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox I used the small cube method like the big boy in the valley demo. :)
Nice
Im trying to replicate this process, but I dont want to be doing my animation in an outside program, like you did with the side to side wobble and then using it is an animation clip. This is probably to complicated to answer here, but how would this process go if you wanted to setup a control rig inside UE for animation, instead of using prebaked anim clips?
I tried following this process for my own model, and it seems to work.... though Im not sure. I cant test to see if the swapped-in nanite meshes are sticking to the bone because I cant access the joints in this new blueprint to do a simply fk test. (its just 'Rig" and thats it, no bone hierarchy). if I open up the skeleton or skeletal mesh imports and move the bone there, nothing updates in the new blueprint. Furthermore, if i try save the skeletal mesh (or skeleton) files wih the moved bone, still no update in the new blueprint, and when I go back and reopen the skeleton or skeletal mesh files, the bone is back in its original position - like it didnt save my transform.
Any thoughts on if Im doing something wrong here? Or does this whole thing only work with an animation clips type workflow? Again, my end goal is to be able to setup a control rig....
Nice, there are very very few people currently available who actually make unreal videos in very detail. 🙌❤️
Glad you like them!
thank you so much for this!
(for my future reference)
12:25 for FBX export rigLP from blender options
Include> limit to: selected objects [x](select)
Geometry> smoothing groups : Face
Armature> add leaf bones [_](de-select)
(select)[x] Bake Animation> Sampling Rate: 0.1, Simplify: 0.0
Export
Thank you,
our project just turned on Nanite (after the more recent updates)
and I'm now testing it with our guns
Cross fingers on finding no hidden performance issues
Let me know how it goes.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox we ran into an issue in 5.1 where nanite didn't support custom depth and stencil rendering which broke some stuff. But apparently that's been fixed in 5.2 so trying this again
Oh I think they sorted it, yes.
You are god like. So fare your tutorials have shown me the way to go, and your very easy to fallow! So appreciative Thank you!
Cheers!
Amazing stuff! This will be useful when I bring the larger, more complex capital ships into play
Nice
Very nice, I've actually built a few vehicles, nanite on custom skeletons, got the idea from the Ancient as well. Keep up the great work 👍
Well done. I'm working on a socket system now for modular ships
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox I'm following so looking forward to anything you put out, and that sounds particularly epic!
Cheers
That sounds like a good idea.. Let me recap this.. you basically retargeted skeletal mesh using a nanite static mesh? Although that looks like it. I am wondering what would happen if the skeletal joints are weighted? I don't think that would work for that case..
The mesh won't deform as you are not deforming the nanite one anyway, you are just updating the position of the mesh based off the socket of the bone.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox so basically no mesh deformation at the joints? Like rigid bodies connected together?
Yeah no deformations. This approach works great for mechanical designs. You can however create a hybrid between deformable non nanite meshes and nanite meshes.
Awesome video man. Do you know of any performance issues running up large numbers of sockets?
Not that I've seen. I've used this method to make a massive starship with over 100 parts moving and there are no issues
I would place two dislikes if I can. Wasting 32 minutes on an idea that takes 3 sentences to say, this is truly an art.
Normally I would just ignore these sorts of comments as they are very unhelpful. But I appreciate the feedback. Please be mindful there are loads of people out there who need a lot of hand holding to achieve results in a software they are still learning. I am unsure why people think that short form tutorials for their own benefit is also the benefit of the creator. This is free content after all, I also need to make a living. If you feel you have wasted your time, please formulate a brand new tutorial that is lean and that stops people from falling in the same trap as you have.
Dude I love this so stoked to try this
Ya the naming convention is probably why I never got it working
Oh, you already tried it?
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox not this workflow but I had a few unsuccessful attempts. One decent attempt locking the mesh location and rotation to sockets. But was not a good solution overall.
Great stuff man!
I have a problem: would this give me better performance over a normal skeletal mesh actor with an animation playing on it?
My current skeletal mesh has 6k tris but I have to spawn about 150 of them at the same time which tanks performance, would using this nanite trick help? The "rig" skeletal would have a simple 500 tris mesh just for the bone and then the 6k poly mesh would become the nanite one
Yes, I think you should get better performance. Just be mindful that you can't deform the mesh.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox Unreal 5.1 has world position offset enabled for nanite. Does that enable some possibilities?
Should do, not tested it yet though.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox I did test it. Vertex animation works well in 5.1 with nanite but there are still some weird lighting bugs and distortion, it's still a preview so I suspect it will improve in the future
dos this method count as socketing the nanite mesh onto skeleton?
Im working on RTS and need every little bit of performance i can get, and somewhere i read socketing onto skeleton is the way to go since the socketed thing takes its world info from the bone instead of keeping track of its own
I wound say yes but not really got any tech info to back it up.
You could always do a test mesh with and without nanite and see the performance comparison
Ok ill do that, thanks anyway👍
Thanks for this tutorial! How do you make a custom rig with this method? Let's say I imported a car model and I want to make a custom rig for it.
Will this work with physics?
Yes, I see no reason why it wouldn't.
wait how do we do the construction script?
Does this reduce the benefits of nanite? Part of its benefits come from the fact that the mesh is static and it can work with that. If the mesh moves does that have a performance penalty? Is that performance penalty greater than the savings nanite gives?
There are no performance lost by doing this. It's still a static mesh that is now moving according to a bone structure.
Do you know if this technique works with control rig?
Yes, it should do.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox It did indeed! thanks!~~
So a question.. I've got this entire workflow in successfully, however if I introduce a new animation, which uses the same skeleton, naming and hierarchy, the newly introduced animation imports correctly, but the nanite meshes are not aligned correctly in the new animation. Is this an issue you are familiar with?
That shouldn't be the case as this setup just ensures your meshes are aligned to the original skeleton you've created. So not sure why that is happening, but I did not experience this issue.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox So update on what I've learned.. every animation has to start in the same pose you exported the original rig and mesh parts from.
EDIT: Workaround appears to be just making each initial frame the same in every anim then trimming that frame off in Unreal..
EDIT: Workaround breaks when BP is compiled.. so scratch that.
@@wayneadams9102 Hi I'm currently having the same issue, did you ever find a work around that works?
Impressive
Thanks
What are does green bones?
Hi
This is an indicator that the bone chain is part of an IK Rig Constraint (in blender)
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox oh ok thanks
I watched the tutorial a bunch of times and my static meshes don't rotate properly with the skeleton. Like the legs are fine on my character but the arms are still T-posing but still moving with the skeletons animation, but the animation has the arms down and rotated. I did find a way to fix it by snapping to target and changing all the origins to where the bones should be, but that's tedious and I feel like it should work the way you did it.
Ok for anyone else that might have the same issue, you have to enable "Use Ref Pose on Init Anim" on your skeleton animation category
Are you doing this in 5.2 by any chance?
This is great, thanks. Could you give me advice how to name multiple meshes driven by one joint and how to connect them in UE5?
Simple solution for my problem is to merge all the meshes that need to be animated with one bone only. I did it in Maya and everything works. Thanks for the tutorial!
In theory that works, but you did raise a valid point of adding multiple separate meshes to the same bone. Not sure on the solution.
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox You can also use traditional skinned meshes alongside with nanite meshes. I did it for organic and some smaller parts of the car rig I work on.
I'm working on a character that will be a normal Skelton mesh but with nanite armor pieces on for maximum quality :)
WARNING: If the skeleton's mesh is completely encased by a nanite mesh, Unreal will not think to render it, and that will cause animations not to play. Just make sure the original mesh is physically appearing outside the nanite pieces, before you add the material that hides it, and Unreal will understand it correctly and play the animations.
Oh, haven't noticed that. Thank you for the tip. My newest method of doing this doesn't include an invisible mesh at all, I just export bones for it and ensure that the program where the skeleton originates from (blender) has the "transparent mesh" so that I can align everything properly.
Dude this probably sounds stupid but I am having a lot of trouble starting new projects and opening existing projects in UE5. It keeps getting stuck at 45% compiling shaders. I hear people say you only have to do it once but mine does it sometimes opening an existing project. Plus you need to be able to start different projects regularly without having to wait an hour each time. Any way at all you could make a quick vid on this topic maybe showing how you start a project or open existing or is this just how it always is?
Hi. Are you activating Ray tracing when you create a new project?
@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox I have tried both ray tracing and without. No difference for me. I have followed tons of videos on changing config files and everything no luck. How long does it take you to start a new project on average? Is there a certain template that is more efficient than others?
Really sorry to hear that. Haven't experienced it myself but a simple blank scene with no Ray tracing takes about 2 mins to open, sometimes less than a minute.
Only time I have trouble like that is usually because I needed to update to a studio driver. Running UE5 I learned to check daily for new studio driver updates to my mother bored.
Or set it to automatically update upon new drivers. Hope help. But I could be something else of sorts. This is one thing that work for me tho when I learned to keep my motherboard updated just as like the operating system.