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(Wes Bunn) Hey everybody and welcome back. So in the previous video, we took a look at
where we can get our hands on those FBX assets that we will be using for the remainder of
this video series. We also created our project, which I have up onscreen at the moment. In
this video, we are going to import those FBX assets. We are also going to pause for a moment
to talk a little bit about Skeletons and how they are used inside Unreal Engine 4. So let's
continue. Inside of our project here the first thing that we are going to do is actually
hop down to the Content Browser, which as the name suggests, allows us to browse all
of the content inside of our project. The first thing we are going to do is Right-click
on the root Content folder here, and we are going to create a New Folder. We are going
to call this folder the "Character" folder. This folder is going to hold all of the assets
pertaining to our character just to keep things nice, neat, and organized. Now I am going
to hop off-screen for just a second and open the folder on my desktop that is containing those
FBX assets that I downloaded. I will pop that up. Once you have extracted that zip file,
here all those assets. The first one that we are actually going to import is the SK_Mannequin;
this is the Skeletal Mesh asset. So there are a number of different ways we can import this.
We could click Import here in the Content Browser. But probably the easiest is just
to Left-click and drag and drop that directly into the Content Browser. When I release,
you can see that we are presented with a dialogue box. This is the FBX Import Options dialogue
box. The cool thing is that Unreal has recognized that we are attempting to import a Skeletal
Mesh and It is giving us a bunch of options to kind of define how we import that Mesh. So
once we start importing animations in a moment, you can see we will get different settings
that pertain to animations and how we import those. We are going to leave most of these
settings as default, but there is one setting that I wanted to take just a minute to talk
about here, and that is the Skeleton setting. As you can see, it is currently set to None.
So we are going to pause for a second to talk a little bit about Skeletons and how they
are used in Unreal Engine 4. One thing I am going to do actually is kill this Import Options
box. You can leave it up if you are following along with this video, but if I don't, I am
going to get some artifacts here when I hop over to PowerPoint land here in a moment.
So I am going to kill this just for now, but you can leave yours up and follow along with
the video. So I am going to open up my PowerPoint presentation. I promise it is really short;
it is not too long. So let's go ahead and get through this really quickly and talk about
how Skeletons are used. If you are already familiar with animation say in 3DS Max, or
Maya, or any number of other 3D animation tools, you are probably already familiar with
the concept of Skeletal Meshes in the sense of them being some type of object that defines
points of rotation on a 3D model. That model ends up getting skinned, or in some way bound
to those bones or joints depending on what animation tool you come from. In Unreal they
are referred to as bones, but just know if you hear the term joints or bones thrown around,
it basically means the same thing. So Skeletons in Unreal are basically just that; they are
a list of bone names with some hierarchy data so it knows who is parented to what. The reason
this is important to you is that Skeletons are the way that animations can be shared
in Unreal Engine 4. That is very important; I am going to put a gold star next to it.
There are some rules to remember when sharing animations between Skeletons. To share animations
typically as a best practice and to make your life easier down the road, you will want your
characters to use the same Skeleton asset. So you want any Skeletal Meshes
that you import to share the same Skeletal asset if possible, that way those animations can be passed
between different Skeletal Meshes without any extra work. Now as a side note to this
as of Unreal Engine 4.5 or later, there is a feature that will allow you to retarget
animations between characters that use different Skeleton assets, however, there is an extra
step involved when doing so. As I mentioned, characters that use the same Skeleton asset
can automatically share their animations with other characters without any extra work. But
I did want to mention retargeting just in case you come across a situation where you
have characters that are using different Skeleton assets. Now the good news is this Skeleton
asset gets automatically created when you import a Skeletal Mesh. You don't actually
have to go through any extra work or stuff to make one, it is going to happen for you
automatically. The reason that we want to take just a second to talk about them, and
you may already be thinking this, is that not all of your characters are going to be
the same. They are not going to have the exact same joint layout. So if you are worried about
that right about now, this is why I kind of wanted to pause for a second to talk about
them for just a moment here. So if we have two different characters, let's say this is
our base character that kind of defines our generic base character that all Skeletal Meshes
use. You can see it has a head, it has shoulders, arms, legs, feet, and so forth. But let's say
we had another character that was going to have a ponytail. So there is our ponytail;
you can see it has a joint coming out of the back of the head, a bunch of bones for the
hair, and so forth. Well, it kind of looks like a ponytail. This is totally fine. You
could totally do this. If you had two Skeletal Meshes, the one with the ponytail could use
the same Skeleton as the one without the ponytail. There is no problem in doing this. When these
two characters use that same Skeletal asset, Unreal will automatically know that they are
the same and that this here is an additional appendage, so to speak. It won't affect the
character. So if you import the first character, he has the white Skeleton here, you import
the Skeleton with the ponytail and you tell the second character to use that first Skeleton
asset, these joints well just get appended or added onto that Skeleton asset and everything
will be fine. The characters that don't have a ponytail will just not use that data; it
is just not a problem at all. What is a problem, however, is if you brought in another character
that had some more bones, say spine joints for example, or maybe some roll joins in the
middle of the hips and shin, and maybe some on the upper arms and lower arms because sometimes
that is the way people will rig their characters. They will add those additional bones in their
character for more control. This is actually problematic because you are breaking the order
of the hierarchy. So the Skeleton asset would look at this list and say, "Okay, you have
some extra things in here. I don't think that these are compatible, so that is a little
bit of a problem." So long as you are doing extra things like adding things such as a
ponytail, or maybe extra arms, or a tail, or wings, or things like that, then you can
certainly use the same Skeleton. That is kind of the misconception when people are first
getting started with Unreal Engine 4 and importing their characters, they think they need a Skeletal
Mesh and a Skeleton per Skeletal Mesh. So they are creating a bunch of different Skeletons
and applying all those Skeletons to individual Skeletal Meshes, when in fact, they could be
sharing those and sharing animations just saving you a lot of work. So the take away
here is that if there are extra joints that are going to disrupt the base hierarchy, then
that is when you would need to create an entirely new Skeleton. This may mean that you may
need different animations or to go through that process of retargeting animations, as I mentioned
before. So with that now that we have established what Skeletons are as kind of a general topic,
we can hop back over to Unreal and continue importing our Skeletal Mesh. I am going
to hit Esc and hop out of PowerPoint. Let me bring back up my folder with my FBX assets.
Let's drag and drop in that SK_Mannequin and get our FBX Import Options dialogue open again.
There are some more artifacts. I didn't know it was going to do that there. (Laughter)
If you are seeing those artifacts, that is because I am video recording. So the joys
of video recording are producing extra effects here, though it is kind of neat when you look
at it. So if you can ignore that for a moment, it will go away in a second when we import.
We are going to leave Skeleton as None because we want to create one when we import our Skeletal
Mesh here. I did want to open this Advanced section here. There are a bunch of options
in here, but I wanted to change this Normal Import Method option. We are going to Import
Normals. Now, yours may have been set to Compute Normals. If Unreal computes Normals, it may
create some hard edges on our Mesh here, which I don't want. I am just going to Import Normals.
I am going to move my window up and I am going to hit Import to import our Skeletal Mesh.
Now you may see a warning here. When you do so, you can see it says, "No smoothing information
was found in this FBX..." and so forth. You can click this little button (Docs icon) here to open Documentation
on it, but basically what it is saying is it didn't see any Normals on the character,
which is fine. I knew it didn't have any Normals to begin with, so you can go ahead and close
this window. Inside of our Content Browser, you can see that our Skeletal Mesh has been
added along with some additional assets here. The first thing that it also created is a
Physics Asset (SK_Mannequin_PhysicsAsset). This is used when you want to create any kind
of like ragdoll effects for this Skeletal Mesh, like if you had a ragdoll death animation
or something. We are not going to be doing that in this video series, but I just wanted to
point out that it is there. Then, there is our Skeleton asset; this is the important asset that we
can use between different Skeletal Meshes, if we had them, to pass animations between
those characters. Now, it also created some Materials that can be applied to our Skeletal
Mesh here. If I actually open it; let's Double-click and open it. The window actually opened off-screen,
so I am going to drag that in. This is Persona. So we are now inside the Persona editor. We
are in the Mesh tab of Persona. I could hold Alt inside my viewport here and drag around
with my Left Mouse Button (LMB) so you can kind of fly around the character here. If
I click the Skeleton tab, now we are looking at the Skeleton and there are all those bones
that we talked about inside our Skeletal Mesh here. I am actually going to close this now
because we are going to go into Persona in the next video actually, so we will kind of
break that down a little bit better in that video. So let's continue. Let's actually open
that folder containing our FBX assets. Inside here, I am just going to hold Ctrl and hit
A to select all of them. Hold Ctrl and deselect our SK_Mannequin. Now that we have all of
our animations selected, I am going to drag all of those into the Content Browser here.
Actually, you know what? Before I do that for organizational purposes, I am going to
Right-click on the Character folder here, create a new folder, and call it "Animations".
Now, we are going to import those FBX assets into the Animations folder. So there is our
friend the FBX Import Options dialogue. Look at what it is asking us for; it is asking
us for a Skeleton. We created one when we imported this Skeletal Mesh, so we can click
this drop down here and there is our Skeleton asset. Let's go ahead and select that. We
are going to leave the rest of the options as default and we are going to hit Import
All. That is going to take a second for it to import all of those assets. Now, there
is another warning here. I kind of wanted you to see this. It says, "The following bones
exist in the imported animation, but not in the SK_Mannequin...," and so forth. The character
that was used for the punching sequence had a coat and that is those extra bones we were
talking about. Our Character does not have that coat so it is just going to ignore all
of these, which is fine. So we can go ahead and close this. Inside the Content Browser,
you can see all of our assets have these little asterisks on them. This is letting you know
that these assets have not been saved. So go ahead and click the Save All button to
save all of our assets. I am going to open up a Save (Content window) dialogue. Then go ahead and click
Save Selected; that will save all of our assets. So, I think that is a good time to pause here.
We are about 13 minutes in; we have imported all of our assets now. We have talked about
what Skeletons are and how they are used to share animations inside Unreal Engine 4.
We have also imported those animations. So we have everything ready. In the next video,
we are going to talk about Persona and start setting up some of the things that we will
need for our character. So let's break here and we will see you in the next video.
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