>> Let's take a look at the Export Settings.
If you look under the Export Settings,
you'll see a series of options.
All these options are operations that
will get applied to your objects before they
are exported to your FBX file.
Let's take a look at this first one, Export All Actions.
By default, this will be on.
And essentially, what this is doing
is it's ensuring that regardless of the mute values on your NLA
tracks, your actions will get exported.
So let's go ahead and just hit Pipeline, Export, Send
to Unreal.
If we look over at Unreal, we will
see that we have two actions.
We have our idle action we also have our run action.
This is because we had that setting on,
which states that we will export all actions.
Now if I was to turn this off and delete these two
actions in Unreal, and do that same operation again,
you will see that it only exports the idle animation.
This is because only the idle animation is unmuted.
And vice versa-- if we just only unmute the run animation,
we export this to Unreal, you'll see
that we only at one animation, and it's just
the run animation.
Next option is Autostash Active Action.
But this is supposed to do it's supposed
to simplify the process of creating animation
on characters and stashing them into the NLA track
for you so you don't have to think about doing that.
So for example, I just have this mannequin character here.
I want to create new action and send it to Unreal.
So now that we have our action created,
I'm going to send it to Unreal, but first, I
want to show you what the NLA tracks look like.
When you have an action and you're working on it,
it'll be put into this active action slot,
but it's not actually in your objects and NLA stack.
In order for this action to be in your objects NLA stack,
it has to be pushed down like this.
So what Send to Unreal is doing is
it's doing that process for you you don't even
have to think about it.
So if I hit Pipeline, Export, Send to Unreal,
you can see that I had this action that
was sent over to Unreal.
And you can also see that it stashed that action in my NLA
tracks.
If we turn this off, and I tried that exact same operation
again--
let me delete this from Unreal--
if I do this again and just hit Pipeline, Export,
Send to Unreal, you'll see we get this error message.
You do not have the correct objects under the mesh or
rig collections or your rig does not have any actions to export,
and that's correct.
Our rig does not have any actions
to export because there are no actions under this object's NLA
tracks.
So we would have to manually stash it like this--
Pipeline, Export, Send to Unreal.
So this can be useful, and it's left on by default,
but if you are doing very specific editing with your NLA
tracks, you might want to toggle this
off so that this push down operation
doesn't mess with your arrangement of your NLA tracks.
Let's take a look at the third option.
Notice this option is grayed out.
This is grayed out because this operation relies
on another one of our add-ons.
So if you're using UE to Rigify, and you activate it,
you'll have access to this option.
What this does is it simply syncs your NLA strips
between your two different rigs.
So let's go ahead and take a look at our scene.
If we open up the UE to Rigify toolkit
and we just select this rig as our source rig,
and we go ahead and just click Overwrite Animation and click
Convert, it will convert both our run and our idle animation
over to this rig's animation data.
So you can see that our control rig is now animated.
If we take a look at our scene, we
can unhide our root rig here.
Now this might seem a little bit convoluted,
but the idea behind you UE to Rigify
is that you use Rigify to drive your original source rig
and you do not make any modifications
to your original rig.
You're just driving the original bones and those in turn
drive the skinned mesh.
So when we went to export something to Unreal,
we went to export just our source rig.
And you can see that our source rig, which is called Root,
is under the rig collection.
So if we want to animate on our control rig
and export our source rig with the matching actions to Unreal,
we need to sync up the NLA track data.
This includes mute values, start and end frame positions,
and also, the strip scale.
So if we take a look at our preferences real quick,
and we turn off autostash active action,
and we just leave this option on,
autosync control NLA strips at source,
let's see how this works.
I'm going to move this run strip right here in my NLA track.
I'm going to Export, Send to Unreal.
And you'll notice that our root rig has synced up
with our control rig's and NLA tracks.
This can be used in a variety of different ways.
If I go over here and I just remove the active action,
you can see that we have this idle animation
and then we have our run animation.
Now let's take an example where I
would be making an idle animation that goes into a run.
So say I wanted to see how my animation is
in the viewport going from an idle to a run,
but I want to export those as two separate actions to Unreal.
You can do that.
Just Pipeline, Export, Send to Unreal.
And you'll see that we have our idle and we have our run.
Now let's see another way that we could use this
if we went into our preferences, Edit, Preferences,
if I turn off Autosync Control NLA Strips to Source,
you can do some interesting things.
For example, if I was just to remove this run track
and I was to go here and go to this idle track,
I'm just going to create a new animation called Combined,
and then I'm going to go over here to this strip.
And on this strip, I'm going to assign it the action Combined.
So the thing to remember with Send to Unreal
is ultimately, it exports actions on strips.
So if I have an action called Combined that's
just on this NLA strip, then the NLA strip
will determine the start and end values
as well as the scale of the action,
but the action will be exported.
And since there is only one action on our source rig
and there's two actions on our control rig,
this will combine these actions for us.
So if I just go in here and on this strip,
I'm just going to put its end value to where
it's about at the end of the run, now when we export,
we should have a single animation called
Combined that is exporting idle and run together.
So if I hit Pipeline, Export, Send to Unreal,
you'll see we get a third action.
You'll notice we get this static animation, which
is not what we want.
What we want is to have both of these actions playing
under a single action called Combined.
So let's go back to our Preferences.
You'll notice we have this Export All Actions ticked.
But we want to do is untick that option.
And the reason for that is what that setting is doing
is it simply going through and it's
unmuting all of your actions.
But when you're working with UE to Rigify,
it essentially is looking at your unmuted actions here
and it's trying to unmute them for you here.
But since we have an action called
Run and an action called Idle, and this action is also
called Combined, there is no correlation,
so it can't unhide that for you.
So it is up to you to just uncheck that option
and unhide the action yourself.
So this time, if we hit Pipeline, Export, Send
to Unreal, we'll get an action that
starts out in the idle and finishes in the run.
The last option we have is Use Object Origin.
So to demonstrate this, I'm just going to take these three cubes
and they're spaced about two units apart in Blender,
and I'm going to move them to the mesh collection,
I'm going to do Pipeline, Export, Send to Unreal.
If we go over to in Unreal, we'll
see that our three cubes have been imported.
I'm just going to move them into our scene here.
You can see that each cube has its origin at what was
the world origin in Blender.
If I go to Edit, Preferences, and I tick on this option,
Use Object as Origin, I'm going to just redo that--
Pipeline, Export, Send to Unreal.
You'll now see that all three objects
have their origins set to what was their origin in Blender.
And the next thing you'll notice under the export panel
is these FBX settings.
So if we just open this up, you can
see that these are all the standard FBX export
settings that would be in your normal Blender FBX export.
The only things missing from this
are exporting by selection or by a collection, because that's
already handled with Send to Unreal by these collections
right here.
And then also, exporting all of your actions versus exporting
an action in your NLA strip-- that's
also handled by Send to Unreal.
And then also, the object types that you can export--
that's also handled by Send to Unreal.
And modifying those settings would break the functionality
of Send to Unreal.
That's why they're not exposed.
But the object types that it supports on an export
are armatures, meshes, and empties.
One thing to note is that the settings that you modify here
will persist across Blender sessions.
So whether you closed Blender or you open a new file,
the settings will stay how you modified them.
So if these were unchecked and you opened a new Blender file,
they would stay unchecked.
If you save your Blender file, then this data
gets written into the scene file.
And when that files loaded again,
it loads in whatever that was that was saved.
And so your information will also be saved into blend files,
as well, if that's how you use it.
The only way you're these settings will get reset
is if the add-on as deactivated and reactivated.
Then we can see that it's back to our default values.
You can also just reset to the default value that way, too.