Facial Animation and More in Unreal Engine 4 3D Animation

Description

Unreal Engine 4 and Daz Studio are outstanding, freely available animation programs that allow you to create stunning character animations like a professional. This course uses high-quality Daz 3D characters to teach you how to export any morph target of your choice from Daz Studio and use it in Unreal Engine 4. One of the most powerful features of Unreal Engine 4 is its ability to display animations in real time, unlike slow, sluggish systems that hinder your animation creativity. When you export your animation to an image sequence or to a video file for compositing, you'll be able to render your animation in near real-time. You'll also discover how to create high-quality facial animations confidently. This course comes with the following five fully rigged characters that you can use in cinematics and videos: Super Dude - Based on the Daz3D Genesis 8 character, Super Dude was created and sculpted in ZBrush by Michael Ricks. This character is inspired by the character from the hit film The Incredibles. Super Dude comes fully rigged with a ton of facial morphs and phoneme mouth shapes for accurate lip sync punctuation. Wendy - Based on the Daz3D Genesis 3 character, Wendy is a cute toon girl character created and sculpted in ZBrush by Michael Ricks. She also has many facial morph and expression controls and can be made to come alive immediately in Unreal Engine 4. She has big expressive eyes, and can be easily made to emote in no time. Lil' Frankenstein - Based on the Daz3D Genesis 3 character, Lil' Frankenstein was also created in ZBrush by Michael Ricks. Frankie comes with a wide array of facial morphs and can display many emotions. Billy - Based on the Daz3D Genesis character, Billy was created and sculpted in ZBrush by Michael Ricks and comes with a wide range of facial morphs. Epic Robot - This is a realistic robot character created by Epic Games for the hit virtual reality game Robo Recall. It comes with inbuilt animation and the sound of a 'roar.' By the end of this course, you'll be well-versed with facial animation in Unreal Engine 4 and be able to create impressive character animations.

What You Will Learn

Export your Daz 3D character to Unreal Engine 4 with morph targets and expressions of your choice
Use Puppeteer in Daz Studio to export morphs and animations
Import the skeleton, rigging, morph targets, materials, and textures of your Daz3D character efficiently
Find out how to locate the morph sliders and use them
Create a realistic blink animation for your character
Generate side-to-side and up-down eye movements for your character
Animate mouth movements for speech as well as expressions
Animate your character's head movements
Create believable, expressive facial expressions within Unreal Engine 4
Discover amazing new tools that integrate with Unreal Engine 4 such as Allright Rig and Akeytsu

Audience

This course is for beginners and intermediate-level animators who want to learn facial animation in Unreal Engine 4.

Approach

This course follows a project-based approach to help you render your animation in near real-time. With plenty of examples and detailed explanations, you'll be able to learn and get hands-on experience easily.

Key Features

Use the amazing toon house created by Michael Ricks in your scenes * Access original four rigged Daz toon characters created by Michael Ricks * Explore a rigged robot character featured as a complementary character from Epic Games

About the Author

Michael Ricks

Michael Ricks is an animator, VFX artist, and an independent filmmaker. He has been making films and creating visual effects for Indie films for over 15 years. Upon discovering Unreal Engine 4, Michael was overwhelmed by its realistic real-time rendering engine. In the past, it would take hours, if not days, to render each frame of an animation and it was impossible for an independent artist to complete a full-length film, but Unreal Engine 4 has leveled the playing field. It has enabled the storyteller to create their vision with their animation skillset. No longer will you be held back due to the limitations of technology - join Michael on this fun and creatively satisfying journey to explore the interesting UE4 toolset now!

Course Outline

1. Introduction To Unreal Engine 4 Cloth Animation

2. Cloth Animation In Unreal Engine 4

3. Advanced Cloth Animation

4. Setting Up Props For Cloth Simulation

5. Resources & Bonuses