Installing Unreal Engine plugin
AImationUEPlugin (WIP)
This project package contains C++ classes supporting LiveLink for AImation Studio connection, together with simple examples of usage.
To use the plugin in your project, copy the Plugins/AImationStudioConnector directory into:
[your project]/Plugins/AImationStudioConnector
or[Unreal Engine root]/Plugins/AImationStudioConnector(Installs for all projects to use).
If your project already contains Plugins folder, enter the folder and copy just the AImationStudioConnector folder
To connect with AImation Studio, open the Live Link window in UE (menu -> Windows -> Virtual Production -> Live Link).
In this window, select Add Source -> AImation Studio and input your connection settings.
The default connection settings are for connecting to AImation Studio running on the same machine.
After adding the connection, you can see some additional settings in the right-hand pane.
The most important of those is the Data for Retargetting flag, which changes the data format sent by AImation Studio.
The difference between both options will be explained in a moment using examples.
On the bottom-left pane, there is a list of “live link subjects” created by the connection.
Our plugin exposes two subjects: “Body“ with 35 bones and “BodyHands“ with 77 bones.
At most, one of those is active at a time, depending on what track was selected in AImation Studio.
For now, we do not support sending only the hand animation data via LiveLink.
The project contains two examples of ways to use the data received via LiveLink, presented as actor blueprints.
The “Direct Animation Actor“ is designed to be used with “Data for Retargetting“ set to false.
In this mode, AImation Studio transmits both positions and precalculated rotations of bones in their local coordinate system.
However, as bone rotations are calculated for a given skeleton, this mode only works for skeletons with a fixed bone structure (as seen in Direct/AI_Rig skeletal mesh).
The animation blueprint used by this actor simply evaluates the Live Link pose using built-in UE logic.
As it does not support finger animations, this blueprint works only with the “Body“ live link subject.
The second example, “Retargetted Actor“, utilizes UE IK retargeting tools and is designed to be used with “Data for retargeting“ set to true.
In this mode, AImation Studio transmits only the positions of bones in world coordinates.
The retargeted actor works with both “Body“ and “BodyHands“ live link subjects.
To select which subject is used, the actor exposes a boolean flag “With Hands“.
This influences which IK rig is used to process the data.
There are three rigs: one for the initial torso setup, one for the body without fingers, and one for the body with fingers.
The target skeleton structure is UE’s Metahuman model.
As additional options, the actor exposes an enable/disable flag and a scaling parameter to be used when there is a height mismatch between the captured model and the mesh.
The estimation model currently used by AImation is not designed to properly animate the head, which can cause some problems when rigging.
That’s why you can also adjust the head alpha parameter (the lower the parameter, the less influence it has on the neck bone position) and the head Z adjustment (influences how the center of the head is projected from the positions of the ears and nose, moving it in the front-back axis).
The last two parameters may need to be adjusted for a given recording, as the approximated head position may be influenced by lighting, camera angle with respect to the head, ears visibility, and so on.
