Robots Blossom – Project Update 019

Working with morph targets in Unreal Engine 5 vexes me.

For my previous animated short Robot Eyes, I followed a tutorial from StyleMarshal showing how to add morph targets to Sequencer. A big thank you to StyleMarshal for creating a tutorial on this topic. I had a hard time tracking down any tutorials. I’m sure I must not be asking the right question. The tutorial got me to the project finish line but this method seemed to be hit or miss for me. I found that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t and I couldn’t see a pattern that helped me discern the cause. 

For my current animated short, Robots Blossom, I went back to the same tutorial but couldn’t get it to work on my actors in Sequencer. Again, I couldn’t figure out why. So I searched for more tutorials. Funny enough, StyleMarshal to the rescue, again. I found another tutorial StyleMarshal posted that shows a different solution for adding morph targets to Sequencer. Simply put, use Edit With FK Control Rig. I genuinely thought I had previously looked for a solution using one of the control rigs to expose morph targets but somehow missed something. But there they were. Super simple. Well, I did have to take a few steps to get there but it was straightforward enough. I had been using IK Control Rig to animate my actors because I was working with hands and feet. BTW, morph targets are not exposed when you bake to an IK Control Rig. Once I had these animations complete I baked to animation sequence. Then I deleted all the control rigs and current animation sequences for the actors and replaced them with my new animation sequences. Then I selected Edit With FK Control Rig and there were the morph targets. Huzzah!

I need to do some additional lighting for the eyes to highlight the morph targets animation but that should be about the last thing before doing a final full render and moving completely into post-production in DaVinci Resolve.

The screenshot below shows my second full render pass which ended up taking about 3 hours to complete today. I’m sure I have overshot the fidelity settings on a myriad of things that probably won’t make a visual difference. I definitely want to keep improving my ability to balance render times and render quality. I did this pass just to make sure I got rid of all the flashing light spots that had shown up in some of my smaller test renders.