Question 1

Add the metahuman to the demo project

Accepted Answer

MetaHuman rigs are more complicated than the UE Mannequin, but here we walk you through the steps to animate a MetaHuman with PoseAI.  We assume you start with our demo project for UE5, and have familiarized yourself with the animation blueprint and third person character controller blueprints from the demo.

Import your Metahuman as per the Epic instructions on adding a MetaHuman to a project.  Make sure to enable all features required by MetaHuman on import

Question 2

Create an animation blueprint for the correct skeleton

Accepted Answer

1. open the metahuman blueprint (something like BP_AvatarName)

2. select the Body component (components are usually on left side)

3. find the skeletal mesh in details (something like "m_med_nrw_body").  Click the search to button to find it in content browser

4. go to content browser, select the skeleton, right click and create asset - new animation blueprint.  Call it something like ABP_AvatarName

Question 3

Setup the Metahuman character blueprint

Accepted Answer

1. go back to your metahuman blueprint, select body component again, in details set animation mode to "Animation Blueprint", and anim class to "ABP_AvatarName" or whatever name you created

2. under components Add the Pose AI Movement component to the metahuman

3.drag the PoseAIMovement component into the event graph, drag a pin off to create a Add Source Next Port node and connect it to Event Begin Play.  Also create a Close Source node and connect to Event End Play (you may need to add Event End Play to graph)

4. create a handshake structure as input for the Add Source node.  You can copy this from our demo as the settings should largely be the same.  Importantly rig should be set to "MetaHuman"

5. save the rig blueprint

Question 4

Setup the new animation blueprint

Accepted Answer

Edit ABP_AvatarName which you created.

Basically here you should copy the structure of our ABP example in both the anim and event graphs.  The important thing is the LiveLink node feeding into the output pose in the AnimGraph, which needs to have the correct LiveLinkSubjectName.

You could manually set this everytime you begin playing the scene (at which point the dropdown is populated by the engine), or you can use our template  to automate that for you.

Make sure instead of casting to BP_ThirdPersonCharacter, like in our example, you instead cast to BP_AvatarName in the event graph.