Quick Guide

How to use the HEAT plug-in inside of Unreal Engine 5.

MAYA QUICK GUIDE VIDEO

Quick Guide video for HEAT Maya plug-in

OPENING THE HEAT PLUG-IN

• After loading the HEAT plug-in to Maya navigate to 'HEAT -> Launch HEAT Window' in the top menu bar.

HEAT menu drop down to launch plug-in window

• The HEAT window object will now appear within Maya.

HEAT plug-in window within Maya

• In the upper right corner of the plugin pop up you will see the 'Sign In' button (). Click this button and enter your login credentials.

USING THE HEAT PLUG-IN

• Once you have successfully signed into your HEAT account, the plug-in will automatically display the animations included in the 'Dashboard' section of your profile.

• The library viewer in the HEAT Maya plug-in works exactly like the web version of our platform. For more information on navigating our movement library refer to this section on exploring movements.

• Before importing animations we need a character to animate. Click the 'Import Base Character' button () in the bottom right corner of the plug-in window. This will automatically pull a HEAT base character model into your scene and select the skeleton of that model.

• Next find an animation you would like to import to your character.

• When you select the animation you will see the preview viewport window expand on the right hand side of the plug-in.

HEAT animation library within Maya

• Below the viewport you will see the 'Import' button (). With the character selected in your scene click this import button and your chosen animation will be applied to your character in the scene.

• The animation is now applied as keyframes to your character.

animation importing to maya scene

• When you import an animation into your maya scene the FPS of the project is automatically set to 60 frames to match HEAT animations, and Mayas time editor is muted so that there are no conflicts between animation clips and keyframed animations.

• Multiple animations can be applied to multiple characters in this method - simply select each character armature you would like to animated before importing an animation.

Due to the nature of keyframed animations, if you import an animation onto a character that is already animated the previous animation will be over-written. If you want to apply multiple animations to a single character you must use the Time Editor within Maya, which we will go over in the next section

Next we will go over using the Time Editor to blend multiple animations together.