I love making games with unreal but my main issue with unreal is I just suck at modeling and animating so I can never make anything and the game just feels off when it doesn’t have animations
Check out the Market Place for some models and animations. If you just need something as a placeholder for testing, etc you could even just use the Animation Starter Kit by Epic.
The odds of finding someone willing to create models and animations for you for free is slim to none. It’s time consuming and one heck of a fine art. (It’s my personal weakness too lol)
Edit: Might be worth checking out the community content thread as well for offered free assets:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/forumdisplay.php?12-Community-Content-Tools-and-Tutorials
Same here.
The marketplace has excellent assets, though it can be difficult to scour through the many options available to find the occasional free ones (probably done on purpose by Epic).
For me Mixamo was a real life saver. It’s an awesome (free!) service for quickly getting your own main character (or any humanoid NPC for that matter) up and running in terms of model, animations and textures.
What type of models do you need, I would be happy to make some models for you to use in your games
The hard part is getting the skeleton rig to match the animations correctly. There should be better plugins and 3rd party software. Mixamo, Daz3d, Blender and the like are not well streamlined whatsoever. There’s a major gap in the market if you think about it.
What is your issue with Mixamo?
I think it is a great piece of software and provides any animation you would ever need for a game, and you can always customize the animation inside unreal engine…
My issue with Mixamo is I started my project before they dropped support for UE4 and changed the format, but for someone starting from scratch they would have no issue using all the new mixamo .fbx formats.
(My issue is that I was using the ue4 skeleton for all of my mixamo characters and when they changed the mixamo characters skeleton it was no longer compatible with the ue4 skeleton upon import (without going into a 3d modeling software and changing all the bone names, but someone is helping me out with that already - and that is a problem particular to my design choices - as I mentioned if you start a new project from scratch ontop of the mixamo skeleton you will be fine[and don’t need to have the UE4 skeleton as mixamo has every animation “you would ever need” for a game…]).
But you are right about the GAP, if someone were to provide something like FUSE does but with full support for UE4 I would buy it without blinking.
Blender’s workflow is really easy, it’s just you gotta be careful about unit scaling, bone axes and export options. I would really recommend Blender, it’s free. You can buy 3rd party animations then model and rig the character on your own. It will look original enough and would be easier than making all of the animations on your own. Animation and Skeleton retargeting from blender to ue4 -> https://youtu.be/r986GDnpvXw