How-to: Create new Anims for Unreal Skeleton

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello wonderful forum people. I’ve only made a few posts but so far the forums have been awesome.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on any resources about how to create new animations for the default unreal skeleton. I’ve been all over youtube, google, and searched the forums a bit and all I can really find is info on how to import new skeletal meshes that will use the unreal skeleton. Nothing on how to create new anims for the skeleton.

FYI I’m using blender. I’ve tried exporting the unreal anims to fbx and importing them to blender but absolutely nothing happens when I do that. I can’t export the unreal skeleton. And when I export the skeletal mesh I get just the geometry, but no bones. Seems like out of everything I’ve tried to figure out, this is the one thing that is actually impossible to accomplish without creating a brand new skeleton from scratch.

Thanks in advance!

2

Creating animations using the mannequin skeleton is a bad idea, you’ve got no controls, no IK and so on. It’s better to use a rig that already works in Blender (like UE4Tools) and retarget the mannequin animations to that rig. Or vice versa.

3

You’ll need to rig it for use in what ever program you are using to animate. If you use Maya or Motion Builder, contact me. I may be able to help you out. (I built a rig for it just yesterday:))

4

I’m using Blender, but thank you for the offer.

5

That makes sense. I am unfamiliar with UE4Tools. I’ll look into it though and see what I come up with. Thank you.