Hello everyone!
I am trying to import this rig with the controllers into UE 4.26, all I get is the skeleton, I tried to convert the controls to mesh, splines, etc, no candy so far!
So I am wondering if it is even possible to have an advanced rig, with advanced facial controls to be able to animate a character directly into UE, and if so, is there any resources or tutorials on the subject?
Thanks in advance for any comments and or replies!
Gilles
The realtime rendering engine plays animations on a skeleton.
A rig is typically used in external tools to create animations for that skeleton. Eg Max, Maya, Blender, Houdini…
Generally speaking rigs do not transfer.
These days, 4.26 also has its own Control Rig. Eg you can build up a similar complex rig in ue. And you can use it at runtime, or even animate using sequencer. TBH one approach is to just ditch the blender rig and just animate directly in ue4.
Summary
There is no exporting the rig from blender. It is blender specific. You can use the Blender rig to create animations in blender and export the animations.
As a side note, exporting onto the UE4 Mannequin has additional considerations that make this adventure a little harder.
Thanks for the reply!
I looked into the 4.26 rig, it’s a fun rig, but not the kind of rig professional animators use, plus there is no facial rig, It’s obvious that a Blender rig won’t work in UE, rigs are native to the DCC app.
So my question is more like, is it possible to build a similar rig in UE, as far as I can tell it’s not, but I want other opinions on the subject!
Gilles
Unreal engine is a game engine. It is not a 3d authoring tool, that already exists as OptimisticMonkey points out.
You can check out Artv1 on the marketplace, it handles a lot of the rigging stuff but you still need maya.
There is also the control rig which is a fairly recent addition to the engine. Compared to animation specific software it is very limited.
The engine is fine for importing in whatever kind of animations you make. It will allow you to manage them and modify them. Still, it is best to author them outside the engine is software like maya or blender, where you have your built control rig with all of its solvers, constraints and other logic to handle the animation creation process.
On 4.26 they also added a Full Body Ik node that is quite handy, and in general you can build an advanced rig using the Control Rig.
Taka a look at the Meerkat demo made by Weta, the rig is quite advanced and is a great example that you can study.
The nice thing about the Control Rig, is that you can theoretically reuse the entire rig on different characters, even if the skeletal hierarchy is different, so goodbye building a rig from scratch ( or almost ) in Maya/3ds/whatever 