As you can see, Imported the UE5 manny skeleton into blender. It looks good and the pose mode works fine, but I have literally no idea how to make this skeleton actually useable in a workflow.
I was planning on pairing the skeleton to a new mesh so I could make brand new animations and other cool things without worrying about full IK retargeting.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of extra bones that don’t make sense to me and seem to make what I want to do an non viable. What are those giant bones that are bigger than everything else? why does the arms and legs seem to have extra bones?
Appreciate anyone who has insight on this. I just want to know if I’m going about things the right way or not.
Haven’t tried the ue5 mannequin. That looks about as good as the rest of the engine (Hint a gigabtic pile trash looks better, and at least it produces methane).
The giant bones should still be the IK bones.
You definitely need those, but can hide them. Nothing has to be painted to them.
The 20 or so bones along the arms/legs are probably trashable. Must be stuff used by control rig if i had to guess.
Get the mannequin out of ue4.
Go by its bone hierarchy.
Be aware that in blender you should not auto orient bones.
What you have there is likely not going to work in engine, unless they changed the mannequin skeleton that drastically (which is against epic policy, work? Are you kidding?)
Rotations must be kept identical for retargeting to work.
Try
On the older skeleton if you need to rig it for animating.
I don’t think ill ever support ue5 until it starts to actually work (maybe 2025 at this rate).