Problem
Hey! I’m trying to make some placeholder animations for my game prototype because the ones on mixamo aren’t cutting it for what I’m doing. I was looking for a way I could quickly make some placeholder animations so I could get back to working on the prototype proper. I’m currently using the Quinn mannequin, and was looking to animate her in Blender. I have 3 solutions in mind but I’m confused on each and every one of them.
1. Animating Directly in Unreal Engine
Unreal doesn’t seem to have many tools to make game ready animation, and I couldn’t find many super relevant tutorials or documentation to go down that route.
2. Animate the character in Blender
In my research, I saw that you can’t export the rig from unreal to use in blender, and was instead directed to the addon Mr. Mannequin for blender, which lets you create a pre-rigged mannequin for the game. Here’s the PrismaticaDev tutorial I used. I was able to animate it but when I imported the animation to Unreal, the mannequin’s size got really big and stretched out like this:
Before:
After:
It looks like there’s an update for the addon on the way, but it could just be an incompatibility with UE5. I tried exporting with Blender 3.6 LTS as well as 4.3 to no avail.
Can I somehow use another premade rig of Quinn in unreal somehow that I can transfer back into unreal?
3 Using a different character
I was considering switching to a different placeholder character and finding a pre-rigged character on fab or something. I’m a little nervous about this option because it would most likely break all the premade animations already in the third person template as well as possibly break mixamo animations if I want to use some of those. Could I just download a humanoid dummy on mixamo or somewhere else and be okay?
End
If anyone has any recommendations for how I should proceed or a workflow I could use to make some quick placeholder animations, I would really love suggestions. I feel like I’m totally out of ideas for how to proceed, thank you so much.
