Blender to Unreal character creation and animation

[Ares9323]

Here’s an example that I would use to quickly setup a human character:

IF YOU ARE GOING TO CREATE THE ANIMATIONS:

1. Sculpt your character
2. Rig it with whatever skeleton you like
3. Create animations for it in Blender, or use motion tracking
4. Import it in unreal.

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IF YOU WANT TO USE BOUGHT ANIMATIONS FOR THE UE4 MANNEQUIN:

1. Place an UE4/UE5 mannequin in blender and model your character on it, this will save you a lot of time posing it later, using the default skeleton really helps you a lot while retargeting animations (especially fingers could get really messed up and require a lot of tweaking)
2. Rig your character to an UE compatible skeleton (you can use automatic weights and adjust it with weight painting)
3. Import it in Unreal and select the default skeleton (do not create a new one), if you are using a UE5 template project you can find the UE4 and UE5 Skeletons respectively in:

/Content/Characters/Mannequin_UE4/Meshes/SK_Mannequin_Skeleton.uasset
/Content/Characters/Mannequins/Meshes/SK_Mannequin.uasset

4. All the animations for the UE mannequin should work “out of the box” for your character

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IF YOU WANT TO USE ANIMATIONS MADE FOR SKELETONS THAT DON’T SHARE THE SAME BONES :

1. You need to set up retargeting, in UE5 you need to create an IK rig for each skeleton that you need to retarget:
   

   

2. Right click the Pelvis bone and set it as retarget root, it’s not always called Pelvis (Like in this case, it’s Waist), so be careful:
   

   

3. Now you need to crate chains between corresponding bones between the two characters, the fundamentals are: Spine, Head, LeftArm, RightArm, LeftLeg, RightLeg (you can skip fingers if you want the hand to always be open or closed, like when holding a sword).
   To create a chain select the bones and right click one of them, and select “New retarget chain from selected bones”, I remapped it to CTRL+R to speed up the repetitive process.
   

   

4. Save the IK Rig and repeat the operation for the other skeleton

5. Create an IK Retargeter and select the SOURCE IK rig (the one that has the animation that you want to retarget)
   

   

6. Set the target IK Rig
   

   

7. Check that the chain names match, Auto-Map Chains works really bad if the names are not IDENTICAL, so be careful, it is not smart at all (at least the old humanoid rig was recognizing several bones names).
   

   

8. You can preview the retargeted animation in real time before exporting it, you can select multiple animations to export at the same time.
   

   

9. Stuff like Root Motion, Posing, and other stuff will be covered in the video that I hope to complete as soon as possible (I’m trying to cover as many things as possible and it’s hard to avoid error, especially when you are not a native english speaker)