Hello, I’m a concept artist, I have some experience with rough modeling for my art, but recently picked up Unreal and I’m in love with it. I want to learn how to rig and animate.
I was wondering if you can advice me on some learning curve? Are there many technical difficulties into Importing a rig and animation from blender to unreal? Are there any things I should keep in mind before i start learning how to rig and animate in blender in order to export to unreal? Any advice’s you can give me in general? Thank you 
Thank you so much !! Ill check it out asap !
@Mariyan-Hristov
If you are going to do characters, forget the official plugins. They are a total mess.
For rigging the mannequin you can try my blender addon.
It just generates the Rig and allows for some animation features.
For importing new stuff into the engine, you literally just import it.
If you make your own, the skeletal structure doesn’t really matter - unless you plan to sell it on marketplace, in which case read the guidelines before working.
My 2c is to also “forget” blender for sculpting/working/painting.
Zbrush its where its at in terms of ease of use, features, detail, performance, etc.
Where blender is good at is to set up the UV after the mesh is finalized, rigging, and animation(s).
Usually you have to pass the final mesh to blender, unwrap it properly, then replace it in z-brush and produce the textures (normals, poly paint etc) from the extremely high def version with sculpted skin etc.
If you literally just need to create a rig and animate, then Blender it up. Use rigify.
The engine doesn’t take rigs (and they are pointless in engine anyway).
When you generate a rig on a custom skeleton you need to make sure the correct bones are marked as “deform” and that you only export deform bones to the FBX.
(My plugin goes around this by not modifying the unreal skeleton at all).
To bring in mocap, rokoko studio is “mhe”. The blender plugins they offer are sort of Ok though. It depends on what you expect. Its definitely nowhere near going to a real mocap studio…
I suppose my gripe with it is more about the suit performance itself: its fine for very basic stuff, just about anything where the hands do not touch your own body or need to reach the head, feet, etc.
Quite obviously, the production speed of basic animations between manual animation and donning the suit for recording is about 5 times faster - if disappointing when it comes to most common actions actors do without even realizing (scratching, for one).
My current process to this is, record in studio, clean up in studio, transfer to blender, retarget to correct skeletal mesh, rig, clean up, export to FBX for later use.
Generally takes about 1 hour for a walk cycle.
Vs animating it manually at around 3 hours…
Really useful info, cant thank you enough ! You are awesome
@MostHost_LA Can I ask you about export settings in Blender to UE?
What about them?
My plug in has 3 or 4 different presets avaliable by just clicking a button…
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To export a rig char from Blender to UE, for example, because I’m stuck with control rig and I can’t understand what is missing. Because the control I create on a bone then it’s not transforming it.
Usually you don’t export rigs.
They either stay in the DCC or if unreal has one you set up it just stays there.
With BoneBreaker and UE4curves installed you should be able to expor a character or animation from UE4 (note that the new mannequin probably won’t work).
Click the button to get it riggeed so you can work.
Do the work.
Then rxport it back to an animation so the engine can import it.
While old, the youtube tutorials are likely still relevant…
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@MostHost_LA
You’re right. I meant armature not rig sorry. Take a look, for example, after exporting my char, creating a control rig and a new cntrl on a bone, linking the nodes in the properly way, I’m able to transform the bone only from the control’s details panel and not directly in the preview. It’s too strange. I tried several times to follow step by step tutorials and guides (from UE doc too) but I’m stucked here.