Wow, fantastic work, think you may have spent a lot of time for this, i mean so many people try to figure out with ue mannequin for good workflow with the skeleton and animations for that to manipulate, thank you so much.
@Grot13 i found a other way to install it. Unzip only the blank files and create in blender addons a newfolder, put it in and you have it for not looking correctly of the specific versions.
Try it, hope it helps.
No prob, i am glad to read this, nice :D.
I’m wondering it that was an old or a new version of blender 2.8. You may want to download and install the newer one as they addressed some of the rigify bugs in it.
I should do the same to see if everything installs fine too…
Definitely an outdated version. The error says that the mechanics to get the cursor on the center of the screen don’t exist…
Glad you got it working.
I need to push another update and also make a usage video.
In short. I find using the pole rotation to be a lot better when It comes to animating and moving the arms/legs.
There are also some somewhat obscure features (to me) that are important like having the hand auto follow the parent and removing the stretching.
Ideally I want my addon to take care of all of these in a one shot process. Realistically, the functions for switching poles are locked behind the rigify custom script and I can’t seem to have them trigger via code.
Might just need to be scripted differently though.
Another thing that doesn’t happen but should is armature curves. Blender does not yet support those, and the unreal editor for curves is trash (unless there is a better way I haven’t found to edit anim curves you can’t even copy and paste).
The morph targets work on a mesh and they do import fine as curves, however they require you import the mesh and get tied to it so deleting the mesh removes the curve.
Anyway, I’ll start with pushing version 3.1 and addressing what I can of the follow/stretch/pole issues and move on from there.
ps: currently if you author your own animation starting from the mannequin itself you should really click “follow my anim” before export so that the foot/hand IK bones get placed.
that’s going to be changed shortly as well to where you won’t need to as is has seriously driven me crazy with having to re-import over 20 animations that I thought were fine…
Give your self a goal and produce a solution.
Version 3.4 is now live with the changes mentioned above.
3.4 for blender 2.8
With this latest update the joint rotation is automatically set as the pole. This makes it a lot easier for us to animate things as it gives more control then attempting to rotate the shoulder joints. The IK bones will now automatically follow anything - even if you author your own animation from scratch.
Next up is figuring out animcurves in the FBX.
Just adding an “into the night” “down the rabbit hole” post to claim the start of some success with the whole curve process.
This “information” that is however currently empty is correctly importing from an FBX file after modifying the FBX import IO files.
As soon as I manage to import the curves along with it, the issue of importing from ue4 to blender is resolved - though I still have no idea on how to provide this into the plugin, I might end up having to package a separate plugin to overwrite the default FBX import or run alongside it if possible.
Bingo.
Part 1 worked (though I don’t know how damaging this treatment is to all the other FBX files one can import).
Just wanted to share that I was finally able to export custom animation curves inside the FBX file from blender.
they arent importing into unreal or back to blender just yet but its probably because of a type mismatch or something I overlooked. The data it self is almost a 1:1 of the original file, so this is really looking like it’s happening 
And here we go.
New example video of the features that will eventually be released after some thorough testing.
I’m new to animation in UE4, and having a difficult time understanding the blender pipeline in general. The idea of this plugin is that you use it to create an animation in blender (with the plugin), then it exports a UE4 skeleton compatible animation? (Then I’m assuming you just need to have a skeletal mesh that uses the UE4 skeleton ready to go, which is a whole separate thing.)
If you don’t have this plugin what is the pipeline? You have your mesh using the UE4 skeleton, export it to blender, animate it, and import just the animation to UE4 and hope nothing breaks along the way?
Pretty much. But you could also re-target your mesh to get the same animation you produce or correct with the plugin to work with your cusom mesh.
It becomes especially easy if you make a custom character to rig it however you prefer and add as many bones as you really need and then just re-target it to the motion you already authored or got off the marketplace.
all you need to do is match the initial A pose general position or switch both to a t pose to get near perfect results.
Hey, Looks good!
Can’t wait to test it.
Another idea what i have is, when it’s possible to bind snapping points for a weapon to animate with this, don’t know if it is possible.
Unfortunately no way to import sockets, but I was considering making a button to active a “follow this” type function between selected objects and a selected Rig part… I would have to test how all of that works ofc…
I’ve test it out a little bit, but think there is a little problem with streching by now.
Here is pic:
I have it test with the version 2.79b version of blender with your last update.In Blender 2.8, i leave the plugin version of 3.3 and there is all good!
Ok, solved by my self, i guess to use the ik settings 
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Current version should be 3.4 for the latest blender 2.8
Updates will be made avaliable after unreal licensing approves logo usage and other things they have to approve.
I believe around the 11th this month to coincide with a possible official release of blender 2.8
Looks like a rather cool add-on for Blender! How can I use it to rig/export my own character, so that when I import resulting FBX into UE4, I can basically use any of the existing Mannequin-compatible skeletons/anims with my character model as-is (without retargeting in UE4) ?
You can try to weight paint your own mesh manually around the unreal bones, but the short answer is you shouldn’t.
Instead use this plugin to match your mesh/skeleton Pose to the Mannequin A Pose exactly - so there won’t be issues when you re-target.
You only need to match the rotations, not the translations. And ballpark is not good enough. You may want to take the rotations from the deform bones of the rig manually (bone roll) and apply them to your own mesh.