Epic Rant about the state of the Unreal Engine documentation about animation

Development Character & Animation
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Hi,

Warning: this is a rant.

I’ve been using Unreal for many years. I’m not an animator, but I’ve always kept an eye on the animation side of things.

I’ve been wondering about something for a very long time, 7 years to be precise. Why isn’t there some clear and official documentation about how to animate the standard Unreal Mannequin (UE4 or even MetaHuman?) into the most popular 3d packages our there (Maya, Blender, etc)?

A quick search with the term “MetaHuman” or “Unreal Mannequin” in the Unreal 5 or Unreal 4 documentation returns 0 results. Why is that so? (This might be a bug with the current forum search engine.)

About the Unreal 4 Mannequin, it is one of the most used skeleton used on the Marketplace. You’d think that by now, there would be an official page somewhere, explaining in detail the structure of this skeleton and the philosophy behind the structure and the bones and why Epic created it (i.e ik_hand_gun). Now, I know what these bones are used for, because I have spent countless hours searching on the web for answers, and like most of you, I found out what they are used for. But that is beside the point. This should be officially documented somewhere. Learning about the Unreal Mannequin and its structure and how to animate it, shouldn’t be a treasure hunt on YT or on obscure blog posts. This information should be readily available in the official documentation, with many workflow examples taking into account these various packages. I understand that many tools are used internally, and that there isn’t a single way to animate. But I think that it would very beneficial for the Unreal community to learn more about the internal practices of Epic on that subject (which tools are they using, why and how, when animating the standard Unreal Mannequin).

It’s almost as if this information needs to be secretive for some reasons or something. It shouldn’t be.

Another example of how poorly supported / implemented the documentation about animation is: we still have a stickied thread, from 2014, yes 2014 you read that right, where people are still asking question and finding bugs about the A.R.T tool. A tool that was created from a (now EX) Epic employee and that is pseudo supported, externally by this person. Every time I open that thread I cringe when I see people finding bugs and asking questions. This plugin is still officially on the Marketplace with the current description:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/animation-and-rigging-tools-faq-known-issues-and-feature-roadmap/2200/1942

“The Animation and Rigging Toolkit is used by Epic for all internal projects, including Fortnite, Paragon, Robo Recall, and Unreal Tournament. Autodesk Maya is required to use the tools (we use Maya 2016 internally), as is a Windows operating system. These tools allows you to rig and animate your own characters, with a robust suite of tools to make the process as easy as possible. These tools are fully compatible with the Epic Mannequin (he was built on them after all!), and all Epic skeleton animations available on the marketplace.”

Could we get some visibility about this please? And I don’t mean: what do you mean, you haven’t watched the video blog from March 2017 at the 2 hour 16 seconds mark that will give you the answer about your question? If Epic is still using this tool, and which version btw are they using V1 or V2, and with which version of Maya (still using 2016, in 2022?).

So my questions are:

  • Is Epic still using this tool? And if so, could you please create some official documentation about it?

  • Could you create some official documentation about how to animate the standard Unreal mannequin, with examples for various popular 3d packages (Maya, Blender, etc). Including best practices when using HumanIK (in Maya) or Auto-rig (Blender option). Examples that include animating / characterizing / auto-rigging or taking into account bones that are part of of the standard mannequin such as the ik_hand_gun.

  • If you are moving away from the standard mannequin (Manny and Quin) could you please create some official documentation about the MetaHuman bone structure and explain in details the role of each bone (not a 3 hour video, just an official page in the documentation that lay it out clearly and concisely)?

/rant over.

I apologize in advance if the information that I am looking for is already available in the official Unreal Engine documentation. Please kindly point me to where I can find it.

Thank you.

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Please Epic, share with us, the Unreal Community, your best practices, the tools, the plugins, the software and the workflows that you are using when creating animation for the Unreal Standard Mannequin and the MetaHuman Mannequin.

Thank you.

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I completely agree. I’ve been confused by this myself for many years. I actually came up with my own IK setup that works for me, and wish I could understand epic’s setup better so I can use the standard thing everyone else uses. Or maybe I’ll once and for all be comfortable knowing that I can’t use epic’s setup for my game due to my way of doing things.

Oh and don’t even get me started on how confused I am by the new corrective pose bones that come with the UE5 mannequin. I understand now it’s because it’s based on metahumans and that may be the way going forward. However my game is also going to have non-human monsters. How do I decide what bones and corrective poses to use for my monsters. Some of those poses are very random. There was one that had the character’s thigh twist by 10 degrees and was not even noticeable. My previous plan was to just reuse the mannequin skeleton hierarchy and add/remove unneeded spine and other bones. Now I’m super confused with all the extra

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bones.

I even forgot I asked this question years earlier:

I’ve been struggling along with ART 1 for the last few years myself, and have even used it with Maya 2020. I also tried ART V2. I used to make my own rig actually, but it was incredibly difficult to animate weapon reload animations so ART helped with space switching. ART messes up the maya environment somehow and I often have to reset my settings. It also requires Z up instead of the normal up, so all my models I built in the past were hard to open.

I’m actually excited about the new control rig in unreal and plan on no longer using maya to do animations at all. I just need a good environment to make weapon reloading animations and have good space switching, which unreal will make much easier. The rest is probably going to be mocap cleanup using maya’s own tools so I no longer need ART.

It took quite a lot of digging around, but I realized the standard control rig to use is the metahuman rig. The manny and quinn mannequins are based on metahuman, and their control rig is copied straight from that. The valley of the ancients demo also has that “ancient” robot, and it too is based on a metahuman character. Its control rig is copied from that. I started making my own control rig for the old UE4 skeleton, and was using the ancient rig as a reference. Then I heard metahumans come with a control rig so I imported one of those into my project. I was going to use that as a reference for how to build a rig instead, and it turned out it was identical. Then realized, oh, I should really just use the new UE5 mannequins and their control rigs from now on. Maybe ignore all those corrective pose bones too, since manny/quinn come with simplified models that don’t use the corrective bones either. Maybe my human marine character will use the new metahuman skeleton and all the corrective bones, but my monsters will be simpler. Probably for the best since I want many of them to exist on screen at once for you to slaughter. And painting all those weights is going to be a nightmare, but the results will be really nice if done right.

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My opinion is it seems the same old techniques and tutorials presented by Epic is still dated from 2014 and since released by Epic is accepted by most as to how things are done instead of being used as a base where the ideal should be “how do I do this better”.

What is lacking is an understanding of options based on the fundamentals of design and theory as to how things work and can be expanded. For example sync groups and markers can for the most part do away with the need for state machines but its function description is limited as to possibilities as to implementation .

To be fair the docs do a fair job of describing function and the tutorials are sound as far as the “make it work” requirements goes but 8 years on I feel there is a need for some form of structure as to creative design theory of the “advanced” nature that can only come from experienced yet difficult to put to paper with out first understanding the basics.

Maybe a forum to discus game design theory instead of yet another tutorial based on 1990 info?

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I couldn’t agree more. I’ve only been using Unreal Engine for a year or so, I work mostly in animation, and to find anything of value in that area is almost impossible, especially when to it comes to animating inside the sequencer.
I use Reallusions products, Mixamo and I’m trying to learn Omniverse’s Audi2face, but as for anything specific from Epic. Nowhere to be found.

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Another suggestion for Epic. It would be really great if there was someone dedicated to listening and answering to users in the forums. Someone that would take the feedback and interact with the community on a frequent basis. It often feels like we are in an echo chamber here and that we are left on our own, speaking amongst ourselves, but never really knowing if our feedback is heard from the people working with and making the Unreal engine. I understand that Epic employees have better things to do than spending their time answering questions on the forums. But how about having someone doing that full time?

I think that it would be very beneficial for the Unreal community, to be able to interact with someone managing the forums and to know that they are relaying the information to the Unreal team.

Thanks.

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The Open Source aspect of the engine is great, but I think that engaging more with the Unreal community through the forums would be a wonderful way to fully embrace this philosophy and expand their user base. Listen, share and communicate more. We all benefit from this approach ultimately. The current one-way communication approach is intimidating and not really inviting for new users and even for people like me, that are extremely familiar with the engine.

Thanks.

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Hello!

Thanks for taking the time to describe a lot of the issues in documentation and transparency surrounding the Mannequins and Animation in general.

Accessible, discoverable, and current(!) documentation and content examples are all very important to me personally and the UE teams. Updating our documentation to the standard the community deserves has been something we’ve been pushing on, and making great progress with the release of 5.0. That said, there’s still a lot of work to be done - and you highlighted some big gaps!

To address your specific questions:

  • Epic no longer uses ARTv1 internally. It remains available on the Marketplace since it still provides value to the community. However, it is no longer actively supported and we’ll update the Marketplace listing to reflect these changes.

  • We have been focusing on documentation around using Control Rig and Sequencer to animate the mannequins. Expanding this documentation to include common DCCs is also something we can consider.

  • With the release of Manny and Quinn in UE5, we’ve aligned the core hierarchy between MetaHumans and the UE Mannequins. Creating a good and concise breakdown of the skeleton is a great suggestion.

As someone who is very guilty of presenting 3+ hour-long livestreams (sorry!), I recognize the desire for more immediate, bite-sized info. We’re actively working on improving this process and hope to use this new Epic Dev Community as a platform to share more regularly with you.

Thank you for your honest feedback!

~ Jeremiah Grant, Product Manager - Rigging & Animation

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Well since someone is listening.

What I would like to see more of is lecture series explaining the different sub systems available and how they work within the context of purpose of design.

This for example starts out good but turns into yet another “tutorial” on how to make the buttons work.

What I want to know is “what” the program will do for me that I would have to figure out via discovery rather than an hours worth of options that I could figure out on my own. For example the “new” turn in place system was just touched on as a bullet point.

I understand the need for basics for the nubies but I’m sure there are more than one or two developers around here who knows what they are doing they just need to know what is available and the purpose it serves.

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Hi Jeremiah,

Thank you for your detailed answer and for giving us some visibility / clarity about the direction that Epic is going with the animation side of things. It is much appreciated.

Looking forward to the future Epic Dev Community content and the official documentation updates!

Thanks!

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I agree. Clear an concise documentation about the new features, documented in the official documentation and not only inside live-streams videos. Text written references that developers can look up quickly when needed. Deep dive videos are great companions for learning, but they aren’t a replacement for official and concise text based documentation. One of the main reason is that you can’t search the official documentation for specific terms / questions and get results from a video that contains these answers. Text based entries, contrary to videos that contains the information (hidden inside the videos), allows people searching for some specific terms to get more accurate search results about the subjects that they looking for.

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All great feedback and we’ll follow up with the teams about your Lyra example, regarding the “what” in addition to what we’ve shared.

Not a perfect solution, but we add captions/transcripts to all of our content which are themselves searchable, so if you find a video on the topic you’re needing an answer on, you could try searching the transcript for relevant discussions.

Thanks for all the feedback folks :slight_smile:

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Aren’t these livestreams on Youtube? Perhaps a good option if so would be using the Chapters feature over there to break the topics down further, so if someone has a specific answer they are looking for they can use the timestamps?

It’s no perfect solution, but would make finding the needle-in-a-haystack answer in a three hour long video a bit easier.

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I’ve been finding youtube videos that other people have made on Lyra too, which helps, but would also be great if it was done officially.

And yeah, my main source of info is usually the unreal docs themselves. I do watch those long youtube videos on 2X speed to get through them quickly, but it’s still a very long thing to go through when I just want to quickly reference something.

Videos are good too. Maybe if there was some kind of combination of where documentation articles mix in quick bite sized videos to explain something that can’t be explained in text well.

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I’m actually happy to see these bones were added. I think I don’t need a custom skeleton now.

Only issue is they’re not rigged in the control rig. Would be nice if the default rig had these set up. I guess I’ll have to make a modification to rig these up somehow, unless there are recommendations of how epic used them.

I’m hoping to not need Maya anymore for making weapon animations since ART is so complicated to use with all the deprecated support. The space switching features of the rigging seem like they’ll be perfect for hand animating magazine reloads and such.

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Well the IK bones is a legacy hold over from Unreal 3 and I’ guessing that some animator add them during the development of the base character rig as auxiliary bones to assist in animating left right hand handling of prop objects including weapons. Using these available bones when authoring the animations an animator can switch which hand is holding the weapon say for actions like reloading a bolt action rifle where the right hand needs to operate the bolt. With out them the weapon is more or less glued to the right hand.Why the don’t get a lot of documentation as their use in this manner is well known base on experience so gets overlooked as something that is assumed everyone already knows.

The control rig is also a feature that’s been used for a while now and in Unreal 4/5 I’m assuming is an uncompleted feature addition yet completed as to the intended use. If as a completed feature along the same line as done in Motionbuilder then most of the issues relating to off the shelf products and the need for retargeting would be a thing of the past.

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That’s right. I actually realized those bones weren’t on the skeleton itself.

I ended up creating a custom hierarchy after all. I was able to modify the control rig quite a bit to help make reloading animations and other things easier.

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In some 12 years they haven’t even bothered updating the animations to be correct so that the default skeleton retarget settings for the mannequin don’t have to be set to “sekeleton”, and you want updated documentation?
Good luck.

Any response they give where they say they listen to feedback is a blatant lie.

Unless they add the mannequin to fortnine and need to fix it up for it, nothing of it will ever get changed.

Best practices are:

  1. Don’t use unreal.

  2. Ignore unreal docs as they contain a bunch of ad hock, one off, completely against industry standards practices. And are mostly aimed at cinematics anyway.

  3. make your own skeleton based on what you need - And position the twist bones where they ought to be, not where the epic mannequin put them.
    (Even importing the basic blender rigify rig result is a better idea).

  4. the latest meta humans addition is essentially cinematics only. If even (Considering how they look, I wouldn’t even use them for that, but I have high standards).

  5. ignore any and all documentation on animation blueprints / montages etc, as its completely wrong.
    This also extends to all the tutorials they have out there (Look at them once, absorb the context, forget they exists and their details).

  6. The character BP is in charge of animations. Not the animation BP. Not the post process animation bp. Etc.

Bonus points:
(a bit out of scope but character related)

  1. goes back to 1: don’t use groom. Use hair cards.

  2. Make your own face morphs based on the ARKit demo mesh if you use that for face capture (This is usually tied to each actor’s expression anyway if you are doing real work and not playing around).

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