First Person Arms animations

I’m trying to make animations for the first person arms. I cant find a pre-made control rig for the first person arms that doesnt cost a lot of money. So I’ve made the animation with the full Manny control rig, and then retargeted it to the FP_Arms skeleton. After fighting with the fact that the skeletons all face positive Y, but are animated to face positive X for some reason, the animations just dont look the same way as in the third person set-up I’ve got for animating.
In my sequencer animating setup, I have the manny skeleton attached to a camera like the first person setup, centered properly as far as I can tell, but with my pickaxe animation, the pickaxe hits way off center on the retargeted first person arms, but looks right in the sequencer.
I’m starting to get incredibly frustrated with this whole thing. Is it possible I’ve got it setup wrong? Am I doing something wrong?

Pictures will help.

If your retargeting animations - you may want to make sure you have IK Goals setup if your having line up issues.

I just downloaded the Control Rig UE4 Template Project - Migrated the Rigs to My Project and now have a one to one control rig.

There would be no need to retarget these animations - the rigs are identical the only differences being the Models are different (e.g. deleted body)


It sounds like you should Select a new Skeleton rather than retarget - that way you can make all your models share the same base skeleton and if you do this to the animations as well they will all share the same animations.

My project currently has like 3-5 skeletons
3 of which are the old UE4 ones (MoCaps, Anim Starter Pack, and UE4 Mannequin)
2 are the UE5 Manny and Quinn

I recommend you duplicate a Skeletal Mesh or an animation and right click > Skeleton > Assign Skeleton and see if you can get both your ARMS and your FULL BODY to share the same skeleton - that way they will share the same animations

No more retargeting to deal with.


Depending on your situation you will probably also need to reparent the Animations as well - This might be the only real step you need to do.

I always recommend you duplicate one or two to test before doing a whole bunch