Hi everyone I am trying to make a TPS game and have run into a problem: I can’t figure out how to animate the weapon (The shootergame example rifle) with the character with blueprints as I don’t have any animations nor do I have experience in making animations. any help is appreciated, thanks in advance
Animation is an extremely complex and intricate portion of game design requiring a lot of practice and expertise. To my knowledge you can’t simply create an animation or 3D model within the engine (Although that would be extremely useful and convenient for all game devs working in unreal I highly doubt something like that would be implemented in a later version.) If you are going to learn modeling and animation and you are working with a pretty tight budget I would recommend downloading Blender. Its free and contains the necessary tools for animation and 3D Modeling (For your case I would imagine you’ll be modeling a rifle/gun of some sort and then creating something like a reloading animation.) Although, since Blender can be very hard to learn especially at first I recommend following some Youtube tutorials on the basics and then advanced sections of Blender.
Hi Alec, thanks for your answer, unfortunately I have downloaded blender but simply cannot get my head around it and was wondering how the shootergame example did it with the mag being pulled out of the rifle, any ideas how they did it?
Also thank you for taking the time to respond it really helps 
All of Epics content is animated (and most likely modeled or retopo’d) in Autodesk Maya. An alternative to Blender which can be rather expensive especially to beginners and hobbyists (aka people who can’t push the cost onto someone else, like their company or customer).
There is a plugin called “Allright Rig” which may allow you to do some animating within UE4 but there’s nothing solid.
The most convenient and solid way to do animations is dedicated software, such as Blender, even though it will cost you quite a bit of time to learn the 3D workflow.
In the unreal shootergame example that is just an animation that was created in an external program and then imported into the engine. Afterwards there is some setup required to make the animation play at the desired time (I have included a link for a tutorial that helped me out a lot with that down below).
I can definitely understand your difficulties with Blender. (It’s not exactly very user friendly). Below is a few tutorial series that helped me with understanding 3D modeling and some animation in Blender:
Begginer tutorial series: Blender Beginner Tutorial Series (OLD) - YouTube
Intermediate modeling series: Blender Intermediate Modelling Tutorial - Part 1 - YouTube
Basics of animating in blender: Rig and Animate ANYTHING in Blender - YouTube
This is also a very good tutorial series that highlights how the process of actually getting animations to work correctly once you have imported them into unreal:
FPS animating gun tutorial: Setting Up Character Animations - #6 Creating A First Person Shooter (FPS) With Unreal Engine 4 - YouTube