I have a really hard time with animations and AnimBP for game design

Development Character & Animation
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I’m a game designer, not an animator and animation is the bane of my existence. I, for some reason, cannot do animations or work with animations without wanting to pull my hair out.

so I’m trying to build a game project prototype with mostly C++ code and use the default Manny skeletal mesh and import free animations. I’m trying to somewhat recreate resident evil 4 remake survival horror style third-person behind the shoulder gameplay and feel. I managed to the cameras and walking setup correctly but I can’t get aiming animations right. I tried importing Lyra Shooter sample animations and that became a big mess.

One developer told me to use cylinder and spheres as the character for prototyping or some low-poly mesh and make my own skeleton and animation in blender that is simple and easier to animate. I agree on this. But it can also break immersion since the character model and animations support the gameplay design.

Are there any good courses on animations for unreal? What is a good workflow for creating character animations and importing to unreal? Is this hard for everyone or is it just me?

Any advice on animations and getting better at understanding it more? I feel like that this part of game development in unreal is the one thing that is holding me back from finishing project or getting something worthy for my game design portfolio which is frustrating.

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No.

It’s all trial and error with 0 good sources and everything from epic or anyone at all on youtube just giving you the worse possible advice they can. Always.

Realistically you should either partner up with someone who is capable and willing - even if just to teach so you can learn. Or hire a dedicated character designer/animator for your project.

Other than that, you do or do not. There is no try. And that’s why you pull your hair out (hint, being bald helps with this and unreal in general!)

Additionally. Do not prototype off the unreal skeleton. It’s a horrible idea and all your work will go to waste the moment you put in a real character. We are easily talking 2 months of work you can easily throw away in 10 seconds flat here.

If you want to learn on your own, you take blender, load up something like my plugin (bonebreaker) or Mr mannequin - Or whatever else is in fashion in 2026? - and you use that to try and lessen the pain of animating clean stuff.

BUT, you use only your actual final character and it’s custom rig. This way you don’t waste any time and effort (and the rig does exactly what you need it to).

Things you need to look into are animation curves, turn in place tutorials from epic that last 3/4 hours and use curves creatively Nothing of which is actually going to work in the end mind you, because none of it is made to work in Fastapath. The idea behind it is what you are after here.

And ofc you need to start by looking up what fastpath is and why it’s important since it will set the basis by which you learn to properly code a character in unreal…

You may want to also combine this to the new trash that epic made like the “AI” pose selector and whatever else. Ofc, all of that is a sheer waste of time and effort since things epic makes never work right. Better option always to do your own thing from scratch…

If you make your own skeleton from scratch for instance, you’ll never have any issue… if you use Epic’s trash instead? Constant issues… and that’s just one of a billion related examples :wink:

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I think everyone struggles with animation. I spent 2 hours trying to synchronize the rotation of the minigun barrel with the shot. The difficulty level is the same for both simple and complex implementations. Unless you follow Epic’s method, you’re bound to have trouble.
No matter which tutorial you look at, you ultimately come to the same conclusion. That means you absolutely must use Animation Blueprints. And i think the majority of animation issues are with animation blueprints…
Since animations are controlled in a way that is unrelated to gameplay, it takes a lot of effort to synchronize them with gameplay. You cannot control even a single bone from a normal Blueprint. You must have an animation asset and drive it from a state machine.
Game designers like you will try to incorporate animation into gameplay, but Epic doesn’t think about that. They think animation is made by animators, and that animators just make animation without thinking about gameplay.
I’m not sure what you’re struggling with specifically, but if you’re struggling with branching animations, consider using a montage. This is one of the few ways to play animations directly from Blueprints.

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100% wrong and factually incorrect. Look up fast-path. Stop spreading misinformation. and also learn something. Learning is not a bad thing.

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If you want a decent tutorial series that teaches the basics of implementing animation specifically for locomotion, I recommend my friend Ethan’s YouTube series. It’s a bit outdated now, but I’m not aware of anything better. If you follow the series, use the animations that come with the Game Animation Sample Project (GASP), since they’re free. (You won’t need all the animations from GASP, of course, just a small subset.)

As for creating animations, I’m no animator, so bear that in mind. I, however, use Cascadeur because it’s easy to get started, and I can created results that are good enough, particularly for prototyping.

There is a lot to learn. Be careful to not overwhelm yourself. Take one step at a time. One thing learned today is one less thing to learn tomorrow.

If you have questions, you can ask on my Discord. I may not be good at too many things related to game dev, but I specialize in implementing animations for character locomotion.