Hello everyone, I make Lego games within UE5 and this problem has had me stumped for a while. Long story short: I want a 2D lego face rig in UE, not sure how.
Essentially I want to animate the faces of my characters. Nothing massively complex, just something to give them emotion whilst they’re walking around or idling or whatever. I have a face rig in Blender that basically uses Planes with shrinkwrap modifiers. Here comes the problem: I have no idea how to get this into UE5.
I’m not exactly sure how much I want out of this but here are somethings I would like to achieve if at all possible:
- Bring the face rig into Unreal somehow and slap it on the character’s face.
- Animate the face:
- Ideally I would like this to be procedural based on some preset poses I have in Blender, simple example in attached video. If I can’t get this I will settle for baked out animations.
- Customisable colours like in the original rig.
- As I may also have multiple characters it would be handy to be able to swap out the currently used rig at runtime with custom shapes, colours etc. made in blender
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So far I’ve attempted to export the rig from Blender → UE and creating a control rig from that. Only problem is the meshes used for the rig come in like this which isn’t the best
Attempting to add this to the character also yields no results with the bones being visible but no geometry
More updates
I figured out that the reason it was looking jank before was because it was attached to the head model in blender and the shrinkwrap modifier was basically being included in the export. So I deleted the head (which I’ll use later in the character anyway… somehow) and re-exported the face rig
I have begun creating the control rig. some things are a little off between Unreal and Blender (bone parenting etc.) but other than that it’s a start.
There are still some outstanding issues:
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Eyes: In Blender the state of the eyes being open or closed is controlled by basically a boolean cube which just hides the part of the eye that it’s covering, whilst I’ve setup the control for this in Unreal like I have for the other bones, it currently does nothing and I’m not sure why
-
Eyelashes: for some reason the eyelashes are massive and are a long way from the rig itself, again, not sure why.
- Teeth: I think the teeth are the random lines that have decided to jump into next week. Not sure what to do about these entirely or why they’ve decided to do that randomly.
Update: Today I’ve been trying to figure out issues with the parts of geometry that weren’t previously visible. Starting with the eyes I’ve tried deleting the boolean modifiers that caused them to be hidden in Blender, I figure I can hide them in Unreal somehow. After a bit of messing I finally imported them only for them to be massive like the eyelashes.
Another update. I have found out that the teeth and tongue are controlled by textures and not meshes. I have imported these textures into Ue and they connect up fine for the most part but I’m not sure how to control them with the control rig.
