Looking For Information on Animating the UE4 Skeleton

Development Character & Animation
1

TL;DR Can I make animations for the UE4 skeleton without using ART?

I’ve been searching all over Google and YouTube to try and find information on my question, but I haven’t found much. Maybe it’s because I’m new to this and don’t know the terminology or what to look up, but I’m going to try and explain myself the best I can. I’ve wanted to get into game development for awhile now, and I’ve finally set aside time to learn and practice. Blueprint stuff and some coding is easy for me, but now I’ve gotten to the point I need to start making animations and assets. I decided Maya LT is probably going to be the best tool for me and I’m currently in the trial period. But there’s one problem with LT, no python scripts. This means I can’t use ART to animate. Well I looked up stuff on converting it to MEL and I found the opinion that it would just be better to not use ART anyways and just learn how to properly animate because at some point I’ll have to anyways. That’s fine, there are plenty of tutorials on animation and rigging, and Maya 2017 has a cool little human IK thing to help teach you. But if I wanted to make my own characters and animate them my own way I wouldn’t be here. I want to use the UE4 mannequin with its skeleton so I can stay compliant with the marketplace, and still be able to use any animations I might buy from there. Every tutorial I have found on animating the UE4 skeleton always uses ART, so I’m wondering do I have to use ART to animate the UE4 skeleton? If not I’d really appreciate if someone could be me to any source of knowledge.

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No you dont, ART is just a certain rig built around that skeleton … Just a rig (and some other useful tools but we arent talking about that right now). You can certainly do your own rig and you dont need much to call it a rig. Look up some rigging tutorials on the autodesk maya learning channel on youtube - they have a lot of really useful information aimed for beginners. You can follow that tutorial, using your own (UE4) skeleton and that would be it. Should take you like one weekend to build a decent rig like that.

3

I suggest you to use Motion Builder, it works great for both mocap tweaks and standard animation, and once the skeleton is characterize the rig is built automatically with a button.

ART is pretty cool, but for tweaking mocap animations is a real pain, mostly to the way the rig is built and how the controls are setup ( lots of knee and elbow flipping ), so you can just use HumanIK instead in MayaLT, is just a matter of working with it for a while and you get used to it :wink: