I’m fairly new to the Unreal Engine side of game development, although I’ve been developing the backend for a multiplayer game that is designed around a server-authoritative architecture. I do most of the programming myself, and I’m now learning the Unreal side as I build out the client.
I’m currently trying to understand the best-practice approach for character skeletons, animation, and modular character customization in UE 5.8.2.
What I would like to accomplish is something along these lines:
• Have a small number of standardized body types — potentially 3–4 different body sizes/proportions.
• Each body type would have a common skeleton/rig and a shared animation system.
• Characters using that body type would reuse the same underlying skeleton, movement, and animation setup rather than having separate animation systems for every character.
• The player’s actual appearance would then be modular/customizable on top of that system — different heads, faces, hair, clothing, armor, body appearance, etc.
Essentially, I’d like to build the character/animation architecture once for each major body type and then have the individual playable characters be different visual configurations built on top of those foundations.
My goal is to avoid duplicating animation and character logic across potentially many different character appearances and races.
Before I get too deep into implementing this, I’d like to make sure I’m approaching it the way Unreal is intended to handle this.
What systems or workflows should I be researching for this type of architecture?
For example, should I be looking primarily at shared Skeleton assets, modular characters/Skeletal Meshes, Animation Blueprints, Linked Anim Layers, IK Rig/IK Retargeting, or some combination of these?
If anyone knows of a good tutorial, documentation series, sample project, or other resource that explains the best-practice architecture for building something like this, I’d really appreciate a recommendation.
I’m using Unreal Engine 5.8.2.
