We originally considered the use of Epic’s official rig, however, this creates licensing problems since when you export a model from MakeHuman, the resulting model and rig become CC0 (in other words, copyright free). We could say “if you use the Unreal rig, that rig is copyright Epic Games and may only be used with Unreal Engine 4 blah blah blah” but this is not something we wanted to do. The alternative was to create a custom, UE4 compatible rig. So what are the aims?
Well, firstly, it should work with UE4. Which it does for the most part.
Secondly, it should support the standard animations from the Epic store. Allowing direct importing turned out to be quite tricky, but the retargeting tools do work and is simple to set up. With a better T pose (one designed for UE4) we should be able to get pretty decent results. I agree that in an ideal world, direct importing should work, but it is what it is.
Thirdly, it should work in all circumstances, desktop and mobile for UE4. This means staying under the 75 bone limit (which causes it to break on mobile). This may not seem like a problem now since the rig is quite simple, but once face bones and such are added we’d want to be careful to keep things working. So in the long run, this will hopefully be a more powerful rig than the Epic one, while remaining compatible with both mobile and desktop.
So rather than being a replica Epic rig, it’s more like a UE4 compatible rig. Also worth noting is that 1.1 is still unstable and there were/are known issues with the exporters.
I know we’d like to improve support for UE4, but given the team size, it’s just not possible to have someone dedicated to it. I can’t speak for Manuel, but I’m sure he’d appreciate it if we could get someone on the team wanting to improve the UE4 support. So if anyone is interested, let us know.