Thanks for the Hexagon tip, it might turn out to be more useful for occasional hobby developer than Blender. The problem with Blender is that I tend to forget all those convenient shortcuts and workflows after not using it for a few weeks. Something more intuitive would work much better. It is good to have intuitive and simple menus and buttons to look at and immediately remember what is what.
It would be so great to have a series of tutorials for creating a character for Unreal Engine, using free or reasonably cheap tools (at least to keep in $200 budget). I would donate for the tutorials themselves, if they show the entire character customization process from the beginning to the end.
Let’s say, we start with a DAZ or MakeHuman base model, then customize it (body, face, custom hair, facial hair), then add some customized clothes, then set up textures etc. so they can be translated to UE4 PBR materials, then add body animations (can use BVH freebies etc., but it is important to show how to deal with possible incompatibilities such as root bone issues, different skeletons etc.) and facial animations (blend shapes) accounting for clothes and facial hair (the beard should move when character talks), then create some LOD levels to make it possible to have 10 - 20 characters in a game simultaneously, and then get it all working in UE4 with full compatibility, so I can use UE4 IK constraints on animations (to climb stairs or shake hands with another character etc.) and physics. Also some optimization techniques - reusing the same skeletons, animations, facial morphs on multiple characters etc.
This entire process is complicated and there are so many ways to go wrong just because you forget to click some checkbox along the way.
There are lots of separate tutorials for different things, but the problem with them is that 90% of them is just a “proof of concept” - here’s how you do this single thing; but if you want to integrate it into your pipeline then look for other tutorials. It all often just does not stick together because of using different tools, different software versions, different models, rigging, animation techniques etc.
I haven’t even found such a paid complete course on sites like Pluralsight, lynda, Gnomon, 3Dmotive (maybe I missed some…). So, yeah, I guess I’ll have to put it all together bit by bit through lots of trials and errors.