Very short version of this thread: If I wanna have a rigged character (with face rig) in UE, including a proper control rig. Then is building everything myself (although I have no idea how) the best solution? YES/NO
Longer version:
I spent some time figuring out the best practices but this is kinda messy. I wanna rely as little on anything outside UE as possible. So I don’t know how all of this was done previously but I somehow cannot imaging animation in a different program and then importing all of this, going back for little changes, reimport, etc., it seems like a nightmare to me. Also I’ve seen someone animation in Blender, importing and the translation didn’t work 100% so he had to readjust it.
So what seemed quite promising at first was to reuse the rig of the manequin. But: no face rig. There’s probably an option to just use the base rig and make an additional face rig, but that looks pretty tedious too.
The new modular control rig of 5.4 looked kinda hot too, but as far as I can see, it has no face rig yet either.
So getting an existing rig from metahumans or something similar still looks most promising to me. HOWEVER: I just read in another thread below, that the metahuman skeleton is very/way too complex for UE and thereby probably for my needs too.
Another thing I shortly looked into is transfering the Blender addon riggify’s rig and control rig to UE, however I fear that this will be more complicated, since it’s not exactly build for UE, which is why I say I wanna do as much as possible in UE itself. Yet, their skeleton has exactly to right complexity for me.
… something makes me guess that you will suggest me not using anything prebaked but build everything myself. ^^
What also might be relevant is that I’m not doing any mo cap. I wanna do everything manually. But I wanna be able to easily transfer the rig and animations to other characters.
Would be nice, if you could lead me the way through this jungle … thanks!