Hello, I’m debating between Unity or Unreal to get my characters up and running about. I’ve got absolutely no programming experience just modeling and some animation. Also, these characters aren’t rigged yet, so I’m wondering how I’d go about that. Does Unreal require a certain setup? I’m using Autodesk Maya 2016. And another thing, my models are around 30k polys. Is that okay for game characters?
You can use whatever skeleton/setup you want for Unreal. HOWEVER, if you rig according to the default Unreal mannequin skeleton, all the starter pack animations will work with your character, which will help a lot in getting running/jumping/etc going in games.
Separately, if your skeleton looks mainly like the Unreal mannequin skeleton in structure and hierarchy, then you can also re-map existing animations to your skeleton from the Unreal set, which lets you have a differently-proportioned skeleton, but still use the default animations.
If you’re building a fully-custom game (AAA style) then you’ll likely end up defining your own skeleton/s, and make all your own animations from scratch, and build your own character animation blueprints, at which point you don’t need to worry about how Unreal samples do it, just about how you want to do it. But with that flexibility comes the fact that that’s a lot of additional work!