Tips for animating eye and mouth movements separate from body movements

[CallMeMamaLuigi]

Hi! So I’m creating my own characters and animations in Blender. However, I want the eyes and mouth to be moved separately from the rest of the body, and I have no idea where to start with that. For example, the character may be walking or running in-game. Whilst they are walking or running, I want their eyes to be focusing on different things happening around them. So they may look at other players in front of them, or items around their area. Same goes with the mouth, maybe if they see an item they open their mouth out of happiness . Whilst those are happening though, I don’t want the walking / running animation to be interrupted.

I was thinking it might be easier to have the eyes and mouth be separate models, but that would be very hard for the mouth as it may mess up the rig due to the mouth rig having some influence on the sides of the head as well.

I’m very new to setting up animations in Unreal in-general, which makes it even harder to understand where to start with something like this. If anyone has any advice on how to achieve something like this, I would very much appreciate it!

[Enter_Reality]

In the Animation Blueprint there is a useful node called Layered Blend by Bone.
It allows you to have the B slot animation to affect only a specific joint ( or joints ) and their children, so if for example you want to have lipsync animation on your mouth/lips, you need to set the “father” joints as the rule inside the Layered Blend by bone node, so that the mouth animation will work together with the body animation ( which I guess will ne inside slot A ).
For the eyes you can do the same thing, or simply use the Look At node, which allows you to do what you described for the eyes ( look at towards a specific direction ).

There are several examples of both around, so take a look at some video and try to use those nodes.

[CallMeMamaLuigi]

Thanks so much! That’s very helpful, I’ll be sure to take a look at that