Mostly you will create a Rig object in the engine and specify which chain of bones match across the two characters. At this time I don’t have any UE5 specific retargeting tutorials. For the time being you will need to rely on unreal documentation or other sources to do retargeting on the engine side.
On the Blender side things remain as they are shown in the videos wrt to the UE4 mannequin.
Uefy v2.5 is currently under development with support for the newer manny and quinn mannequins with higher bone count. Once that is released, I will begin work on new videos specific to unreal engine 5.
Thanks for getting back to me, there isnt really any UE5 documentation, i looked, it all refers to 4.27 documents. what you’re saying is, do it the old way with IK rigs?? i hope you release 2.5 soon, i really like the concept of your project, was hoping to use it sooner. guess i’ll have to download 4.27?? would that be my best choice of actions? thank you for your time.
You can check unreal engine 5 documentation on IK rig based retargeting here:
I have tried retargeting with the new IK Rig based system and it works. But I have not made any tutorials on it nor studied it in great detail just yet. My priority is to complete Uefy v2.5 only then will I look into this.
You can read the docs linked above and work out retargeting in UE5 yourself… Or you can use 4.27 to do the retargeting and use Asset Actions → Migrate to move the results to UE5 if that is easier for you.
Unreal just updated to 5.0.1 moments after i wrote you. i think i’ll redo my blender steps over again. as of right now and after the update, my skeleton is walking but side ways hahahahaha. i appreciate your time, i’ll re-do my steps again, I am unsure which model you used for the Quick Re-targetting video, i have a bunch of the UE4_Mannequins. but not the one you had?? thanks again, i think i can work it out, i look forward to your work on 2.5
Importing the character from Blender to UE5 is more involved than simply dragging the FBX file into the editor. We have to setup automated twist bones with a Post Process Animation Blueprint running a Control Rig.
Unfortunately at the time of this writing seems to be a bug in UE5 that can cause the editor to crash when setting a Control Rig on the character. This is an editor side issue unrelated to Uefy.
In the video above At 0:51 I create the Manny89ControlRig and at 1:22 I open it and import the correct bone hierarchy. At 5:01 I set the Default Animation Rig to this control rig BEFORE I set the Post Process Animation Blueprint.
By correctly creating the control rigs and post process anim blueprint and setting them in the correct ORDER I avoid the crash and everything works out.
Uefy v2.5 addon exports a perfect match for the Unreal Engine 5 Mannequin if you use the UE Rolls export as shown in the videos. That means a drop in replacement for the main Blueprint in the third person template with complete working post process and control rig.
That is one way to do things. But it forces the way Maya does things onto the rig in Blender and I don’t want that. So my default is to go for maximum compatibility for Blender and just build a new Blueprint in unreal.
i tried it its not working. first of all it fails half the times to Bind the Mesh in blender, when you do get it in to Unrea. you have to "fibble with roll bones in the blueprint´s If you inport it stright in it will Corruppt the Unrea Rig. the only way to do it is to Unser a hacked version of the skeleton that works pretty Much the old UE 4 One
If you look at the UE5 mannequin rigging video for Uefy 2.5 above. There are two exported files:
manny89.fbx
manny89_ue_rolls.fbx
The first one requires creating and setting up a new Post Process AnimBlueprint and new Control Rig.
The second file lets you import the mesh directly to the existing UE5 skeleton. All existing post process anim blueprint, retargeted anims and control rigs work immediately. You don’t need to create anything.
You can choose to use either way. But I strongly recommend the first option, as the one with UE Rolls requires forcing the bones in the Blender rig to behave like Maya. It is not designed to do so. It is not compatible with Blender or Rigify. We can force it work but doing this already complicates exporting animation from Blender and might cause other issues later.
I am never going to use Maya given how much it costs. So I would much rather have greater compatibility with Blender.
If you still want to go that route, the Blender to UE5 import video above shows setting up manny89_ue_rolls.fbx in ureal from 11:43 onwards. No new Blueprints are created to start using the character as you can see in the video itself.
Hi! I’m trying to import animations done with the blender based rolls rig to unreal but I keep getting weird behaviours with the characters toes, they in unreal for some reason rotate wildly around. Any ideas what might be causing it?
The first thing that comes to mind is to turn off control rig to see if it is the cause and fix that. Second you should check if it is a weight paint issue. Sometimes if control bones get weight painted by accident, it looks fine in blender but falls apart in the engine. You want to make sure only exported deform bones have any weight paint.
Hey there,
I used an older version and am very impressed with the improvements in 2.5.
I’m trying to work through the workflow of having a completely custom mesh without any armature or bones and then rig it to a UE5 skeleton.
The general workflow I have followed is:
prep the scene
add a eufy metarig to the scene (manny89/quinn89 - In your video you say they are the same, so does it matter? model is a woman…)
adjust the metarig bone positions to the mesh
create a rig using rigify
parent the mesh to the rig using armature deform
click “create skeleton” (updating the uefy setup beforehand)
This process almost works, it seems to be fine, but when I got to pose mode to test things out, the rig moves, but the mesh doesn’t react, as though there is absolutely no weight painting at all. Is there a (or multiple) steps that I am missing? or is this somehow an issue with my mesh? Any help would be wonderful!
The addon works by transferring the weight paint from the mesh’s original armature to the rig created by Rigify. If you have a static mesh meaning no starting bones or weight paint then you need to add some yourself using blender’s built in tools.
In object mode you can do Shift + A → Armatures → Uefy Script → Reference Skeleton → Basic Posing Skeleton to add a prebuilt skeleton into the scene. You can use this armature as the initial skeleton for your character. Move/Rotate the bones into your mesh and use automatic weights. Then use blender’s weight tools to fix the weights.
A more advanced method is to find a character that is already weight painted with similar size and dimensions. Then you can transfer those weights onto your character with Blender’s data transfer and start fixing from there. Sometimes you get better/faster results that way.
Previously I’ve made a video where I rig a static mesh ( How to rig a character from Blender to UE4 with Uefy Script v1.3 - YouTube ) for the older lite version. In that video I build out the entire skeleton. But you can skip that just use the Basic Posing Skeleton it already has correct names and rolls. Then try out Blender’s weight painting tools. You can check the linked video to see how to do automatic weight painting. However I don’t go into Blender’s weight painting tools in detail and I have yet to make a video on those.
I am a programmer not a 3d artist so my preference is to use prebuilt characters from CC3 or Daz or Makehuman etc where I don’t have to weight paint.
Thank you, these are very great ideas, and this makes sense. I have used your tool before for weight painted models, and couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong!
I bought a Soldier mesh off the Unreal Marketplace. Now i want to create custom animations for that Soldier, is it possible to just import the Mesh into blender with it’s UE4 Skeleton and use the Uefy rig to animate it? I just want to import animations for the UE4 skeleton into unreal.
If the character is a static mesh meaning it has no initial skeleton, you will need to provide one yourself. You can add the Basic Posing Skeleton from Uefy to the mesh and weight paint it. That can act as your initial skeleton.
If the character already has an initial skeleton you can use Uefy to transfer it’s weight data to the final rigify rig as shown in the tutorial videos.
Once rigging process is compete you can create new animations in Blender and export them to Unreal. The addon is geared towards creating a new skeleton in the engine and importing characters and animations onto that. But you can also retarget these animations to the original UE4 skeleton if that is what you require.
Hi,
I’ve got a character with a skateboard that I’ve rigged using Rigify in Blender and fully animated. I had to create some extra bones and make some adjustments to the IK hierarchy to get the skateboard to work as part of the rig. Does this Uefy tool clean up my rig to make it compatible with Unreal Engine? (for example renaming and reorienting all bones to be compatible with Unreal and moving any helpers out of the skeleton hierarchy and removing unnecessary bones etc)
The primary function of the addon is to optimize the export hierarchy and make it as simple as possible. So no unnecessary rigify bones make it to the export.
Other than that you can think of it as a set of tools you can use to accomplish the other things you listed. But you will be using the tools to do that, it is not going to happen automatically.
The addon is designed to work on a new skeleton import in unreal using the orientations preferred by Blender. You can also export with bone orientations that match the original unreal mannequin bones, but that process is not recommended. All of the character bone orientations that exist in the unreal mannequin will be updated automatically. You can use the tools provided to update any extras if need be.
Uefy supports a subset of the rigify parts available to use in a metarig. The supported parts are listed in the FAQ section. Your metarig will need to consist of those parts only. You will need to redo your custom IK hierarchy scripts after building the rig because the addon is not going to know about them.
Blender 3.3.1
UEFY 2.5
Mannequin from freshly made 4.27 third person character project
I have followed the tutorials from 2.0 and 2.5, right after the point of generating the bones I try to mirror the movement of the right hand but it is always off on the left side when it mirrors. Is this normal? Is there anything UEFY has to get the rig symmetrical?
