If you haven’t heard of it, UMA is a Unity de facto standard for characters, similar to Epic’s skeleton animations. It offers a ton of features, including hundreds of character genetics options (character customization known as DNA) and an easy method for runtime clothing and armor changes (known as Overlays).
Here is the main project, and there are hundreds of packages and thousands of assets on the Unity marketplace that conform to this standard: Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making
What I discovered is the skeletons used by UMA are almost a 1:1 translation to Epic’s skeleton, with minimal retargetting effort needed. So every UE Marketplace animation can be used on this system.
http://i.imgur.com/HVVMFMam.gif
Also, UMA is licensed under MIT, an extremely permissive license.
Someone had to get the ball rolling, and I’m not claiming to have made useable progress. I’m a little out of my element with art and animation, especially porting it, but I am here to provide any code needed. I’m in the process of studying the overall design of UMA’s C# code and deciding how it should be ported in a logical manner to Unreal. The goal is to get things like easily swapping items/armor in and out, as well as customizing the character physical features, in C++ and expose the functionality to blueprint.
If you want to see this become a thing, fork and submit pull requests. There’s more info at the GitHub.
