TL;DR: How’s a solo developer supposed to add characters in UE4 without spending years learning to make them?
EDIT:
*Don’t demand that I devote several months to learn how to model, rig and animate professional-quality animations. I’m NOT talking about Last of Us or Detroit: Become Human type stuff here with masterful IK rigging. I’m talking basic humans with different faces and builds and a way to fit them onto the UE4 skeleton.
*Don’t assume I want to completely outsource a character design job to a program. I would love to hire a professional to make good characters and animations worth being proud of. Right now I don’t have the resources to do so. I make 3k a month in an unrelated job and I have around 2 1/2 hours a day to devote to development.
I’m a solo developer, and I’ve been making games for a while. Now I want to start adding basic, decent characters. Thing is, I haven’t made enough money from games to hire a character modeler or animator, and I’m not looking to get a bachelor’s degree to learn basic modeling and animation.
I’ve been using the Mixamo creator because it worked well for making unique and specific character models and faces. But, it never worked with the UE4 rig; the in-box clothing, hair and animations are limited; and it no longer has support, so it’ll be obsolete soon.
How have you guys been able to import unique characters with the Unreal skeleton without a massive time investment to learn it from scratch? I’m interested to know if there’s a way I haven’t found, since I’ve seen it happen. Answering either of these questions will help:
1: What are some character creator programs or plugins that work with the UE4 Mannequin skeleton?
Can be a standalone program or a plugin/addon for UE4 or Blender
Must work with the UE4 rig for Marketplace animations. If it needs some tweaking, I can learn.
No fancy features necessary. Just customizable height, build, and facial features.
Not prohibitively expensive
2: How can I find resources to learn to make clothing that fits and moves with a character?
I’m willing learn how to model and rig clothing, I just need to find a good tutorial to do so.
Method must work with the UE4 skeleton
If there’s somehow a program/plugin that does this, that’s fine too.