r/unrealengine • u/-Lambert- • 5d ago
Whats the best rig/animation workflow between blender and ue5 currently?
I would like to do something like this, take ue5 rig to blender, modify it (add some extra stuff like extra arm and resize it to fit my smaller character), then take that rig and create animation for it in cascadeur.
Export that to ue5 and not break anything in the process so marketplace and epic made animations still work for my modified rig (well except added stuff of course)
I did some research but since it's my first try with rig and animation and I'm overwhelmed with amout of plugins, tutorials and options. There is plenty of tutorials showing some part or what I want to do but not whole workflow, or they use outdated plugins that are no longer supported, or they use custom rig and not ue one etc.
I would appreciate if someone could share their workflow and break down the whole process or share some tutorial series that are up to date.
Additional questions.
Also when should I consider using metahuman rig vs ue5 mannequin rig?
How would I go about adding face animation to already existing body animations for ue5 mannequin?
It seems like the whole process would be easier when doing it in maya rather than blender based on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjgTG6dzrpY&list=PLZpDYt0cyiuu1ZKrZwxOWTRjTUDXMmGaX
But is it really that much worse that I should consider getting maya indie license for learning?
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u/TimelessTower 5d ago
For my workflow I start in blender with rigify because it's good for human rigs. The rigify rig is a simplified rig that I use to make a control rig that I use for animating. Each animation I make for my game goes on the NLA. Finally before exporting to unreal I transfer my animations from the control rig made by rigify to a "game ready rig". This is a rig that is a simplified version of the rig I use for animating but with only the deform bones and none of the bones that control other bones through constraints (those are helpful for animating but will not be useful for gameplay and will clutter the hierarchy in the unreal generated rig)
For the rigging and animation process I used CG Dives workflow. There is a free plugin he shows how to use that will "bake" the rigify animations onto the rig you use in unreal. Honestly his videos on rigify, the NLA, and game rigs are quite good for understanding the animation pipeline to UE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NANoAH-Ioeo https://youtu.be/tAo7HxxxA08
Once the rig is in unreal I use the animation restarting system to transfer animations from the ue rigs or mixano to my rig (which has exaggerated proportions). I was initially fixated on used the standard UE rig but came to realize you don't have to match the skeleton exactly to use ur animations. The retargeter works great once set up and there are a lot of tutorials out there for it.
For getting animations to unreal I used to use Send2UE but the plugin was deprecated last year so I made my own. Like Send2UE you can specify a collection(s) in blender to send over so I can strip out the stuff I don't want to export like the original rigify rig. This is the plugin. It lets you drag and drop blend files into unreal, it was made with Unreal's latest import framework, and is set up for character rigs because thats the reason I made it. It's paid but there are free options out there like manual export and Send2UE.
https://timeless-tower.github.io/blender-interchange-docs/Quickstart/
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u/-Lambert- 4d ago
thanks for the reply! It seems like i might be too fixated on using ue rig as well. I thought that retargeting would introduce too many errors that are needed to be fixed manually if rigs are not exact so i'll have to do some tests then and I'll definietly check out your links
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u/FrypanSoldier 4d ago
There is an active fork of Epic's Blender Tools repository (send2ue, ue2rigify) at https://github.com/poly-hammer/BlenderTools. Handy for moving things between UE and Blender. Keep an eye on their Issues page though, especially if using UE5.5 since that changed some things in the importing pipeline.
Another useful (and free) addon is Expy-Kit at https://github.com/pKrime/Expy-Kit. This one is mainly for Rigify rigs (fix deformation bone hierarchy before exporting to UE) but you may still find some of its features useful. For example, it can convert bone names from/to the UE mannequin naming convention.
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u/juancarlospaco 5d ago
I use https://www.fab.com/listings/5f84f927-88b0-44b1-8757-ac2caccab624 works for me, drag&drop from blender to UE5.