Animate your Character

Organize your files for Animation

For more flexibility and organization it is a good idea to create your animation in a separate scene from your Character Rig File. This will allow you to more easily make edits to your rig once animation has begun. It will also allow you to reload a fresh copy of your character should you break it during the animation process.

Create a new empty scene and reference or link your Character Rig File into it.

It can be helpful to split your animation work into multiple scenes in order to organize your work and keep the scene complexity down, for example animating movement in one scene and attacks in another, this is completely optional and up to personal preference.

Each animation should be authored as a separate Animation Action in Blender, consider making use of NLA strips for managing Animation Export selection.

Create a test Idle animation action

Begin by creating a test Idle animation – this is a critical pose to nail early on as many other states will blend back into this one. Treat this as your final check on character proportions in game before fully committing to the rest of your animations.

All animation must be authored at 60 Frames per second so be sure to set your framerate before you begin.
Other types of deformers that exist in blender are not supported in Unreal and therefore any other type deformation achieved in blender must be somehow reproduced by joints and shape keys.
Unreal imports animation rotation data as Euler curves, Quaternion curves in Blender will not be reflected in your unreal imported animation.
Control rig data is not imported into the engine and should not be included in .FBX files – instead animation keyframes must be baked to joints and shape keys (AKA Morph Targets in Unreal) on export.
Each animation action is baked as a separate clip in your exported FBX file, each of these clips will then import into Unreal as Animation Sequence Assets
Animation sequence assets will be named based on Animation Action names in blender so it is recommended to name them accordingly before export
We recommend that you create an Animation folder in your mod content Unreal Assets folder and organize your animations however you like within.

Notes on Character Animation

Test your character early

Do not attempt to animate too many states before getting your character into unreal and play testing them. Focus on animating the Idle, Crouch, Run and Jump/Fall states to get a well rounded idea of how your character will look in game before moving on to the rest of the required animation states.

Don’t Polish right away

Keep your animations fast and loose to start, you don’t want to perfect an animation only to find it doesn’t line up or time well with gameplay.

Character States

If you aren’t sure how to approach animating a particular character state, start by checking the base cast.
You can also review the list of Character Animation States for any additional information needed about how an action should be animated.

Dynamic Animation

Animation clips are played directly on the characters so no blending or dynamic post processing of animation is supported on the main character mesh (Dynamic IK, retargeting etc).

If you wish to add dynamic bones for hair, ropes, or any other dangly bits you can do so by exporting them as a separate mesh and adding them to your character renderer blueprint with dynamic bones enabled. You could also take advantage of the Clothing Tool for dynamic cloth effects.

Animation Progression

It is recommended to start with the character’s movement states as these are the simplest to create and do a lot to define the character’s personality.

When you’re ready to move on to more complicated states consider moving on to Attacks

Grabs and Throws are the some of the most complicated animations to tackle and should be left for last.