Unreal Engine 5

I’ve setup a small unreal engine 5 project to explore and demonstrate my knowledge of some of the current and upcoming animation features which I will demonstrate here.

Animation Retargeting

The above image demonstrates same skeleton retargeting. This allows for animation reuse without duplicating the animations which is kinder on your games memory budget.

I’ve rigged the central and right hand rigs with maya to match the UE Quinn model, the models for these rigs themselves were taken from online. The only differences are with the extra joints added to describe appendages such as the skirt. The skirt is not animated in maya as the original animation does not contain this information, the skirt is Unreal Engine Physics added on top of the animation as is the hair.

Joints need to be oriented the same way as the source skeleton to work correctly, otherwise limbs may animate in the wrong axis.

Alternatively you can use IK retargeting to have a much more adaptive means of retargeting, but this requires animations be duplicated and costs more memory. This can be useful in a pinch but I would save it as a last resort for efficiency,

UE Cloth

Unreal engine cloth.

Cloth weight painted onto mesh then physics colliders influence the cloth.

While this system works well in isolation like for this rendered unreal engine sequence, in game it’s not very robust and often escapes the collision. To improve in the next version I would combine this with UE IK Rig to primarily control and move the joints out of the way of the legs as they move then use cloth over the top as a light finishing layer.