Did you know that Unreal Engine 4 comes with animation and rigging tools for Autodesk Maya? Because it does! The same tools that our in-house animation team uses are also provided to our UE4 developers!
The Animation and Rigging Toolkit (A.R.T) provides you with everything you need to create a character from scratch and get to animating in the shortest amount of time possible. The rigging tools allow you to create a character without the need for a model, or if you have a model, you can use that as well!
In the image above are shots of the different stages of character creation, from the skeleton creation, to the joint placement, and even customizing your mannequin (if you don’t have a final mesh yet). Once you’ve completed your creation, you simply publish your character, which will send it through the auto rigger. This process takes under a minute to complete, and then you’re ready to start animating!
The animation toolkit has tons of useful tools to speed up your workflow, including importing and exporting motion, the pose editor, space switching, and much more. Take a look at some of the tools included below:
Pose Editor:
Import/Export Motion:
To see a preview of the toolkit, please check out this video. When you’re ready to get more in-depth, we have a full set of tutorials covering the Animation and Rigging tools that come with UE4!
I look forward to hearing what you think of the tools and continuing to improve them with the community over time! Join me over on Twitter at @Epic_Ernst to join in on the discussion.