3D Animation with Unreal Engine

01

Overview

A game-changing toolset for animated storytelling

Courtesy of Snafu Pictures | Netflix | Able&Baker

Control the narrative

Built for collaboration, Sequencer is Unreal Engine's fully nonlinear, real-time cinematic editing and animation tool that enables you to define and modify lighting, camera blocking, characters and set dressing on a per-shot basis. You can even create new animation by blending animation clips together. With Sequencer, teams of artists can work on entire sequences simultaneously to develop and refine your story throughout the production process.

Perfect your performances

Whether you choose to animate your characters with keyframes or drive their performances with mocap data, Unreal Engine has the tools you need. Control Rig is a scriptable node-based rigging system designed to provide artists with tools to create flexible, dynamic, and procedural rigs with animator-friendly interfaces. And with Live Link, you can stream data from a variety of sources—even your iPhone—directly onto your characters in real time.

Courtesy of Adam Valdez

Craft the look

From the flexible node-based Material Editor that enables you to layer materials and fine-tune values at the pixel level, to sophisticated lighting that includes an atmospheric Sun and Sky system, Unreal Engine gives you the freedom to craft any look that you want—then iterate to your heart's content. What's more, with support for strand-based hair and fur, your cast of characters can include everything from adorable animals to bearded buddies—without waiting for an eternity for renders!

Courtesy of Waldemar Peter

Animate in context, finish with polish

With Unreal Engine, you can forget working with low-quality render settings or playblasting clips to see results; instead, you'll interact with your characters in a fully lit and rendered real-time environment that gives you the complete context for your animation, including a wide range of post-process effects; advanced particles, physics, and destruction; and even real-time ray tracing. And when you're ready, you can output your finished frames with settings that deliver uncompromised quality, still at a fraction of the time of offline rendering. Final pixels—fast.

02

Latest features

Newest animation features in UE 5.5

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Animatable animation deformers
It’s now possible to author deformers inside Control Rig and easily apply them to characters in Sequencer with a single click—great for realistic contact deformation or cartoon-style squash-and-stretch, for example. There’s also a selection of ready-made Control Rigs with built-in deformers, including Lattice, Camera Lattice, and Sculpt.
Nondestructive animation layers
We’ve added nondestructive animation layers to Sequencer, providing the additional control and flexibility previously only found in traditional DCC applications; this includes the ability to easily manage the contents, choose between additive or override, and animate the weights of these layers.
Other Sequencer enhancements
Additional updates to Sequencer in this release include a more controllable interface with better filtering and easier access to properties, reducing workflow fatigue and increasing productivity. Plus, you can now dynamically control a Level Sequence and its contents to make conditional changes during both interactive and gameplay cinematics.
Control Rig & Skeletal Editor improvements
Modular Control Rig moves to Beta with many UI and UX improvements; new quadruped and vehicles modules; and support for common bipedal skeleton types. Since UE 5.4, you can also layer Control Rigs, making adding animation on top of anim clips drastically simpler. Meanwhile, the Skeletal Editor is now Production-Ready with improvements that include quicker and simpler workflows for painting and editing weights.
Audio-driven animation for MetaHumans
Introduced as an Experimental feature within MetaHuman Animator, you can now generate high-quality facial animation—including inference of upper face gestures—just from audio performances. The fully local, offline solution works with various voices and languages and can be batch-processed and scripted alongside other MetaHuman Animator inputs.

03

Case studies

Unreal Engine is powering animated content across the globe

Image courtesy of DNEG and Howdybot Productions

Animation Case Study

Academy Award®-winning animated short War is Over! makes Unreal Engine history

At the 96th Academy Awards, anti-war animated short film War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko made history as the first project made in Unreal Engine 5 to win the Academy Award® for Best Animated Short Film.