September’s Epic learning content: MetaHumans, physics, animation, and more

AnimGen plugin

Animation

Chaos

Film & Television

Games

MetaHuman

Mocap

Nanite

Unreal Engine 5.8

This month’s drop of learning content has landed—get ready to sharpen your skills and expand your expertise.

Epic Games tutorials

Markerless Mocap with MetaHumans

Learn how to generate full-body animation for MetaHumans using standard video footage without mocap suits or markers through the new MetaHuman Animator Markerless Motion Capture plugin in UE 5.8. Want to learn more about the plugin? Check out our recent demo.

Take a look

Markerless Mocap with MetaHumans tutorial.

AnimGen tutorial series

The new Experimental AnimGen plugin in UE 5.8 empowers you to build and train machine-learning-based character animation controllers in the editor and evaluate them at runtime. Learn the basics of AnimGen here, including how to train a system from your own data, combine AnimGen with the Game Animation Sample Project, and use the plugin together with the MetaHuman Animator Markerless Motion Capture plugin.

Dive in

Chaos physics and destruction guides

Unreal Engine 5.8 brought a bunch of updates to the Chaos physics and destruction system. Explore some of what’s new in these guides.

Dataflow Templates

Dataflow Templates are reusable recipes that give you a starting setup so you don’t have to build the same arrangement of steps every time you prepare a new physics asset. We added many new Dataflow Templates in UE 5.8—check them out here.

Dataflow Variables

Dataflow Variables are adjustable settings for Dataflow Templates. Variables enable a shared setup to use different inputs or values for different assets—like using the same recipe with different ingredients or quantities. Find out how to set them up in this tutorial.

Community tutorials

Porting Physics Asset Tuning Between Characters with the Native MCP Server (UE 5.8)

Joint limits and mass tuning are the least creative part of a character pipeline. In UE 5.8, the built-in MCP server enables an agent to port them from a finished character in minutes. Check out this tutorial for the exact recipe, including a look at the one part that stays manual.

Learn more

Porting Physics Asset Tuning Between Characters with the Native MCP Server (UE 5.8)

Courtesy of pavyny dev

Using Animation and Cinematics as Gameplay Tools in Horror Games

Discover how to use animation and cinematics in Unreal Engine horror games as gameplay mechanics, rather than just visual polish. This tutorial covers creating tension through timed interactions, communicating enemy behaviour without UI, using cameras and cinematics to reveal threats, and more.

Using Animation and Cinematics as Gameplay Tools in Horror Games.

Courtesy of Huseyin Onur

Nanite vs Traditional LODs: Detailed Performance Breakdown for UE5

This tutorial explains how to optimize geometry effectively in Unreal Engine 5 to save VRAM, boost FPS, and balance target performance, focusing on when it’s best to use Nanite and when traditional LODs come into their own.

Get started

Nanite vs Traditional LODs: Detailed Performance Breakdown for UE5.

Courtesy of 3D Dreamer

Epic talks and demos

Project Health in Unreal Engine: The Technical Indicators That Matter

Jam-packed with resources, this session recorded at Unreal Fest Chicago 2026 explores a selection of cross-discipline indicators that often influence the outcomes of real-time projects, including optimization, fidelity, scalability, engine version integration, build health, iteration workflows, project settings, and more.

Take a look

Project Health in Unreal Engine: The Technical Indicators That Matter.

Breaking Performance Barriers: Lessons from Optimizing Chaos

In this presentation recorded at Unreal Fest Chicago 2026, Epic Games Physics Programmer Vincent Robert does a deep dive into the key algorithms, architectural trade-offs, and the lessons he’s learned from optimizing Unreal Engine’s high-performance physics and destruction system Chaos.

Learn more

Breaking Performance Barriers: Lessons from Optimizing Chaos.

Learning content on Fab

AnimGen Example

Get hands on with UE 5.8’s new Experimental AnimGen plugin in this project. It contains two examples of AnimGen animation controllers: one that supports basic walking locomotion as well as aiming and firing of a pistol, and one that supports different styles of walking locomotion for NPCs, including support for props.

Check it out