It’s Unreal
A story about my personal journey through learning all things Unreal and its built-in Technical Animation pipeline.
It was early 2025 I had my last day at UWE, and with my career in question I decided to pursue the advice of my peers and continue to develop my skills in Unreal Engine. Specifically in the world of rigging, animation blueprints, and cinematics… All of which I had been working closely with since I started compiling animated model files and creating cinematic shorts for Natural Selection 2.
I chose to work in Unreal Engine because it seemed like where the industry was headed and because (at the time) I still wanted to find my way back onto the SN2 team. They also seemed to be making great effort to create their own tools and process for developing skeletons, rigs, and animations INSIDE of the engine. I was excited imagining an animation pipeline that didn’t require returning to third party software to make adjustments. And I’ll just add this bit now… In the months I spent learning this pipeline, I did not enter Blender/Maya a single time.
Now before I dove into the animation pipeline I knew I needed a better understanding of the fundamentals of UE5. So I went back to school. Specifically the Udemy class Unreal Engine 5: The Complete Beginner’s Course and the Unreal Engine 5: Intermediate Course by David Nixon. As a reminder, before this I mostly only knew UE5 through the Subnautica 2 project which had over a years worth of code and files from a large dev team integrated together. Learning the basics from a clean project was so freeing and refreshing. These nearly 30 hours of courses were exactly what I needed to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together in my head. It was clear to me at this point I should have done this a long time ago, and perhaps things would have turned out differently... But my ego drove me to try to figure it out as I went along, amongst the chaos of that project.
Since that training went so well I picked up a couple of animation classes on Udemy and a character model off of the marketplace with the goal of learning the process of creating a character skeleton, skinning it to the character model, setting up a custom control rig, transferring animation sets to my rig, and making custom animations. All inside of Unreal! And although I’ve never created a skeleton or rig before, it seemed like the process was relatively simplified (and lacking in a few features which I’m sure they want to add). It wasn’t without bugs or headaches but after a few weeks of the step by step process I was able to get some decent results.
I added this rigged character and created an animation blueprint (from even more lessons) that allowed me to run around with my character in engine. I then created a couple of simple blueprints for pickups that would swap out the character model (I had a unclothed and an armored version) when he picked up armor. Then I added another pickup for a sword that would switch between the basic third person animation set and the animation set from a Paragon character which included strafing and weapon attacks.
Lastly I wanted to put it together in a presentable format inside of the beautiful Dark Ruins environment. Here I also dove into some lessons for Sequencer and put together an in game cinematic with custom animations tweaked within the Sequence using the control rig. I wasn’t expecting to showcase this potential new employers at GDC, but did make up this demonstration just in case. Check it out if you want to see the results of a couple months of lessons and experimentation.
