Custom character face & body animation | Unreal Engine 5

Face & body animation tutorial for custom characters (non Metahuman) in Unreal Engine 5.

Our custom 3D character was rigged with Blender, Auto Rig Pro and FaceIt, but these steps should work for any custom 3D characters or meshes with rigs and ARKit blend shapes created in any DCC.

We used this model from SketchFab, credit to Ready Player Me https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/femal...

2025 UPDATE: one thing we found is that it may be helpful to have 2 different rigs for face and body; otherwise it's possible the animation data for the two could mess with each other, especially if they are recorded separately, e.g. face MoCap with Live Link and body animation from Mixamo etc. That's likely why Metahuman and other rigs have it setup this way with separate rigs so they don't interfere with each other. We will update here if we drop a new tutorial for that in the future, but should hopefully just be one additional step to this tutorial.

#unrealengine5 #unrealengine #unrealenginetutorial #metahuman #blendertutorial #blender3d

0:00 Custom character setup in Blender
2:06 Exporting from Blender
3:53 Importing into Unreal Engine
5:30 Confirm face blend shapes import
6:32 Body animation retargeting
7:54 Sequencer
8:22 Animation blueprint
9:10 Live Link & ARKit plugins
9:52 Anim blueprint Live Link
11:04 Details settings
11:53 Take Recorder in Sequencer
12:50 Bake face animation
13:55 Body animation
14:32 Layered control rig
15:24 Re-adding face animation