On 21 November 2024, I went to Unreal Evening: Character Authoring Workflow in UE 5.5, with Helge Mathee and Benoรฎt Gadreau.
The short version: Unreal wants more of the character pipeline inside Unreal. Skeleton, skinning, rig, deformers, animation. Less Maya ping-pong, especially for late fixes.
Skeletal Editor
Production Ready in 5.5. Create or edit bones, convert a static mesh to a skeletal mesh, isolate parts of a character, and do some rough mesh editing.
A late skeleton fix no longer automatically means export, Maya, reimport.
Skin weights, live
Better selection: edges and faces, grow / shrink / flood, lasso. Copy and paste weights, weight transfer, a Hammer operation, LODs and alternate weight profiles.
The useful demo: paint weights while previewing a pose from Play in Editor. Bad bend in the actual animation; fix it there.
NB: this can update every character in every scene. Or version the fix for v2 only. Or keep it on the run animation clip.
Layered skinning
Main bones in one profile, tweaker or corrective bones in another. Combine them in Deformer Graph.
No forced round trip
Skeleton and weight fixes can stay beside the final animation, camera and lighting.
Modular Control Rig
Now Beta. Instead of rebuilding every rig graph from zero, assemble reusable modules with connection rules.
- Simpler module hierarchy and clearer overlays.
- Bipeds, quadrupeds and vehicles.
- Variants to swap or upgrade modules without rebuilding the animation rig.
Rigger makes the modules. Animator assembles the character. That's the idea.
Deformers, through the rig
AddDeformer
Control Rig can add one or several deformation effects during the forward solve.
Animator Kit
Sculpt, lattice and camera-space lattice. Contact fixes, squash and stretch, shot-specific silhouette cheats.
Camera-space lattice is the interesting one: cheat the shape for the camera, because correct is not always better.
Sequencer
Non-destructive animation layers: additive or override, weight, mute, lock, duplicate, merge.
Bake mocap or imported animation to Control Rig, edit it, then bake it back.
Mesh โ skeleton โ skin weights โ Modular Control Rig โ deformers โ animation โ layers in Sequencer.
That was the interesting part. Not one magic tool, just the whole chain finally connecting.
Still not throwing Maya away. Just fewer trips back to it.
