I wanted to dedicate a separate blog to the rigging issues I encountered, because this part of the project became far more time-consuming and educational than I had anticipated. I had purchased a premade character asset assuming it would speed up my workflow and allow me to focus more on animation. Instead, it turned into one of the most challenging stages of the production.
However, the process ended up being extremely insightful. I tested different rigging setups in Blender, experimented with weight painting the mesh and clothing, and learnt a lot about the limitations of sending rigs from Blender into Unreal Engine.
Initial Problems
There were multiple issues stacked together on this rig:
- The jaw and face bones were twisted before parenting, which caused diagonal or incorrect rotations.
- The character’s ponytail had no bones at all, making it impossible to animate properly.
- The weight painting around the head was inaccurate, causing visible distortions during animation.
- All of this was compounded by an incompatible rig transfer between Blender and Unreal Engine.
Debugging and Communication
Since the problems seemed too extensive to fix immediately, I reached out to the creator of the asset to debug the issues. At the same time, I began experimenting with re-rigging the model myself in Blender.
I was able to correct some parts—specifically the jaw bone orientation—by creating a fresh rig. However, the weight painting remained incorrect and still caused deformation issues.
The creator shared two additional versions of the rig, both improved in some areas, but none of the versions solved the Blender-to-Unreal transfer problem. The animations continued to distort after export, which made the asset unusable in its current form.
Solution
After nearly two weeks of troubleshooting, testing, and back-and-forth communication, I was concerned about delaying the animation stage for too long. That’s when I found a Blender plugin called Game Rig Tools.
Game Rig Tools generates a simplified sub-rig specifically designed to be readable by game engines. This bypasses many of the translation issues that occur with complex control rigs.
Using Game Rig Tools:
- I rebuilt the character’s deformation rig.
- The exported animations finally held their shape correctly inside Unreal Engine.
It was a huge relief to find a system that worked reliably, and this solution allowed me to finally move forward into full animation production.