Unreal Fest Chicago 2026 brought the Unreal Engine community together for two days of major announcements in June, including the release of Unreal Engine 5.8, updates on Unreal Engine 6, and a packed schedule of practical talks. One standout session features Chris Pagoria, Senior Technical Animator at Epic Games, who spent over 15 years in the animation industry, including a tenure at Blue Sky Studios.

In this talk, he shares how to build stylized character rigs in Unreal Engine using the latest shape authoring tools and deformers. You'll learn how to create clean controls, sculpt nuanced facial expressions and emotions, and combine bone-based animation systems with blend shapes. Among the highlights of the session is the Zebra Character Sample, a practical example designed to help users explore the latest animation and rigging workflows in Unreal Engine 5.8, including Direct Mesh Controls, so don't forget to check it out.

A few more sessions have just been uploaded to the official Unreal Engine channel, featuring topics like Mesh Terrain, MetaHuman, Lore, real game case studies, and more:

Shining Isle Productions has also talked about moving the entire production of The Wingfeather Saga animated series to Unreal Engine:

If you're animating with Unreal Engine, we recently featured Loops2DPanZoom, a free alternative to the 2D Pan/Zoom feature available in Maya:

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