Unreal Engine 5.4's New Animation Workflow Showcased

Ahead of the impending launch of Unreal Engine 5.4, most likely scheduled to be released either at or shortly after GDC 2024, Principal Animation Programmer at Epic Games Kiaran Ritchie shared an insightful breakdown discussing one of the abilities that will be introduced to UE5 with the upcoming update.

In the breakdown, Ritchie provided a detailed overview of UE5.4's new workflow, which enables users to automatically retarget animations between various common skeleton types (Mannequins, Mixamo, MotionBuilder, Xsens, etc.), making it exceptionally convenient to import animations from external sources into Unreal Engine.

Explaining how the new toolset works and how it can be utilized to move animations to/from Unreal, the author revealed that the workflow includes support for root motion and IK bones and allows users to auto-generate an IK Retargeter for making simple edits to the resulting motion on characters. You can watch the full breakdown attached above or by visiting Ritchie's Twitter page.

Earlier, Epic Games announced its plans to disclose Unreal Engine 5.4's new features and improvements at this year's Game Developers Conference, scheduled to run from March 18 to March 22.

With its yearly State of Unreal keynote, Epic aims to discuss the latest advancements in their tools, share updates from their partners, and elaborate on how developers can benefit even more from Epic Games' ecosystem. Following the keynote, the team intends to host over 30 insightful tech talks and sessions, offering a deep dive into the latest technologies, Nanite, UEFN, creature art in UE5, stylization techniques, Verse, and UE5.4. You can learn more about Epic's plans for GDC 2024 here.