Why is Animating for Games so Damn Hard!?

I'm not gonna lie I get so much joy out of hearing another 3D artist complain about how difficult learning the pipeline and specific workflows can be. Finally someone is honest about this shit.

For people what are trying to import animations from Blender to unreal: -> In export settings change Up axis to Z+ and forward axis to X+ since blender is using different axis for up and forward -> When importing animation set convert scene Unit Blender support is super tricky in Unreal Engine, also highly suggest Cascadeur for animation it is free under 100k$ per year and has 100% UE support and AI support when animating.

You actually can animate in unreal, I believe there are two ways, one is the painful animation editor and the other is that you can create control rigs in Unreal to animate! Might be worth looking into. Great work on your channel and videos!

Dont use sculpt mode for game characters, you are not Blizzard, do it by edit mode, you can add a plane with the character pic/drawing reference behind in 3d space

4:12 You CAN create whole new animations in Unreal ! You can even rig your model inside Unreal nowadays through Control Rig (although it's a plugin that might be activated by default) edit: silly me just scrolled down the comments a bit too late and noticed that someone already told you ^^

U can model a character, upload it in mixamo, download it back with bones, install blender an addon mixamo control rig, that will automatic create Ik

6:15 when you import from Unreal you need to change the Primary and Secondary Bone Axis to X and Y on Import. Same goes for exporting, you have to export it a specific way, too bad Blender doesn't come with these Import/export presets already pre-defined for people.

7 minutes in and i feel like u got EVERY problem right that i encountered hahahahahaha dying laughing

I've ran into all these problems but now I'm pretty used to it now honestly don't give up I've watched alot of videos to fix these issues and understand them.

Making character models is super scary to me because I’ve only ever designed mechanical parts in CAD professionally so I only know geometric shapes well.

Hey gameplay animator here ! Your video was so fun, considering that you're right ! Game animation is very hard ! It's also a blast when you actually master it, but sure, the process may be quiet overwhelming Cheers and keep it up, your stuff is great !

It was difficult to animate because the way you were animating isn't how 3d animation is done. You have the character rig, but there aren't any controls and parameters that allow you to move certain parts of the body. Don't beat yourself up about it though. Character rigging is a completely different job, and comes before the animation.

7:10 Different programs will either have the Y or Z-axis facing upward, so there's a setting when exporting your model/animations to accommodate for that.

Characters and animating them are some of the hardest things you can do in 3D. It's not really a beginners thing. In fact, a lot of the amazing character animations you see in movies and reels are people highly specialized in animating characters with 5-20 years of experience in just doing precisely that... and only that.

This man needs to be much more well known he has such great vids and I truly believe he will be about as popular as Dani or any other coding YouTuber

I was hoping that the mecs were downloadable coz the look kinda cool

For too many years, Blender to Unreal remained a painful, frustrating, and inexplicably broken experience. Whenever Epic tried to improve the import process, they always missed something, while sometimes breaking existing community workaround and creating new odd behaviors. Even the tutorials and guides created by Epic employees would have faulty information, due to the employees not knowing that certain matters remained broken, and sometimes not knowing how the current build even handled the import.

I feel you man.. Just started learning gamedev myself. 2 days ago i started learning blender and modelling. Made basic humanoid character and imo it was fine. Actually felt pretty good for me, maybe my art skills helped on that. Yesterday was time to learn rigging, was pretty scared that it was going to be painful, but blenders rigify addon saved my ass on that one thanks lord.. Well i quess i can jump to animating now.. Holy fucking shit i hate it at least for now. Really struggling with it and if i can get anything animated someday, i'm sure there is going to be some pain in the ass trying to import it in to UE5. 😂 Not sure if you know of blenders rigify addon already, but if not i really recomend it. It has inverse kinematics built in also!

Yeah there's so many pitfall especially when going between programs lol + a lot of tutorials are either outdated or just kind of bad. On the more positive side I personally think your character models looked pretty good/usable. As for animating itself just using the base bones is a pain but stuff like rigify makes it more bearable (once you get around it's pitfalls too).

You have to make a properly rig . The bones itself it's a bad idea to anímate.. theres a mixano plugin who make an ik rig more easy for anímate