Unlocking the Impossible: Rigging and Animating Nanite Meshes in Unreal Engine 5

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If you ever wondered how Epic created the Ancient in the Valley of the Ancient Tech Demo, then you have come to the right place. This tutorial shows you the workflow to set up a fully animated Nanite Character in Unreal Engine. This approach works well with any piece of software that you use to do your rigging or animation, as Unreal Engine will interpret your input via naming conventions.

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00:00 Intro
03:55 Breakdown
06:00 Mesh & Skeleton Export
13:50 Importing your Rig the Right Way
17:40 Creating the Nanite Blueprint
24:45 Troubleshooting
25:41 Hiding the original Skeleton
27:26 Tuning Animation Speeds
30:46 Final Thoughts

[wayneadams]

outstanding stuff.. this workflow is still valid in 5.3 as of today. :) Thanks man!

[riotechmod]

Nice, there are very very few people currently available who actually make unreal videos in very detail. 🙌❤️

[spaceidiot]

Thank you,
our project just turned on Nanite (after the more recent updates)
and I'm now testing it with our guns

Cross fingers on finding no hidden performance issues

[fluidexpressions]

thank you so much for this!

(for my future reference)
12:25 for FBX export rigLP from blender options
Include> limit to: selected objects [x](select)
Geometry> smoothing groups : Face
Armature> add leaf bones [_](de-select)
(select)[x] Bake Animation> Sampling Rate: 0.1, Simplify: 0.0
Export

[allenbeckman]

You are god like. So fare your tutorials have shown me the way to go, and your very easy to fallow! So appreciative Thank you!

[UltimediaProductionsPH]

Amazing stuff! This will be useful when I bring the larger, more complex capital ships into play

[ParadoxISPower]

Very nice, I've actually built a few vehicles, nanite on custom skeletons, got the idea from the Ancient as well. Keep up the great work 👍

[faradaysinfinity]

Dude I love this so stoked to try this

[JasonAdank]

Im trying to replicate this process, but I dont want to be doing my animation in an outside program, like you did with the side to side wobble and then using it is an animation clip. This is probably to complicated to answer here, but how would this process go if you wanted to setup a control rig inside UE for animation, instead of using prebaked anim clips?

I tried following this process for my own model, and it seems to work.... though Im not sure. I cant test to see if the swapped-in nanite meshes are sticking to the bone because I cant access the joints in this new blueprint to do a simply fk test. (its just 'Rig" and thats it, no bone hierarchy). if I open up the skeleton or skeletal mesh imports and move the bone there, nothing updates in the new blueprint. Furthermore, if i try save the skeletal mesh (or skeleton) files wih the moved bone, still no update in the new blueprint, and when I go back and reopen the skeleton or skeletal mesh files, the bone is back in its original position - like it didnt save my transform.

Any thoughts on if Im doing something wrong here? Or does this whole thing only work with an animation clips type workflow? Again, my end goal is to be able to setup a control rig....

[GTAIV]

That sounds like a good idea.. Let me recap this.. you basically retargeted skeletal mesh using a nanite static mesh? Although that looks like it. I am wondering what would happen if the skeletal joints are weighted? I don't think that would work for that case..

[calmacfarlane]

Awesome video man. Do you know of any performance issues running up large numbers of sockets?

[anlmehmetalan]

Thanks for this tutorial! How do you make a custom rig with this method? Let's say I imported a car model and I want to make a custom rig for it.

[angolodiappla]

Great stuff man!
I have a problem: would this give me better performance over a normal skeletal mesh actor with an animation playing on it?
My current skeletal mesh has 6k tris but I have to spawn about 150 of them at the same time which tanks performance, would using this nanite trick help? The "rig" skeletal would have a simple 500 tris mesh just for the bone and then the 6k poly mesh would become the nanite one

[Drakuba]

dos this method count as socketing the nanite mesh onto skeleton?

Im working on RTS and need every little bit of performance i can get, and somewhere i read socketing onto skeleton is the way to go since the socketed thing takes its world info from the bone instead of keeping track of its own

[friedtomatoes]

Does this reduce the benefits of nanite? Part of its benefits come from the fact that the mesh is static and it can work with that. If the mesh moves does that have a performance penalty? Is that performance penalty greater than the savings nanite gives?

[filipmasiulewicz]

This is great, thanks. Could you give me advice how to name multiple meshes driven by one joint and how to connect them in UE5?

[РижаМавпа-ши]

I would place two dislikes if I can. Wasting 32 minutes on an idea that takes 3 sentences to say, this is truly an art.

[wayneadams]

So a question.. I've got this entire workflow in successfully, however if I introduce a new animation, which uses the same skeleton, naming and hierarchy, the newly introduced animation imports correctly, but the nanite meshes are not aligned correctly in the new animation. Is this an issue you are familiar with?

[DeathClonic]

I watched the tutorial a bunch of times and my static meshes don't rotate properly with the skeleton. Like the legs are fine on my character but the arms are still T-posing but still moving with the skeletons animation, but the animation has the arms down and rotated. I did find a way to fix it by snapping to target and changing all the origins to where the bones should be, but that's tedious and I feel like it should work the way you did it.

[fluidexpressions]

wait how do we do the construction script?