 So you want to fix up your character for Unreal 5. Not a problem. So let's talk about what this even means and why you would even do this. Well basically when I was starting this for the first time I did what most people do and just made everything myself. I made my own characters, I made my own rig, I perfected that rig and I used it for everything and I forced that rig into my game engine which was Unity at the time. And because I was using all of my own stuff and not the industry standard for that engine, I ended up wasting thousands of hours fixing things that could have been avoided if I had just built things properly from the ground up the first time. That is why as soon as I moved from Unity to Unreal 5 I have no intention of making the same mistake that I did in Unity and I highly recommend that you don't either. So from this day forward we are building all of our characters specifically with the Unreal 5 system in mind. So what is the difference between a character that is randomly made and later retargeted for Unreal 5 and a character that is built from the ground up specifically for that engine and why does it matter? Well first off a character that is made for Unreal 5 will be rigged with the Unreal 5 mannequin skeleton. This is probably the single most important thing you need to take away from this video. I know your rig is better and more intuitive and more comfortable. I know most of us don't like using the default stuff but just know if you do use your own stuff instead of their stuff you are going to end up using thousands of hours of your time retargeting all of your characters and animations when you try and take advantage of all the cool stuff that they have available for you on the marketplace. Second a character that is made specifically for Unreal 5 will try its best to maintain the same proportions to the default Unreal 5 mannequin. This means they share the exact same arm length leg length finger chest positions etc. You can make the polygons look like whatever you want but keeping them the same proportion is key to a super smooth and fast workflow and here is why. A lot of people make awesome animations and you can find them for very affordable prices sometimes even free on the marketplace but they are almost always built around the default mannequin which means that even if your character is using the same rig if your character has different proportions let's just say maybe your character's arms are longer or your fingers are shorter then all of the fine detail motions like aiming reloading grabbing weapons all that stuff is going to be messed up because now the guns aren't where they're supposed to be the hands aren't where they're supposed to be the fingers aren't where they're supposed to be your magazines are going to clip through the models the handle will probably be in the wrong place and you will literally use hundreds of hours going into each animation and repositioning all the finger and arm stuff every time you use an animation so if at all possible I highly recommend you just follow the same proportions as the mannequin because then you don't have to spend any time redoing anything because you know that animation will translate one to one so in this video we are going to be building our character with the Unreal 5 skeleton with the mannequin proportions from the beginning so let's get started here is the character that we're going to be redesigning in Unreal 5 now I could simply fix the proportions on this character but that really wouldn't help me much in the future when I need to make another character what we want is a correctly positioned and proportioned base body that we can use for all of our characters going forward because if the base body is correct then animation wise everything you build on top of it will also be correct now you can use any base body you want you can make your own but keep in mind no matter what body you use you're gonna have to make some major changes either way for example this body looks pretty good but the hip topology is not conducive for game animation at all and the finger topology is whatever we also have to line it up with the actual Unreal 5 female mannequin proportions now if your character is flat footed you can go ahead and just straight up rip the Unreal 5 mannequin from the engine and use that as a guide to fit your character but if your character is wearing high heels then you probably want to add heels to the original mannequin and then follow that as your guide all of my female characters wear high heels so I have created a healed version of the default female mannequin and adjusted it to have more fantasy style features while keeping all the proportions exactly the same and I use that as the base shape for all of my Unreal 5 female characters if you want it you can find it on my Unreal marketplace or you can get it from my art station which will also come with jiggle physics you know in case you're interested in that kind of stuff like you know for research so these are the proportions that we need to trace this is the current body we have obviously we'll need to make some adjustments in most 3d software this process is kind of annoying because when you move points it kind of just looks like this but if you're using z brush there's a really easy fix you just mask what you want to move invert the mask blur it and now when you move things because of the blur it'll move all the points smooth and proportionally and this is basically 90% of the process just mask it blur it move it fix it now once you've done that you might have some trouble aligning things when it comes to the hands and the fingers I had this problem when I was working on my last character because the default Unreal mannequins hands are way bigger than the usual petite feminine hands that normally go onto a fantasy female character I needed feminine hands and I had some lying around from an old character but when I lined everything up they were still way too small compared to the default mannequin so I kind of cheated and I kept the shape exactly the same because that's important but I increased the size of the hand by about 17% until it was barely big enough to keep the fingers in the same position and then I simply attached that hand to the new body in z brush this is really easy you just go to your z modeler tool bridge open hole click the body click the hand use the smooth brush to smoothen it out and yeah don't worry about the topology we'll fix all that in blender and I did the same thing to the feet as well because yeah that original topology was something else all right so now we have a general body shape and the right proportions with usable fingers and toes but before we attach the head we have to re-depologize the body so that the topology is better suited for animation now we don't want to re-depologize the head because the head topology is actually pretty good and we don't want to waste our time redoing all of it for no reason so we'll just mask some poly group guidelines where we think the topology should be smooth groups z remesh and bam now this is much better topology for animation don't worry about all the detail that we lost it'll come right back when we project from the high poly base now we can attach the head and yeah there's some funny business going on here but like I said before I will show you how to fix the details and the poly modeling process in blender thanks for watching and as always we'll be having a fantastic day and I'll see you around