"Syndra & Brock" Animated Characters from Hero Forge to Unreal Engine 5

"Syndra and Brock" are two characters in a school project I did at Visual Magic. We were a group of 4 artists building a fictional game demo and since no one of us wanted to focus on the characters rather everything else around it I took it upon me to find a quick solution. It was then I found Hero Forge where you can create your own 3D mini figures, meant for 3D printing. After designing the characters on their website we purchased the models. The downloads were .unity files which was a bit cumbersome but found a .unity to .fbx converter which I then was able to use to import the models into Blender for rigging and skinning. For that I used the awesome addon auto-rig pro which made the process very pleasant. My classmate www.artstation.com/hermanolsbo then retargeted the motion capture data to the rigs using Houdini and Unreal Engine.
⠀
After all this was done we finally had the two characters animated and ready in engine. While this worked great for this school project, the license on Hero Forge doesn't allow for commercial use so for a real game this wouldn't work. However the technique of pre-made character models > Blender > Houdini > Unreal Engine 5 does!
⠀
✉️ For any business inquiries, email me at michael@tiedtke.se
👋 For any personal questions DM me at www.instagram.com/tiedtke