Understanding animations in Unreal Engine 5

Let’s break down the main aspects of animations as they function inside Unreal Engine. More in-depth information about the topics in this section can be found in the documentation that is available directly from Epic Games: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Animation.

Skeletons

Skeletons are Unreal Engine’s representation of the character rig that was made in external 3D software; we saw this in Activity 10.02 – Skeletal bone manipulation and animations. There isn’t much more to skeletons that we haven’t discussed already, but the main takeaway is that once the skeleton is in the engine, we can view the skeleton hierarchy, manipulate each bone, and add objects known as sockets. What sockets allow us to do is attach objects to the bones of our character. We can use these sockets to attach objects such as meshes and manipulate the transformation of the sockets without disrupting the bones’...