UE to Rigify is a Blender add-on designed to streamline the animation workflow for skeletal meshes from Unreal Engine, providing users with the robust control rig inside Blender based on Rigify.
Rigify is Blender’s built-in auto-rigging system.
UE to Rigify works with UE4 and UE5 mannequin skeletons using pre-built Templates shipped with the addon. Custom rigs can also work with the addon after a manual setup.
The primary benefit is transforming a basic UE game rig (just bones, no controls) into a fully functional Rigify control rig for easy animation inside Blender.
The add-on enables a seamless round-trip workflow. Upon conversion, keyframes from the source rig's animation are automatically copied to the new Rigify control rig. This allows the user to polishing the existing animation using Rigify as a control rig.
As a safeguard, the original imported animation is preserved as a copy. Once animation edits are complete, users can easily Bake the newly created animation down to the original source bones. This results in a final animation that is ready to be exported back into Unreal Engine, using FBX or the Send to Unreal addon.
Send to Unreal and UE to Rigify are part of the same suite of Blender tools.
One of the big strengths of UE to Rigify are its highly flexible and sharable Templates. Templates contain all the critical bone relationships and mappings necessary to convert specific source rigs, such as the standard Unreal Mannequin or custom characters like the Echo character.
There are several default templates shipped with the addon. Users can also create new ones from scratch.
UE to Rigify was originally developed by Epic. This is the official announcement.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/download-our-new-blender-addons
Unfortunately, the official development seems to have been discontinued without explanation from Epic.
However, thanks to GPL license, the project was revived by a community member.
For reference only, here is the original repository from Epic Games. Do not attempt to use that with recent Blender versions! Use the updated poly-hammer version linked above.
