Showcase of Juvenate’s full pipeline in UE5
Rig, animation cycles, retargeting results, and in-game integration
Rig, animation cycles, retargeting results, and in-game integration
I built a fully bespoke UE5 Control Rig from the ground up tailored to the character’s proportions and performance needs. To bring secondary motion to life, I integrated spring-bone setups for both hair and cloth, and added a physics body setup with joint constraints to drive realistic movement on the hip belt, then baked all of it and integrated it into the runtime pipeline.
For animation, I leveraged UE5’s motion-matching system to drive the main locomotion, dynamically swapping between pose datasets whenever the character enters different enhancement modes. I also implemented a real-time retargeting workflow that maps the base arm animation onto the extra arm enhancements, ensuring no new clips ever need to be authored.
Character Demo Reel
Realtime Retargeting
Retarget Chain Setup
In Game Implementation
During development, we frequently swapped out character animations but didn’t have a dedicated animator for the enhanced arms. Early approaches such as matching hand-bone transforms and driving the elbow via an IK setup in the Animation Blueprint proved unreliable and too imprecise for a core gameplay feature.
To solve this, I created custom retargeting chains on the arm bones and implemented a Post-Process Animation Blueprint that retargets the base arm animation onto the enhanced limbs in real time. Any existing arm animation now maps automatically to the enhancements, with no extra clips required, slashing our iteration time by hours and ensuring the enhancements stay perfectly in sync with the character’s motion.
Hair Bounce Physics Setup
Without Hair Motion
With Hair Motion
I added extra guide bones and spring controllers in a Post Process Animation Blueprint to drive runtime hair dynamics. The setup injects secondary motion so each strand reacts naturally to character movement, impacts, bumps and bounces, bringing a heightened sense of life and responsiveness to every animation.
Side Belt Physics Setup
Bone Setup for Belt Physics
Node Graph for Simulation
To achieve this, I built a custom joint hierarchy on the side belt and layered a series of Anim Dynamics nodes inside a Post Process Animation Blueprint. By tuning precise constraint settings on each joint, the belt swings and bounces in a believable way without any collision‐based simulation.
Animation Blueprint Setup:
Motion Matching
Motion Matching
I leveraged UE5’s motion matching to drive the core locomotion and built logic that swaps between pose databases on the fly whenever the character enters a different enhancement mode.
I also added virtual bones and stride warping to the state so foot placement stays locked and no sliding occurs when the character’s speed changes.
Animation Blueprint:
State Machine
State Machine
I use a core state machine to drive all of the character’s actions. Idle and locomotion cycles, jump, wall slide and wall jump, plus the up-slash and down-slash attacks.
I leverage State Alias nodes to keep the flowchart tidy and to precisely control which states can interrupt others. Whenever an animation needs to loop (for example, run or slide, I include it and its entry/exit transitions directly in the state machine. One-shot actions like the slashes or jumps I handle as montages outside the state machine so they play cleanly without blocking cyclic states.
I leverage State Alias nodes to keep the flowchart tidy and to precisely control which states can interrupt others. Whenever an animation needs to loop (for example, run or slide, I include it and its entry/exit transitions directly in the state machine. One-shot actions like the slashes or jumps I handle as montages outside the state machine so they play cleanly without blocking cyclic states.
Animation Blueprint Setup:
My Animation Blueprint handles both state-machine logic and layered montages. I created three montage slots: a default slot that can override any pose, and an additive full-body slot for subtle layered effects, and an upper-body additive slot. Because this character never required separate upper-body animations, I never needed to add a dedicated upper-body override slot. State outputs feed into the base pose, and montages slot straight in through the blueprint’s montage nodes, giving me clear separation between looping behaviors and one-off actions.