Skeletons & Skeletal Meshes
Every animation system in Unreal — AnimGraph, Control Rig, IK Retargeter, Motion Matching — is built on
Animation Blueprints
An Animation Blueprint looks like one graph in the editor but is actually two graphs with different jobs,
State Machines & Blend Spaces
State machines and blend spaces are the two workhorse node types inside an AnimGraph — one picks
AnimInstance in C++
Every AnimBP is backed by a UAnimInstance, and pushing gameplay-state gathering into a C++ subclass of
Montages & Notifies
UAnimMontage is how you play a one-off animation — an attack, a reload, a hit react — outside the
IK & Retargeting
Motion Matching aside, most of the "make the feet actually touch the ground" and "reuse this animation
Motion Matching
Motion Matching flips the animation-authoring problem around: instead of hand-building a state machine