A marker-based auto-rigger plugin for Unreal Engine. Drop a few landmarks on a mesh and get a full Manny-compatible skeleton, skinned and ready to retarget animations.
RiggingCore is an Unreal Engine 5.8 editor plugin I made to auto-rig characters inside the engine. No Mixamo upload, no Blender, no placing 80 bones by hand. You put a few markers on a static mesh (pelvis, spine, neck, head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles) and it fits a full 89 bone UE5 Manny skeleton to your character, skins the mesh, and saves ready to use SK_ and SKEL_ assets.
The skeleton matches Manny bone for bone, same names and same orientations, so every Mixamo and UE Manny animation retargets straight onto it.
I wanted a Mixamo style auto-rigger that runs inside Unreal for a long time, so I finally made one.
What it does
You place markers in a custom editor by clicking on the mesh. Interior bones sit on the centerline. I take the middle point of where the ray enters and exits the mesh, so the bones are inside the limb and not on the surface.The plugin fits an embedded Manny bone table to the markers. The main bones land on your markers, the spine and neck follow Manny's curve, the hands get a full 3D orientation, and the left side is mirrored to the right.Fingers are placed with MediaPipe. The hand is rendered to an image, MediaPipe finds the 21 hand landmarks, and I raycast them back onto the mesh.Skin weights come from the Manny mesh. I reshape the weighted Manny onto your fitted skeleton and transfer its weights, then clean them so the mesh does not tear when you pose it.It saves a real USkeleton and USkeletalMesh pair, linked and ready to animate.How it is built
UE 5.8 C++ editor plugin, built on GeometryCore and DynamicMesh.Skin weights use FTransferBoneWeights, UE's own weight-transfer tool: it copies the template's weights where the two meshes line up and fills in the rest.Fingers use MediaPipe Hands in Python.The bone heat solver uses Eigen. I also added EA's Dem Bones as an extra weight option.I wrote an audit tool that regenerates every rig and bends its joints hard, so I can measure the tearing automatically instead of checking each one by hand.Dev logs
I wrote down how I got here:
Building a Marker-Based Auto-Rigger for Unreal EngineAuto-Rigging Fingers with MediaPipeThe Skin-Weight Bug That Survived Six Solvers
