Avaturn to Unreal Engine 5: Rig Your Avatar to the Manny Skeleton, Keep Its Skin

What you get

• •A skeletal-mesh FBX on the real UE5 Manny skeleton — 89 bones, matching names, hierarchy and roll. Epic’s locomotion sets, Lyra and Fab animation packs built for Manny/Quinn play on it directly.
• •Avaturn’s own skin weights, preserved. RigMaster recognizes the avatar’s authored skin and keeps it instead of re-skinning, and it places the Manny joints where Avaturn’s skeleton had them — shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles and every finger joint — so the weights deform the mesh the way they were painted to.
• •Facial blendshapes carried through to the FBX as morph targets.
• •Textures and materials packed with the FBX. Avaturn materials are authored double-sided; see the import notes below.

Step by step

• •In Avaturn, finish the avatar and download it as GLB (the default web export). No rigging or T-pose export is needed — the skeleton that ships with it is what RigMaster reads.
• •Open RigMaster, upload the GLB and place the guide markers. They still matter: they register the avatar’s scale, facing and depth. On an authored skin like Avaturn’s the limb and finger joints then come from the avatar’s own skeleton rather than from your clicks, so a click that is a few centimetres off does not cost you deformation quality.
• •Choose the rig options. The Pro rig’s pose correction re-poses the avatar into Manny’s rest before binding; hand alignment (on by default) sets the finger rest to Manny’s so fists close and idles relax the way the animations were authored. Keep artist’s hands is the opt-out.
• •Download the FBX and import it into UE5. When the importer asks for a skeleton, pick the project’s SK_Mannequin — the bone names match, so no new skeleton asset is created. Assign any Manny/Quinn animation and press play.

Why keeping Avaturn’s weights matters

An auto-rigger that re-skins a mesh from scratch competes with the artist who painted it. Avaturn’s weights already know where the knuckles bend and how the shirt follows the shoulder. The failure mode of forcing them onto a generically fitted skeleton is quiet at rest and ugly in motion: joints that sit even a couple of centimetres from where the weights expect them fold fingers into spikes the moment an animation runs. RigMaster’s adoption step measures the avatar’s skeleton in the mesh’s own space and moves its joints there — measured on a stock Avaturn, the finger joints went from 3.6–4.7 cm beside the finger to within 1.7–2.8 cm of the phalanx they drive, which is where a joint belongs.

The result is checked with real Manny animations, not a rest-pose score: an attack’s fist frame closes into a compact fist on both hands and the idle hangs relaxed, on Avaturn and on other authored skins alike.

UE5 import notes

• •Two Sided materials: Avaturn ships its clothing and hair materials double-sided, and FBX cannot carry that flag. UE imports them single-sided, so thin shells show holes from some angles. Enable Two Sided on those material instances after import — the geometry is fine.
• •Skeleton: choose the existing SK_Mannequin at import. If you let the importer create a new skeleton, animations still play, but you lose the shared-skeleton convenience with Manny and Quinn.
• •Scale: the FBX is exported in centimetres at the mannequin’s stature, so the default import scale of 1.0 is correct — no Import Uniform Scale 100 dance.
• •Blendshapes: the morph targets arrive with the mesh; drive them from an Animation Blueprint or a control rig like any UE morph target.

Avaturn vs the retargeting route

Frequently asked questions