Animations

I can’t animate to save my life(I guess everyone starts from somewhere) but I learned a lot about working with different pipelines and techniques. Luckily I was easily able to retarget the default third-person mannequin in UE5 to my daz3d so that took care of most of what I needed especially at first but I definitely needed to get creative when it came to cutscenes.
I used the ever-iconic mixamo for the ending murder and death animations but I also came across a site called actorcore that had some free animations too.

I exported the Daz3D character facial morphs that allow for quick facial expressions into UE5 to attempt to add some more life to the animations since none of them had any face movement to them.

I did come across this incredible free animation pack for conversations in Daz; however, they were made for the older versions of the character models (Genesis 8). I had found a converter that converted poses from Genesis 8 to 9 (my characters) but it only worked on poses and not animations,, so unfortunately I had to take to animating my own little animations for blinking and talking as I had no other real option.

Learning how retargeting works was great, as it was a super easy way to get animations to work on my character.
Especially once I figured out how to change the bones/poses of my character in the UE5 retargeter.

I also figured out animation montages in UE5 which allows you to use animations in blueprints and I also learned you could update skeletal mesh animations through blueprints as well which again was super helpful with needing to trigger an animation change due to an action.