Unreal Blueprints can feel overwhelming at first, but in this tutorial animator and mentor Nicole Gregory walks through the basics step by step so animators can start using Blueprint without fear. She connects familiar animation concepts to Unreal’s tools so you can understand how your work plugs into gameplay and make smarter choices when preparing game ready assets. Watch the full video above.
Meet Nicole Gregory
Nicole has worked on a range of game styles and genres; from third person shooters to mountain biking to character selection screens. She is currently an Animator working at Third Kind Games – A Virtuos Studio, working on MTB Mavrix.
Nicole mentors students in the 6-week Game Animation Fundamentals course at Animation Mentor and is also an alum of our 3D Character Animation program and Creature Animation courses.
Getting Comfortable in Unreal
Nicole begins the tutorial by reassuring animators that Unreal is less intimidating when you relate it to tools you already know, such as Maya. She notes that the main viewport, navigation, transform controls, and undo behavior all feel familiar, which helps animators quickly orient themselves instead of feeling lost in a new environment.
She also calls out one important difference that affects animation workflows, which is that Unreal uses Z up instead of Maya’s Y up, something to remember when exporting rigs and animations from Maya into Unreal. By framing Unreal as “different but similar,” she encourages animators to lean on their existing skills while they explore new tools.
Understanding the Layout and Content Drawer
Nicole then breaks down the overall Unreal layout, mapping each major panel to concepts animators already know. She compares the Unreal viewport to a Maya scene view, the outliner to Maya’s outliner, and the details panel to a centralized place for transforms, materials, and other properties for any selected object.
She spends time on the content drawer, describing it as Unreal’s version of a dedicated file explorer that contains everything for the game, including characters, animations, meshes, and more. By opening folders such as those for the character Riley, she shows how organized asset structures make it easier to find and manage animations you bring in from Maya.
Animation Sequences and Skeleton Setup
With the layout understood, Nicole moves into animation specific assets and opens a walk cycle that was exported from Maya. She explains that Unreal calls these clips animation sequences and uses them to represent your imported animation data inside the engine.
She compares Unreal’s timeline to Maya’s, explaining that while Maya often shows keys only for selected controls, Unreal lists translation and rotation data in a more spreadsheet like format. Nicole also walks through the skeleton tree, which displays the bone hierarchy in a way that mirrors what animators expect, and she explains how Unreal associates animation data with a particular skeleton and mesh using a puppet analogy.
Working With Blend Spaces for Idle, Walk, and Run
Nicole then introduces blend spaces as a tool for smoothly transitioning between different motion states such as idle, walk, and run. She opens a 1D blend space driven by a speed parameter and demonstrates how idle plays at speed zero, walk at an intermediate value, and run at the maximum, all on a single graph.
By dragging the blend space cursor along the axis, she shows how Unreal blends between animations so you can preview what happens as a character accelerates in game. Nicole also explains how additional motions, like a jog, can be dropped into the blend space, and she emphasizes the importance of locking in agreed movement speeds to avoid issues like foot sliding when gameplay values change after animations are authored.
Animation Montages, Notifies, and Gameplay Impact
After blend spaces, Nicole explores animation montages and how they build on top of standard animation sequences. She suggests thinking of a montage like a video editing project that references your base animations but lets you layer on extra information that the game can react to.
She demonstrates notifies inside a montage and explains how they can mark events such as impact windows or reset points during an attack animation. Using the example of a player repeatedly pressing an attack button, Nicole shows how notifies help ensure the animation plays fully, communicates the hit clearly, and then either repeats or returns to idle at the correct time, improving both game feel and readability.
Practical Tips for Animators Using Unreal
Throughout the session, Nicole shares practical advice so animators can work effectively in Unreal without needing to become engineers. She recommends matching animation speeds to consistent gameplay values, keeping skeletons and rigs organized so all animations hook up correctly, and using the asset browser to quickly switch between different animations on the same character.
She also encourages animators to rely on tools like blend spaces and montages to handle transitions and event timing instead of baking everything into single long clips. By the end of the tutorial, Unreal feels less like a mysterious black box and more like an extension of an animator’s existing workflow that can make Animation Mentor style assignments feel truly game ready.
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