In-Game Character Editor for Unreal

The Popul8 Character Editor (CE) offers a fully data-driven, production-ready solution for character customization, purpose-built to simplify and accelerate integration into Unreal Engine (UE) projects.

Workflow

• Popul8

  1 - Create a Popul8 Project

  2- Import Assets (Character Template, Deformables, etc)

  3 - Use a CE Template or Customize a new one

  4 - Export CE data from Popul8

• UE5

  5 - Import from Popul8 through the UE bridge

  6 - Customize the CE in-game integration (GUI, scene connection, etc)

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Key Advantages of the Popul8 CE Integration

• One-Click Bridge Integration

  Using the Popul8 Bridge plugin, importing CE data into the UE project is as simple as pressing a button. All necessary assets, configurations, and logic are automatically transferred and set up, no manual steps required.

• Plug-and-Play Scene Setup

  Once the data is bridged, simply open the preconfigured level and hit Play. The editor is immediately functional and ready to use within the UE project.

• Drop-in Character Editor

  Integrating the CE into an existing UE game is straightforward. There’s no need for deep code rewrites or complex system hookups.

• Easily Customizable UI

  The CE interface is built with flexibility in mind to match the Game “Look and Feel”. Swap logos, reposition widgets, and adjust styling in just a few steps to match the game’s brand or UI guidelines.

• Shader-Friendly Design

  Integrating custom materials or shaders is fast and intuitive. The CE architecture was designed with compatibility in mind, no need for special shader authoring tools or custom node graphs.

• Animation-Ready

  Game animations and animation blueprints can be directly applied to characters generated by the CE. There’s no need to adapt to a new pipeline. The rig deformations and adaptations are automatically handled.

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Technical Benefits

• Lightweight Runtime Character Baking

  When a user saves their customized character, a compact .bin descriptor file. The format of the descriptor can be customized to integrate with any data model and propagation layer. This can optionally be tied into a remote database for online profiles or persistent saves.

• Optimized Game-Ready Characters

  During runtime, characters are baked into fresh skeletal meshes, stripped of morph targets and customization overhead. This results in significantly better runtime performance and leaner memory usage compared to Mutable’s morph-target-heavy runtime setup.

• Production Scalability

  Whether for single-player customization or MMO-level persistence, the Popul8 CE is designed for real-world deployment. Its decoupled data structure and runtime baking make it a better fit for production than solutions requiring complex runtime composition.

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