What is Character Builder?

Character Builder Framework is advanced and highly customizable modular character setup that comes with each and every pack we ship. It's main purpose is introducing cross-pack compatibility to our content. It goes around the typical limitations of Unreal Engine 5, allowing you to combine multiple packs into one, giving exponential customization capabilities with every single additional pack, while improving performance thanks to the Mesh Merger plugin that comes with UE5.

Architecture Philosophy

It was built with a simple idea in mind - the least hardcoding, the better. That's why you won't find typical enum-based setup here with pre-defined character parts. We use flexible setup with Gameplay Tags and Data Assets instead. We also were quite weary about possible large amounts of content and hard references, which will inevitably flood your GPU texture buffer. That's why we use careful asset management with soft references as much as possible to optimize it down only to the needed resources. Another point was cross compatibility between animation blueprints across the packs and different skeletons. Our solution was building a special layer setup, which allows you injecting any anim blueprint in the final skeleton of the character from any pack. No need to merge skeletons in the editor to have anim-dynamics or rigid body setup shared between two different models.

Also, since the end result is a unique mesh and unique skeleton, we can retarget it live. Meaning, you can have any setup you can think of, for example give your character werewolf legs. Of course, we don't do such things, however here's a bit more conservative example of what skeletons look like:

These characters have different heights due to their shoes, different skeletons (still sharing the same UE5 Quinn skeleton) and combination of items from different Marketplace packs (from our store), but they still work together perfectly.

Additional features

There's lots and lots to talk about here. Our framework is still in development, however we already have a large number of things which distinguish us from similar products on the market. Such as Mesh Replacement System A lot of character pieces won't be compatible from the box with each other. Lots of clipping and misalignment, especially with multiple layers. In the example below you can take a look at character which has shirt with tie and two armors equipped. One has the clipping fixed automatically by the framework and other doesn't have it set up yet:

It works across the packs too, thanks to the data driven approach. We update the packs from time to time to include new additions and fixes to the old content. It allows us to have custom fit items even when they weren't designed to work together like this:

Preset System is also quite flexible You can create presets through our example customization map and save them locally:

To later convert to permanent Data Asset preset using our tool (shipped with each pack):

And both of them can be used to fetch your character data at runtime:

And there's many many more things, such as filtering items by body type, our consolidation tool to bake packs together, item bans (depending on what's equipped), different models of handing IK etc.