Characters, rigging and animation

Forge is not only for props. Give it a character model, one you generated with an AI tool, bought or built yourself, and Forge gives it back as a game character: cleaned to a triangle budget, with tidy UVs and baked textures, a skeleton inside it, skin weights that bind the surface to the bones, ready-made animations and hair that swings. Everything stays in one graph, so you can change any step and the character rebuilds.

The fastest way: the Character template

On the start screen, click Character under Create from Template. The project opens on a sample elf that is already rigged, animated and has moving hair. Choose your own .glb on the Import node, move the markers onto your character, and export. The Character template page walks through every step.

Use the template when you want a result today. Read on when you want to know what each node does, or build your own chain.

What Forge does for a character

Import

Load the character model.
Transform

Give it its real height and face it front.
Character Seams

Cut UV seams at the joints and down each body part.
Auto Unwrap

Lay out the UVs along those seams.
Auto Rig

Build the skeleton and the skin weights.
Hair Guides

Give the hair its own bones.
Add Animation

Add Idle, Walk or Jog, one node per clip.
Hair Physics

Swing the hair through every clip and bake it in.
Export

Write one animated .glb.

A full character chain. Only Import, Auto Rig and Export are required; every other step is optional.

Size and facing. Transform with Fit size scales the character evenly to its real height, and Rotate turns it to face front (+Z). The rig needs a character that stands upright and faces front, in an A-pose or a T-pose.
Cleanup (optional). An AI-generated model usually needs repair: cracks welded, loose fragments removed, holes capped, triangles reduced. Game-Ready Mesh does all of it in one node. Skip it for a model that is already clean.
UV seams (optional). Character Seams cuts the character at its neck, shoulders, wrists, hips and ankles, and down the side of each part, so Auto Unwrap lays out the face, the body and every limb as separate, predictable islands. Then Bake carries the original textures onto the new UVs.
The rig. Auto Rig builds a skeleton inside the character from nine markers you drag onto the chin, neck base, groin, wrists, elbows and knees. It uses Mixamo’s joint names and bone directions: 25 joints, or 65 with every finger. Skin weights are computed for you, with no weight painting.
Animation. Add Animation adds a ready-made clip: Idle, Walk or Jog. Add one node per clip. Every clip loops and plays in place, so your game’s character controller moves the character.
Hair. Hair Guides turns each curve you draw through a clump of hair into a chain of bones. Hair Physics simulates those chains through every clip, keeps the hair out of the body, and bakes the swing into the clips. Nothing to set up in your engine.
Export. Export writes one .glb with the skinned character, its skeleton and every clip, each clip named.

Checking the rig

Switch the viewport to the Rig view. With no joint selected, each part of the surface takes the colour of the bone that moves it most; click a joint to see exactly where its weight reaches. The Motion picker plays a test motion that bends every joint, then each clip on the rig: watch the shoulders, elbows, hips and knees. If a colour bleeds into the wrong limb, move the markers until it stops.

The markers are edited from the Front view. Turn to the Left or Right view to check from the side that every joint sits inside the body.

Getting the character into your engine

Unreal Engine, Godot, Blender: import the exported .glb. Each clip arrives as a separate animation of the one character.
Unity: import the .glb with the glTFast package. Or use Engine Output to send the character straight into an open Unity project as a prefab with its animations and an Animator Controller (Forge Bridge for Unity, in early access).
The Unreal Engine Output node sends static meshes only. For an animated character in Unreal, export a .glb and import that.

What Forge does not do yet

Humanoids only. Auto Rig builds a human skeleton: two arms, two legs, one head. No quadrupeds, wings or tails.
Three clips. Idle, Walk and Jog ship with Forge. You can’t import your own animation files or keyframe animation by hand.
In place only. No root motion; the clips never move the character forward.
No weight painting. The weights come from the shape of the surface. A garment modeled as a separate shell over the body follows its closest bones.