Get results like Gears of War: E-Day with these 500 free Unreal Engine character animations

Whether you're a AAA or an indie game developer Epic Games has a huge freebie for you - the just released Game Animation Sample Project is a massive free-to-download database of over 500 animations and a fully functional character and animation Blueprint, just like those used in upcoming game Gears of War: E-Day.

To use in Unreal Engine 5, the Game Animation Sample Project showcases some of Epic Games' latest tech for video game animation released in the UE5.4 update, including the new Motion Matching toolset. If you're a Triple-A dev the database is a great starting point to experiment, if you're an indie dev or artist then the easy plug-and-play locomotion and game-ready animations, compatible with all UE Mannequins, offer a welcome starting point.

If you're new to the idea of Motion Matching, this is a new approach for Unreal Engine 5 that enables easy and realistic animation in video games. The tech continuously picks the best frame of animation to use from a database of motions, selecting the ones that closely fit the active pose or movement of a character. (Read our interview with the video game art director behind SPINE for how this kind of animation can work in-game.)

In a press statement the the Unreal Engine blog, the Epic Games team writes: "Motion Matching is about more than locomotion – it’s a powerful tool for jumping, falling, and complex traversal (think parkour)."

Adding: "Using 3D trajectory prediction, Motion Matching can produce seamless transitions with anticipation and long follow-throughs for realistic results.Combined with a vast library of animation poses created from high-end motion capture data, the locomotion and traversal dataset in this sample project makes for a powerful new way to animate characters – including MetaHumans."

Download the Game Animation Sample Project from the Unreal Engine marketplace website. Get some inspiration from the our Unreal Engine tutorial for creating a game, or read our guide of the best laptops for game development for the latest tech.

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Ian Dean is Editor, Digital Arts & 3D at Creative Bloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and video game titles Play and Official PlayStation Magazine. Ian launched Xbox magazine X360 and edited PlayStation World. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on digital art, VFX and video games and tech, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5.