Blender authors motion; Unreal retargets it. Animation can come from mocap, a marketplace, or be hand-keyed in Blender — Blender is the hand-keying DCC. You animate on the character rig, bake it down, and export on the canonical skeleton so Unreal's IK Retargeter can drop it onto any character. And because held props are socketed in Unreal, you animate the hand, never the prop — the prop rides along for free.
The rig you prepped in Phase 2 is now the instrument. Whether it's a walk cycle or a single hero pose, the workflow is the same — and it has to survive the trip to Unreal's retargeter.
Block pose-to-pose, then refine timing and spacing. Use the Graph Editor to shape F-curve handles and easing until the motion reads. This is the craft the animation lessons drill.
A still is one keyframe. Save reusable poses (Pose Library / linked actions) so recurring stances — an idle, a ready stance, a gesture — are one click, not re-posed by hand each shot.
Bake IK and constraints down to plain FK keyframes on the deform bones. Unreal's retargeter reads bone transforms, not your rig's IK controllers or drivers — un-baked rigs export as a T-pose or garbage.
Export FBX animation on the same canonical skeleton the character uses, with a clean action name and correct frame range. In UE the IK Retargeter maps it onto the character — and onto other characters that share the rig.
The most common animation-handoff failure: exporting a rig that still relies on IK constraints, drivers, or control bones. The retargeter can't see any of that — it only reads deform-bone transforms, so the motion arrives broken or frozen.
Fix: bake the action to keyframes on the deform bones, confirm the frame range, then export FBX on the canonical skeleton.
Because a held prop is attached to a hand socket in Unreal (grip-pivot set in Phase 3), it inherits the wrist through any pose or animation automatically. You never keyframe the sword — you keyframe the hand, and the blade follows for free.