Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5 is among the best game development software options for 3D visuals, and it's becoming increasingly popular for architectural visualisation and film and TV too. If you're new the platform, the best Unreal Engine 5 tutorials and Unreal Engine Courses are good place to start, and Epic's just shared a bunch of resources from Unreal Fest Chicago 2026.
Unreal Fest is a series of events that gather creators and developers to learn about the latest tools and workflows in the game engine. The Chicago event took place over two days in June, coinciding with the release of Unreal Engine 5.8. Some of the sessions are now available to view on YouTube for those who weren't able to attend.
Unreal Fest Chicago featured a range of highly practical talks. The session above is presented by Epic Games Senior Technical Animator Chris Pagoria, whose career in animation included time as a character artist at Blue Sky Studios working on films like Spies in Disguise and Ferdinand.
In his session, he shows how to use Unreal Engine 5's latest shape authoring tools and deformers to construct stylised character rigs in Unreal Engine. He demonstrates how to make clean controls, sculpt detailed facial expressions that give characters emotion, and how to and combine bone-based animation systems with blend shapes.
Some of the tools are demonstrated using Unreal Engine's free Zebra Character Sample, which is available from the Fab Store. The fully rigged stylised sample character allows users to play around with production-quality rigging and animation workflows in the software (you can also download example animation sequences and facial pipelines).
Other sessions uploaded from Unreal Fest Chicago include Michael Balzer and Etienne Carrier's introduction to Mesh Terrain, a non-destructive workflow that enables artists to craft large complex environments (below), and Henry Falconer's presentation on creating scalable MetaHuman crowds, using Mass and Nanite to simulate and render them efficiently.
There's also a talk from Arkoun Merchant, a project lead at CIMS, on open-source pipelines for handling massive 3D datasets, from photogrammetry mesh processing using a Blender-based workflow to a point cloud pipeline using Entwine, PDAL, and Blender.
