This week was focused on importing my assets into unreal and trying to get animations to work. The key word being trying - while I was able to get the assets imported, I got hung up on getting first person animations to work, and this was after a number of hours troubleshooting getting the assets in. For the arms, I first ran into an issue importing them wherein unreal didn't recognize the bone hierarchy. This turned out to be a simple fix by just adding a root bone to the center of the skeleton that doesn't actually do anything, but it let unreal recognize the skeleton. There was a further issue where it didn't recognize the ending of the hierarchy after that, but again, ended up being a simple enough fix of just flipping an option in the import settings. After all that, the left arm still wasn't computing normals correctly. Again, turned out being a simple fix of just recomputing the normals in blender then reimporting into unreal. Finally, for swapping animations from unreal's starter content to the arms, the biggest issue I ran into is that the first person starter content doesn't have an IK rig for the arms - the tutorial I was following was using the third person starter content, which does have a rig for the third person character. Ultimately this just means I'll need to make two rigs, which now that I've figured everything out that was causing problems won't be a big deal, but all of the troubleshooting  to get to these solutions took far longer than I would've liked.

As for getting the other assets in, the troubles weren't nearly as bad as the arms, though I did run into an issue where textures weren't importing correctly. For some reason, the texture images were saved in the blender file, but not externally. I'm not wholly sure why, but it just means I'll have to export them out from the blender file and insert them into unreal manually. Tedious, but it won't take long.

While I didn't make as much progress as I would've liked due to the issues I ran into, the troubleshooting process did end up teaching me a lot more about unreal that I hadn't known about prior, so it was still valuable from a learning perspective. Moreover, now that I know what needs fixed, I can continue on with getting the rest done much more easily.

Imported arms ready for use after troubleshooting export/import problems

Manually added texture after finding what was wrong

Start of the IK rig