IMO the best way to make animations in UE4 seems to be to make them in Maya, import them and tweak them. I really don't care for Maya for almost anything.. except animation. The problem is, Maya doesn't play great with SFM's files. You have to decompile them with Crowbar and then drag them back in and piece everything together. The animation export to UE4 goes pretty smooth, but that's why all of this is such as pain. There really is no tool that's very good at most things. They're all strong in 1-2 areas and the other areas are severely lacking.
Finally another user who has some common sense. Once someone get's the hang of the pipeline for exporting and importing animations, mesh, and textures they're golden. Quite frankly the reason why I advocate for using UE5 is quite simply the impressive shader suite without the use of a beefy computer. Most animators that use Blender most often realize the bottleneck really is the render. I don't think most know how to optimize it, what options to turn off or turn on. I had that same hunch with Animopron, no way it took that long per frame(it was stated it was 20min per frame) for what was outputted. You don't need to have global illumination and ray tracing on. It's a waste of computational resources.
With UE5, an animator can just focus on the animation. The shading, rendering, and lighting will be easier and can be done in real time rather than spending 3min on a low quality render just to see of it looks right. No noise, no render artifact. Should StudioFOW ever finish their game and move back to making movies, they are 100% doing it in Unreal Engine.
I think the downside is animators who moved to Blender having the "sunk cost mentality". Spent years learning Blender and retaining the audience when up and commers output short animations faster than them in Unreal and is so tied to Blender that they just won't want to switch. If a lot of movies studios are using UE5 for their film productions now then it's more than good enough for smut. Besides, at this point in time I think having experience in Unreal Engine is very valuable.
The key is really using a local one. The online ones just can't be trained. You can pretty much build whatever you want if you do it locally. Initial setup is a nightmare and takes easily a couple dozen hours. TBH I'm waiting for another leak of a better one to not have to deal with this, but I also derive $0 from it, so I have a different set of criteria.
I've pushed 26Region to get in on 11Labs as quickly as possible like sign up for an account before the clamp down on developers.
Fortunately, I was grandfathered in so I am still able to clone voices on the "Free Tier" without paying. For 11Labs I think what most people don't realize is that you have to use [ , ; ! ... ? ] correctly, do it phonetically if you need to, and not input the entire script in. Do it sentence by sentence. It's how all the funny Youtube videos that used 11Labs did, you don't honestly think they just copied and pasted and set and forget?
EDIT: Unfortunately 11Labs cracked down on grandfathered free accounts. I may have the cloned voices but I can no longer use them to generate dialogue without paying. Caught me by surprise, but then again I haven't used it since February.
