[VIVE] Possible to have customized hands with no skinning/rigging, replacing the robot hand in VR template?

[jaydehei]

Hi there,

I'm trying to have customized hands with basic grip animation in my VR game. Problem is I only know how to model 3D hands, but I didn't learn about animation.

Is there a way to use the already implemented robot hands in VR template, just resetting the mesh used by a customized one and a few adjustements, without going too much into rigging ? I assume there are some tools for automatic rigging that could help, this may be manageable, but what's more difficult is building a UE4 skeleton mesh, reusing the grip animation, blueprint/physics from scratch...That's why I'm asking if it's possible to just duplicate and replace these slots ?

If anyone has already done that before, or could send me to some tutorials (I didn't find much about it, all I found was how to use some hands on the marketplace that where already set with skeletons etc and that couldn't be customized !)

Thanks

[Enter Reality]

You could design a set of robot hands using the joints center of rotation, so that they would rotate properly, then once the modeling is complete, you can skin the robot hand by just flooding each robot hand part with the correspondent joint, which is very fast to do, and you won't be doing any advanced skin weight paint.
Alternatively you could also avoid the skin weight completely, design the robot hand, then import each finger section into UE4, and attach each one to a joint socket, and hide the hand.

Being mechanical parts, the skin weight is very simple, so I suggest you to go witht he first option

[jaydehei]

Thanks for the solution, especially the socket one, I'll keep this in mind !
Unfortunately, I'm not looking for mechanical hands, but more like space gloves, so I can't avoid skinning (which I can more or less manage with some automatic tools I suppose). The problem is more about how to build a whole skeleton system (with mesh/physics/pre-built animations) using UE4 system, I didn't find much free nor paid tutorials about the subject :c

[vr_marco]

Thanks for the solution, especially the socket one, I'll keep this in mind !
Unfortunately, I'm not looking for mechanical hands, but more like space gloves, so I can't avoid skinning (which I can more or less manage with some automatic tools I suppose). The problem is more about how to build a whole skeleton system (with mesh/physics/pre-built animations) using UE4 system, I didn't find much free nor paid tutorials about the subject :c

If you create a new hand skeletal mesh with the exact bone structure/names as the original one in the VR template (open the MannequinHand_Right_Skeleton and have a look at how it is organized), you can import it and retarget all the animations to it. Basically you can swap it in place of the standard robotic hand and it will work.

[jaydehei]

I'll give it a try, thanks Marco !