Hey @TimothyBrake and @bigboy2k, we are looking into all of your questions and will get back to you here in a bit!
In you character blueprint add 2 motion controller components. You can select left and right hand in the properties at the panel on the right. Then add the skeletal mesh (single hand) left and right to the blueprint. See Unreal documentation for details: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Platforms/VR/MotionController/
Then drag the left skeletal mesh to be a child of the motion controller left. Same for the right. The tricky part is that the single hand skeletal mesh is not ONLY the hand but the whole skeletal body body where the only the hand is visible. When you add the skeletal mesh this will result in not being centred at the hand. They are WAY above you when you test in VR. You must adjust the location of the actual hand to be at the 0,0,0 point in the motion controller (somewhat the center of where the camera is. Adjust rotation as well to simulate the correct. Took a while to adjust but it worked. I wil ask Ironbelly if it is possible to just provide a skeletal mesh for the hand at the correct location (without all the unneeded bones representing the rest of the body)
Hope this helped.
Great! Is it possible to provide 2 hands left and right without all the unneeded bones? The skeletal meshes have all the bones of a body and only the hand is visible. This has a side effect that when adding it to a motion controller, the hands appear way above you as the center point is not the hands but something else. Manual adjustment of location and rotation is possible but cumbersome. It would be a very nice addition in a VR project to be able to just drag the hands to the motion controller without a manual offset in rotation needed. So basically a skeletal mesh for the hand only.
To make it perfect:
- if the idle animation of the hand is in the exact same position as the real hand of the player (when holding the motion controller), then it would be perfect! The hand being in the exact same position as the real hand is so very useful as the player is then tricked to actually hold any object being attached to the hand. E.g. if the idle position of the hand is holding the controller, the when attaching a sword to the hand (or a gun) the developer does not have to do anything to adjust the hand position and the player is tricked to actually holding a sword.
- Animation holding a finger on the trigger of a gun and pulling the trigger
Thanks in advance.
Greetings,
T
Thanks for the advice! I will work on this when I get home.
After I get that all worked out I want to have the hand pick objects up. Hopefully there can be an update that has examples of these sort of situations. Thanks!
You can do it in multiple ways. 1 way is to check for overlapping actors of the hand when pressing a button on the motion controller. When you find the correct actor you want you can use AttachActorToActor node (or something similar) and provide the socket name you want the object to attach to. If you open the Skeletal Mesh you can see all the bone names and sockets. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xOoknUDGaE for more info.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the answer. It would still be nice if Ironbelly can make some examples that we can look at 
A huge thanks to @TimothyBrake for posting all of the helpful tips! We hear you @bigboy2k about the demo vids, and its definitely something we’ll consider as a future update 
Any pointers for using these with Leap? (Getnamo plugin) Tried replacing the hand mesh in LeapRiggedEchoHandsActor Blueprint class, but not having any luck, even with the Anim Class set to LeapEchoHands_AnimBlueprint.
Any pointers to what I may be missing, or can anyone share a couple of basic steps to get this up and running? I doubt I’m the only one with this issue, although this support thread and Google seem to suggest I am…
Hey @Stormbuster, sorry for the delay getting back to you. We were reaching out to folks asking if they have advice, because unfortunately we haven’t tested them out with the leap. When we designed them, they are made to be compatible with leap, but we’re sorry to hear you’re having trouble. Maybe reach out to their support team for answers? Cheers!
Thanks for the follow up, as you probably may have guessed it’s not a critical issue for me at the moment.
I will check with the Leap community to see if there is a solution for this. Cheers
**You gotta keep em separated! **
Updated the OP but also wanted to let folks know that the Hands Pack has been separated so you can use them together, or individually. While we’re at it- we’ve also updated the pack to 4.15!
[Sketchfab]12588afbbea745e0939933af134b120a[/sketchfab]
Any plans to make these compatible with the VR template hands? I was hoping I could just swap 'em in but it’s going to be a bit of a ballache.
Yea i absolutely cannot believe these are still broken.
I made do with them for a previous projects 6 months ago hoping ironbelly would deliver on their promise to update them. They havent.
If you’re thinking about buying these and you see this first, DON’T.
I’ve spent the last 2 hours trying to learn enough about blender and maya to make this **** work. wth ironbelly? What are you doing? Just make this proper!! the skeleton is already there, just line it up so zero is at the hand and the same as the template hands.
Sure they are separate, left and right. But essentially its like they just deleted the whole skelton of a TPS character EXCEPT for the hand and the Root of of the humanoid. So your root is like 5 feet down on the floor while your hand is way up in the air.
This means you can’t use them with any of the default anims in the template but more importantly you can rotate them without it rotating miles off where you expect since the center is 5 feet lower than the center of the hand.
I’ve seen promises of updates and nothing. Guess I won’t be buying anymore of ironbelly assets. Too bad I bought a bunch already.
Shame too, because the model hands are nice. These shouldbt be allowed to say VR ready.
EDIT: Just wanted to elaborate on this because its the real reason these are flawed. If you import them as is and attach them as the mesh to your motion controllers, they will be 5 feet away from you and up in the air. The will rotate at 0 around the controller floating off in space. This means you will spend tons and tons of time tediously trying to offset them to be more or less centered around the motion controller. You can get some success with this, but don’t even think about offering in-game options to change the hand position. Some like it a bit closer, or further, or rotated up slightly etc. In fact a good example is on vive you will have them finally lined up the way you want. But then due to the controller differences between this and Oculus, you would want to slightly rotate them upward or the barrel of a gun feels like its lower than it should be. But you can’t because rotating it slightly moves it a mile since the center of the hand isn’t the centre of the hand, nor is it even the wrist… its where your feet in real life would be. really silly issue to have.
Agh, great. I was thinking of buying these. Thanks for the warning.
Thanks for the comprehensive explanation. We actually had the hands completely re-rigged a month ago after we realized our first update didn’t do the trick but it’s been delayed getting pushed to the marketplace. That’s the reality of having 30-40 marketplace packs to keep updated and debugged. With any luck we’ll see this fixed and on the marketplace in the next week. That being said it is still possible to use the current hands as is. Import them with the setting that it uses the frame1 as its bind pose option turned on and it should work fine
Sure I can appreciate that, but come on friend. I’m looking through the reviews on the MP page and it’s not looking great. People are complain about the same issue and its been months. This doesn’t look like a major overhaul here so I don’t think this is the kind of update that is half a year in the making. On that note, something that some others do with their packs when they need an update, is they can email the creator proof of purchase and get a temp download link to the updated asset. If I can do this I’ll try the update out and report back here asap.
Maybe I’m missing this option? I see an option for frame 0 but not frame 1. Can you point that out? I tried importing a bunch of times on frame 0 option, on and off, update skel on and off… but got the same results as before see below screens. But even so, you’ll see more and more people asking for assets to match Epic’s baseline. My first VR project VR wasn’t really supported yet so there was no baseline. By the time I got to using these hands I ‘struggled’ with them to get them to fit “somewhat right”. It will never feel perfect having to offset it so much.
But here’s the thing, if someone spends a month or two building out a VR project on the cheap, with place holders and etc… using epics hands. Spending lots of time making their weapons fit the hand perfectly. It’s easy to create grip and shoot anims by mdifying the idle anim… etc… when they go… “Ok lets replace the robot hand with something cool.” and go to the market place and buy this.
- It’s way off 0 so you already now have to rework all your stuff to accommodate new positions
- None of the anims you made will work now… back to re doing a bunch of work
- Even if I could import this to frame1 to get rid of the offset issue I mentioned… points 1 and 2 still apply. The orientation is completely different. My pick up and shot, snap to targets are all gonna be messed up. All the joints I used to attach my weapons wont exist. If only I could use your mesh on the base epic skeleton… I could save a TON of dev time REDOING tons of things.
Do what you want, but honestly you’re gonna find most will use the basic epic assets to start… and building from this means a lot of re-work later if purchased assets arent matching. If you want to fight that, feel free… I just think its not a good way to do it in a marketplace like this.
Hopefully this update comes soon. I’ll stick to the epic hand for now I suppose on the new projects until your update fixes it… or I can manually fix it myself.
…Yeah, that set 0 as base pose thing was never going to work. It sounds like Ironbelly hasn’t looked at the VR template.
update has been pushed to the marketplace, with any luck will fix all these issues
My launcher didn’t show there was an update avail. I deleted local content anyway and redownloaded.
Looks like the same version to me… same issues.
In vaultcache it still has a folder name ending in 412 but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t updated.
Adding to project gives the same results right now so doesnt look like it was updated yet.
followed up with Epic on this, we received confirmation from them yesterday that it was pushed to the marketplace. The hand shoould look like this now:
