Adding weapon bones to mannequin rig in blender

Development Character & Animation
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Hi there,

Kind of a long-shot, but I’m hoping some knowledgeable person will be able to help me out =)

The game I’m working on is focused on sword-fighting, and there are a few situations where I need to be able to animate the movement of the weapon (such as for switching from left- to right-handed, and rotating the weapon in the character’s hand).

I’m animating in blender 2.8 using a mannequin-compatible rig. Adding a weapon bone to each hand in blender is straightforward, but when I export these animations to UE4 (I’m using Auto-Rig Pro exporter) the weapon bones are ignored.

TL;DR

Basically, I’m wanting to add weapon bones to my rig without breaking its mannequin compatibility. Is this possible, or will I need to reimport a ‘clean’ skeleton? If I reimport the skeleton, will I no longer be able to use Mannequin animations?

Any suggestions much appreciated =)

2

What you need is some type of inventory. You can use sockets to on you model, and code it so the weapon will spawn on one of the sockets. About switching from right to left is a bit trickier, maybe you can use Blend shape (morph targets) to animate that.

3

Thanks so much for the suggestions, Blackforcedragon =)

Yeah, sockets give me the basic functionality for attaching the weapons to the character. The difficulty is that they can’t be animated in blender, and the weapon needs to be able to move in quite a few ways - swapping hands, rotating in the character’s hand, and potentially tilting relative to the hand during some actions, etc. etc.

I guess this is a side question, really, but is it possible to move/rotate sockets during gameplay through blueprints? That would be an acceptable interim solution (at least for rotating weapons in the hand). For example, if I had a socket called ‘hand_rSocket’, could I rotate that socket (or the mesh spawned to it) 180 degrees on a given axis on pressing a key?

I’ve had a look at blend shapes (thank you for the suggestion!), but don’t quite know enough about them to see how to use them in this context. Would I need to vertex-animate (not sure if correct term) each weapon model in blender?