Hello,
I’m coming from Unity and new to UE4. I’ve been having a hard time trying to find tutorials on creating animations for hard surface models such as a spaceship. In Unity, it was very easy to do with the timeline and keyframes and it allowed me to save the animation as it’s own file.
I have a spaceship built in Blender and it has multiple parts I’d like to animate, such as the landing gear, wing/engine rotation, pilot seat, lockers, and some panels. In Unity, I was able to simply create keyframe animations for each object. They are simple objects that only require animating the position and rotations. In UE4, everything seems a lot harder to do. It seems animating in UE4 is mostly done with skeletal meshes and some complex setup that looks like visual scripting, but aren’t those for organic objects like humanoid characters where the models need to bend? All of my models are hard surface models and don’t need to bend.
Importing meshes in UE4 is also a lot more complicated than in Unity. In Unity, for my spaceship, on import I have an empty parent object, and the exterior hull, interior hull, engines, landing gear, and other various components as child objects. But when I import it into UE4, I can either import as a combined mesh (but then I can’t animate the parts I want), or I can import them all as separate meshes (which makes the Meshes folder look messy with a bunch of spaceship parts that shouldn’t be used by themselves). Is there a way to keep parent/child structure like in Unity?
This is also for selling in the Marketplace. So I don’t want to have a bunch of separate meshes that are meant to be children of other objects. In Unity, the raw meshes aren’t meant to be used directly and are plugged into prefabs. But in UE4, it seems meshes are used. So I want to only keep meshes in there that are meant to be used as is. There doesn’t seem to be any tutorials on how to set up models and animations (or even any tutorials on how to submit the package) to sell on the Marketplace. In Unity, I just create the folder structure, import my models/materials/textures, create prefabs of the models (and combine multiple meshes into single prefabs with parent/child hierarchy intact), plug in the textures into the materials, create a demo scene, and download the Asset Store Tools to upload the asset. For UE4, I can’t seem to find any tutorials on this process.