I’m trying to figure out whats the best way to hide and unhide bones during animations. Basically I have this pack
I figured out how to add another skeletal mesh to it etc. But I only want to see the arms full time and the rest hidden, then when I perform a wall jump,vault etc, I want the rest of the body appears during the animation then disappear at the end.
Hiding individual bones doesn’t really make sense for a real time skeletal animation, for two reaso
ns.
The math is wonky – what do you do with triangles that use some vertices bound to a visible bone, and some vertices bound to a hidden bone? what about vertices blended across them?
Once you chop off triangles, the “innards” of the mesh becomes visible and give a very disjointed/jarring look.
If I had to show/hide the body like this, I would make the body a totally separate skinned mesh from the arms. Then I would show/hide that mesh as appropriate. They can use the same master pose component, they can animate with the same animations, and so on; you just turn off rendering on the body bit when appropriate. This is similar to how “dress up” or “customizable avatars” are built.
Two other options you could look into if you really wanted:"
A blend target that squishes all the triangles down to nothing. I don’t think UE supports blend targets also changing bone blend weights, though, so this may not work well.
A material that has a cutout alpha channel that you animate between visible and hidden. This will likely work most closely to what you initially requested (“hide a bone”) and you can see whether the cut-out innards of your mesh are a problem or not for you.
