i am about to implement multiple armor slots for my character and therefore i needed some armor pieces which i created in Blender. To avoid the problem, that the Skin underneath the Armor is clipping through, i was advised to simply remove the Skin underneath the armor.
My stupid Question is now, do i have to model every possible armor combination (only gloves, no other armor, only helmet and shoes without Bodyarmor etc. and then switching these complete Skeleton Meshes according to the players occupied armor slots or is there a smarter way of doing that?
Thank you alot for your time to answer my question!
You´ve named one common approach, yes. If you take a look at how Metahumans are handling this situation, they are doing essentially what you are proposing. The shoes consist of the shoe mesh + the entire skeleton of the metahuman.
You typically don’t “layer” armor pieces over the skin but replace them.
So, if i got 3 armor sets for example, Head, body, Legs, Boots. I need to make more than 39 different complete Meshes, the once, where you combine different armor Sets together not included?
Is there no way to splitt the Unreal character skeleton mesh in 4 pieces, but with a combined Armature which controlls the animations and u only switch those pieces?
Otherwise i guess my game will only get a full body armor and a second set
hey there ! it looks like your wanting modular characters.
YES ! you can split the mesh. theres 3 main ways to do it.
heres the documetation that covers it.
TLDR; you can take your mesh into blender and cut it into pieces.
you can them export them all seperately, and in your player actor you can piece it back together.
so your actor would have
Head
Body
Legs
Feet
meshes.
the head mesh will be your “mesh” mesh thats default in UE character.
and the others parented to it. you can then use the above methods i put, combine, or have them copy eachother via a copypose AnimBP.
its not easy, but its also not that hard good luck ! i hope you get a bit further along your journey.
Aditionally to what @shain1234 said, on the case of armor pieces, you can create slots/sockets on your skeleton for those parts.
The sockets will allow you to create a variety of different armor arrangements and it can even have dynamic movement to it.
Without completely understanding what’s been said so far, it sounds like you want a modular setup.
You’ve got your body skeletal mesh.
You make a jacket with the same skeleton and drop it on your character bp.
In construction you add the follow master pose node (I forget exactly what it’s called) and set the jacket (and whatever else) to follow the body.
The body clips through the jacket, so you either spend a lot of time trying to get the blend weight perfect or have another body mesh with the clipping part removed. If the jacket covers the whole torso + arms then maybe you have another body with the torso + arms missing.
