Hello !
I am on a project where I will need to have different characters with different skeletons, BUT, I will need their Animation Blueprint to all be the child of the same parent (to ensure the “cast to” nodes will work).
I see there is a retarget manager, but I’m not sure if it’s doing exactly what I need.
I need to change the skeleton in a child Animation Blueprint, and I’ll reimport the new animations for that new skeleton, but I can’t find anything in the engine to do this.
Is there something I’m missing ?
Thanks !
No.
To share a skeleton the skeleton has to be the same asset.
What you can do, is make a skeleton that contains all the bones you need.
Unused bones in the skeleton do not adversely affect performance. And when a mesh that’s painted to a specific bone is active the bone is used.
If you have different heights of characters, you are way better off retargeting and having separate animation sets for a myriad of reasons.
The weight of animation assets is nearly insignificant (its basically compressed text. Can be very very small).
And having dedicated animation BPs is a way better choice, since different heights have to handle things differently (IK for one).
My 2c:
Save yourself the pain of trying to juggle all that, and then having to scrap the merged system anyway.