Can you parent to 2 seperate bones on the same asset to the mannequin?

Hey Game Designers,

I’m on a mission to find some quality-of-life improvements in my workflow. I am currently working on my FPS game in 5.2. Everything works fine in my game. But I want to know/see if it is possible to parent both hands of my mannequin to my equipped weapon for easier animations with a control rig.

Right now my right hand (middle_01_r) is the parent for my weapon which snaps to the root of the weapon (the handle). I’ve built my animations with this. The animation movements were simple enough to animate the left hand with the sway of the weapon by hand for First person view.

I’m working on my enemies on the 3rd person manny now and the idle animations are a bit more random with the movements and animating by hand frame by frame is time-consuming and doesn’t look great.

I’ve fooled around with attach actor to component and attach component to component nodes to see if I can attach the left hand(middle_01_l) to another bone socket I made on the weapons called 2nd Hand. The engine doesn’t like this and seems to not attach the weapon at all, I suspect it is not sure which bone to attach to so it doesn’t do either. I also don’t see any nodes (to my knowledge) that can weld 2 bones from different skeletons together. I also looked in the animation sequencer to see if there was an option in there to Parent 2 things together to have then follow each other. I’m sure there is something in there or else animation in UE dealing with props would be an absolute nightmare.

It would also be great to have 2 hands parented to the gun so that when I reload or rechamber the gun, I could use the right hand for the animation by detaching it from the gun to do the animations while still having the gun not moving around because it would be attached to the left hand still.

Does anyone have another node or way of achieving this?
pipe dream or no? :smiley: