Changing Class to 3rd Person Character - What does it do?

Development Programming & Scripting
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I’m trying to get my MetaHuman to be the main player character. I chose not to use the default 3rd person template, and followed the StackBot tutorial to make it from scratch, swapping for my own animations, and tweaking parts of the AnimBPs that need to match the feel of my game.

Now, I have set it all up under the UE4 Mannequin Skeleton/Mesh, as that’s what my animations are targeted to.

So, I imported my MetaHuman, I set the ParentClass to my UE4 Character BP, and retargeted all animations with the built-in IK rigs (after a few tweaks) and re-created my AnimBP with the new animations, using the MetaHuman skeleton as the AnimBP’s skeleton.

Everything in the Event Graph has been copy/pasted, and references to the CharacterBP has been replaced to cast/reference the new MetaHumanBP. It seems to work, and the character can move and jump, but animations aren’t playing.

The AnimBP shows the animations working in the viewport.

So, I’m curious what switching the ParentClass actually does? Does it just make it a playable character? Does it make it so that all variables on the original are able to be referenced by the MetaHuman? Why do all tutorials point to just changing the ParentClass to the 3rdPersonCharacter template?

Do I need to recreate my MetaHuman character from scratch with a new Character blueprint?

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Changing a BPs parent gives you access to everything (all the code and components) in that particular blueprint. So, in the case of your character, you have created a character BP. This means it has basic movement components and other things the character class inherits.

However, the third person character BP also has some extra things, like a camera component. So, reparenting will add that camera component, for example.

When in doubt, you can always duplicate your character BP, reparent it and see if you get any issues.

Ideally, you’d be using version control software so you can make a new branch and roll things back if something monumentally breaks.

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