Character Armour/Equipment, whats the best method for this?

Development Character & Animation
1

So I’m not sure how to go about this before my character model is made.

What’s common practice for a character with Equipment?
Do I have a character base with no clothes/gear on then create separate static meshes for equipment?

Hope someone can share their experience on the matter! :slight_smile:
Thanks.

2

You can do it in several ways:

-create armour meshes and attach them to you character with sockets
-when the armour is a texture, just change it with a material parameter
-you could also add morph targets which will create an armour on your mesh + change the texture :slight_smile:

3

I was thinking with static mesh though, if the character moves with say leg armour, the leg armour wouldn’t move with the legs unless it was seperated at the knees I guess lol.

You don’t know of any tutorials do you? Thanks for the guidance so far :D!

4

From what ive read, I can make different pieces of equipment that use the same skeleton as my character. This seems like a method that could work for me. Just need to know how to do this! Would I basically open my character in blender with the skeleton, create an armour piece, again leg armour for example. Weight paint it to the bones, delete the character mesh and import into ue4, then when the skeletal mesh is attached to the character, it would move with the character? Or is that not how it would work.

5

That’s essentially how it works yes. “Additional Body Parts” is in the skeleton properties and should align the equipment to the model, if that’s what your looking for. Otherwise there are other ways such as spawning it through BP and then setting location based on sockets

6

That’s great :smiley: sounds easy enough, I should be fine creating armour myself. Anatomy is a nono lol. I plan on using a mix of the skeletal method I posted above, and using textures to give the appearance of armour (for simple flat pieces like chest armour or legs. Then using a skeletal mesh with one bone to attach a socket to for a helmet which won’t need weight painting. Hope I’m correct in thinking this :slight_smile:

7

Yeah that should work, let me know how you go since I’ll be implementing something quite similar in my project