Character (dog) transform from baby to adult over time?

[Rogeralvca]

hello, is there a way to make a character (dog) transform from baby to adult over time? any ideas?
this proyect is about a homeless dog that needs to survive, so i have a lowpoly character and made a full body blend shape in autodesk maya to make the transition from juvenile to adult, but i don’t know how to implemet that in unreal engine, another issue is the skeleton, in autodesk maya the skeleton keeps the initial juveline form, so animations doesn’t work correctly in adult form.

is there a way to do this in unreal engine? a transformation that happens over time using the same mesh/skeleton
or another way to do it?

[SupportiveEntity]

Hey @Rogeralvca, welcome to the community! You can actually export your blend targets straight from Maya! So if you’ve already exported the FBX with the Blend targets, when you go to import it you have to import them as “morph targets”. Once you’re in you can see them under the static mesh when you open them. If you want a full rundown of the pipeline for blend shapes/morph targets, here’s some documentation!

FBX Morph Target Pipeline in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions!

[Quetzalcodename]

Hey @Rogeralvca! Welcome to the Forums!

To add on, you can is another thread where a user figured out how to update the reference pose for their skeleton:

Update skeleton rest pose of one instance of skeletal mesh

I even tested it in Unreal 4.24 and it was still stretched, so I just made a new animgraph with a single anim node that simply set each bone to what I had recorded for a given pose and that works great. It is sad that SetRefPoseOverride does not work and no one from Epic responded to my question: Calling SkeletalMeshComponent SetRefPoseOverride on identical instance of a skeletal mesh produces stretched and incorrect bind pose on target - Character & Animation - Epic Developer Community Forums

As well as a Live training from Unreal that goes over character morph targets being implemented in engine:

Getting Started with Character Morph Targets | Live Training | Unreal Engine

I hope the above solutions are what you need to solve your problem!

[Rogeralvca]

wow thanks, just what i was looking for!

[Rogeralvca]

hello, after trying to understand what and how to do it, i did make a litle progress, haha (i’m not a native english speaker), and i’m really new to the engine, so the morph taget is ok, but i cant find the way to update the reference pose for my skeleton, i know is in the animgraph tab, but don’t know which nodes i need to use, and how to conect them.

can you help me out?