I have a Character on a Bicycle and am wondering how to keep them the same object? In other words, not to have 2 different animations belonging to 2 Skeletal structures. (Made in Blender)
You can take a couple of routes:
- Merge their skeletal meshes together and have them share the same root. Export one animation sharing the skeletal mesh
- If the bicycle doesn’t have animations (as in simply following the player as a static prop), you can create a leaf bone that stays with the root object of the character. That way you can simply attach the mesh to a socket/prop bone. You can animate the leaf bone off root based on how you need the prop to work with the character.
Based on what you need, it can be okay, but it’s generally not a good idea to combine skeletal meshes as it makes them a lot less flexible.
If the issue is to be able to select/move/manipulate the objects together, a blueprint will go a lot further!
It’s not going to be anything other than the character riding the bike.
The Bicycle does have an animation, the rig has a Bone for rotation of the wheel and Child Bones for each Pedal to rotate.
Look into inverse kinematics in Unreal (I did not tinkered with it yet).
You basically place your character on bike (or other way around), then you animate upper body and hands in traditional way, all while you use IK solver to keep legs on pedals.
So you will have character animated, and bike with pedals using some IK plus rotating skeletal mesh for pedals. This would be like sitting animation, where you need to move feet to match pedals. And do some code for spinning them according to speed.
Then if you want one Skeleton and one Skinned mesh, combining the skeletal meshes might be your best option!
Just note that both objects will always be in the scene together regardless whether they are needed or not.
You can also come up with with custom animations where you 0 out the scale of your bike/character rig (based on your need).
Anything else is going to require a lot of manual setup to get around this issue.