I am making weapons in blender 2.7 and I looked through all the documentation on skeletal meshes but cannot find any good tutorials anywhere. The documentation has lots of stuff on rigging for player characters or NPCs but not for weapons.
My question is essentially this:
What do I need to add to my skeletal mesh to make it a usable (NOT pretty!) weapon in UE4?
I know I need to rig it with bones but what bones does a weapon need
a) at the bare minimum ? 1 central and 1 grip bone / 2nd hand bone?
b) to have animations, muzzle flashes, shooting anims, etc?
c) what animations does it need to work? none? idle? shooting?
d) what blueprint programming do I need to make it ‘shootable’? can I just make a class and extend it of another weapon? like the sample yellow ball gun?
Can anyone point me to a good tutorial on the matter?
Export the machine gun from the shooter game and use the bones in that
Five minutes from reading this you could have that gun in your modelling program… That’s if blender can import FBX, (not sure because I’ve never used it
Just add 1 bone and then create basic animations e.g idle, shoot, reload,… (here you can see how to create very very basic animations: ?v=i1EWKNr6aXc). After you have made some anims just import the weapon into the UE4 and just replace the existing one. (probably I will record a video about that topic in the following days)
LexLuthor1 -> blender isn’t able to import fbx files
Blender has an FBX importer. It was originally designed for simple meshes only but got more features over time (multiple Materials, UV channels, Vertex Colors etc.).
Check this thread plus this post for a modified importer for skeletal meshes.
Hi . Thanks for the information. I tried following your tutorial and I exported the blend to FBX but when I try to import it as a skeletal mesh it gives me the error “no bone hiearchy found”. I did the same as what you did (object constraint, child of -> armature -> bone). How come?
Disable the rigid mesh option and enable the mesh bones option in the import window. When it isnt working after that you have to rigg your weapon in another way (then you shouldn’t use the modifier to assign the bone to the mesh) -> I will record a tutorial about that in the following days
ok afaik none of the current weapons in the UE4 demo’s have any anims it’s all done via the character anims, so atm all you have to do is create your mesh + rig (i advise min 3 bones) skin the mesh to the rig/armature then export via fbx.
i also advise modifing your fbx export file so that it doesn’t add the extra bone to the root of the rig as this can in cases cause problems later
ok time to split hairs on this one, in the FPS template the first person arms are complete with the weapon so anims are required for the complete mesh,
now if you use the shooter game as an example then the arms/character have anims but the weapons don’t.
in the past i have always kept arms and weapons separate.
personally i don’t think it’s a good idea to have the arms+weapon as a single mesh as in most games you will have more than one weapon
