Does this seem alright? [Skeletal Mesh Questions]

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello, I recently decided to restart my project and so far, I’ve implemented a lot of the base features and they work a lot better than they did before which is good. There has also been some changes to the project. The game now uses a “true first person” view (you can see the whole body). I am now to the point where I need the player to handle objects. The game will have plenty of different objects, but the first one that I am working with currently is a flashlight. I’ve setup all of my base code (object interaction, etc) in C++ and I created a flashlight model in Maya. Before I get to my questions, let me tell you about my base code (for equipable objects) real fast. I have an interface that has a blueprint implementable event called OnInteraction. This handles what should be done if the Player presses the interact key while looking at it (used for buttons, etc). I use this interface with two types of actors: UsableActor (AStaticMeshActor) and EquipableActor (ASkeletalMeshActor). EquipableActor contains other implementable events for other functionality. UsableActor was originally intended for static objects such as buttons or doors while EquipableActor is intended for objects the player can actually pickup and use. Now that you have an idea of what I have setup, let’s get to the questions:

  1. For objects such as flashlights, is it better to use a Static Mesh Actor or Skeletal Mesh Actor? Please keep in mind, that I will most likely be animating the flashlight (I don’t know if Static Mesh Actors can be animated). I also plan to have multiple types of flashlights. Because of this, I was going to keep the same skeleton for the first type of flashlight and use that for the other types (which will be created by modifying the original asset) that way I can keep everything organized and only have one skeleton and physics asset per type.

  2. Will there be a performance impact if I use a skeletal mesh instead of a static mesh?

Thanks! :slight_smile:

EDIT: After rereading the post, I realized that for some people, some of the information may be useless in answering my question so you can really skip to the first question. lol :smiley:

2

StaticMeshes are static (gee, who would’ve guessed, right? :)) so you’d better stick to SkeletalMeshes if you plan to animate your flashlight.

3

Hey ! Thanks for the reply. A little bit after I posted that, I tried it out and it works great! I used a SkeletalMeshActor and my animation looks great. I’m currently using a LookAt node to rotate the hand to face the flashlight toward the center of the screen. Is there a better way to do this? Thanks! :slight_smile:

4

Hey, glad that you’ve got that sorted! Well done!

As for the aiming part, check out this thread -

You’d usualy want to use aimoffsets for such things. LookAt is mostly used for headlook, when you rotate your head to the object you’re looking at. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t do other things with it so your approach is valid in general too.