Hide/Unhide a specific bone by name

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’d like to know if is there any way to hide a single bone avoiding to hide all its children bones, like this node does:

335569-hidebonebyname.jpg

I’m trying to achieve that all mannequin bones are hidden except the head, like these nodes that I have in my project:

335570-hidepelvisunhidehead.jpg

But nothing does to be working. It only hides the whole mannequin and I cannot unhide the head (Even if I put a Delay() in the middle of Hide BoneBy Name() and Unhide Bone By Name() ).

So, any way to achieve this?

2

Hello! It is written that Hide Bone works just by setting this Bone Scale to 0. So if you set Bone Scale to 0, every children bones of that Bone will be also scaled to 0. I think, you can try to add some special Bone to Hierarchy - with no skinning weights, bu that will parent for bone groups that you need

3

Hi Kehel18!

Sorry for my delay. For some reason I’ve never got any notification of your answer.

Yes, I know that Hide Bone By name works by scaling the bone to 0.
It’s just that I’m looking a workaround to hide (or scale to 0) by e.g only the uppertorso and let the other bones scaled by 1.

I ask this because I’m working in a videogame which consist in enemy dismemberment in a medieval battlefield. And what I’m trying to achieve, is the following when the enemy dies:

  1. Save the Enemy’s skeletal mesh into a variable
  2. Destroy the Enemy actor.
  3. Spawn another skeletal mesh actor based of the variable saved.
  4. Hide all the bones of this skeletal mesh actor
  5. Unhide randomsly just a single bone.
  6. Set Simulate physics
  7. Add Impulse/Force.

I’m still trying to find a workaround.

When you said try to add some special bone to hierarchy, do you mean adding sockets or Virtual Bones?

4

Bump. I’m still trying to find any solution. But I’d need help or more information.

5

Anyone please?

6

Bump again

7

Hello again. I can tell you several approaches to solve this, but really not sure that that would be the perfect solution

  • Texture solution: create special mask for different parts of mesh and bake it to texture. For example - R is head, G is body, B is pelvis, R+G - right hand, R+B - left hand, G + B - legs. So after that you can use that mask to apply different effects in Material Editor to your mesh. If you want to hide some part just make Material of type Masked and add params to decide which part to hide. You will also need to fix phys bodies activity, because texture only hide triangles from view

  • Mesh solution 1: just use static mesh dummies, hide original Skeletal mesh and use Static mesh parts instead, attaching them to corresponding bones

  • Mesh solution 2: as I wrote before create special bone hierarchy that will provide you with scale-approach visibility tricks (that is more work in Blender, 3Ds Max, etc)

  • You can try to operate on vertex segments but it would be pure C++ solution. There also would be some problem with Physics because you will need to disable some of Bodies due to invisible parts to make picture consistent