Lets say i want my character to have a choice of multiple hair styles that players can choose, but how do i actually keep the location of the hair that is set in 3ds max and also keep it rigged to the head bone?
I have tried adding them as both static and skeletal meshes inside the characters blueprint and hiding/unhiding but both attach to and just manually placing it does not seem to work as it’s either offset and follows the animation or its in the right place but does not follow the animation.
I really don’t want to do offsets for every possible style of hair/clothing for my character.
There must be a better way of doing it.
Thanks in advance.
As far as I know, what you want is a modular skeletal mesh. The idea is to split the mesh into parts. So in your case the cloths, top of the head and the rest of the body will each be a separate skeletal mesh but all rigged to the SAME skeleton. So you have one skeleton and multiple meshes.
Once you do that, you can create many skeletal mesh components inside your character and assing different skeletal mesh parts to each of them. Since all of them are using the same skeleton, they will follow the animation correctly. If you then want some physics simulation for you hair, you can do that in Phat
read these for more info (its in C++ however):
I have received more replies on the ue4 forums, so if anyone else is curious to know more please follow this link.
I can’t exactly tell you my self because i’m not a very experienced Unreal Artist, though I have been studying the past few months, but I figured you’ll most likely have to make the character and the Hair two separate objects. In a 3D modeling program, I suggest using Blender for the following; When the character is rigged, give the hair a vertex group (where all the faces are assigned to it), or you could possibly use the material in which the vertexes are assigned to (if the whole object is one material of course). Make sure the hair object overlaps the character at the right location of where you want it to be, also make sure that the hair is in the exact same spot as the character. Now here is the tricky part, building on from the hair variation example. Make more hair instance objects, making sure there in the exact same spot, and making sure the vertex group of each one (that has the whole object assigned) is the same name as each. This means that if you were to select one instance of hair, the vertex group assigned to it has the same name as the vertex group in another hair instance. Hit ‘Export’ into an fbx. file. Import the newly exported files into Unreal Engine 4. Make sure you have a character mesh, and as many hair instances (difference objects though) in Unreal.
Now follow this link:
I know that it is a tutorial for guns instead of hair, but you can learn the work flow of doing this.
Make sure you have positioned the hair correctly on the character. If you followed the steps above, you should have no problem with this. Now your all set to use C++ or the Blueprints to make the hair optional. You can now follow this link to do so:
Please reply if you have tried this and it works for you. Like I said, i’m quite new to Unreal Engine 4 so this it more like a theory rather than a tutorial. This would be a dramatic achievement for me if I am right about this 