How can you duplicate a Skeletal Mesh?

I have a Skeletal Mesh that I need to clone, that is, to get a new Skeletal Mesh that is an exact deep copy of the original one. The original mesh has been throughly modified so loading a new instance of the asset is out of the question.

Any ideas?
Thanks.

Hi Gatherer,

Could you provide some more information about what you are trying to accomplish? Are you modifying the original mesh during runtime and then needing to make a copy of the resulting mesh (or the original mesh)?

Hi ,

I’ve got an original skeletal mesh which I load and modify its vertices, materials, etc. Then during rumtime I’d like to assign the copy of this mesh to another actor so that I can move it independently and continue modifying the original mesh. When I’m finished modifying it, I want to give a copy to another actor and repeat the process many times.

Thanks

Hi Gatherer,

This is an intriguing and complex idea. Unfortunately Unreal Engine 4 does not have any built-in functionality to accomplish this. You will need to create this functionality yourself. If you can get it to work, I would certainly be interested in seeing how you set it up.

I want to do the same thing with a simple static mesh. Im guessing there is no “duplicate” available there either?

Hi SkurkSE,

You can make a copy or duplicate of a Static Mesh, but the Engine does not have a way to separate the copy from the original. For example, if you were to change the material on your original and make a copy of the Static Mesh, then changed the material again, the material would also change on your copy. If you wanted to make a copy of the original that was its own unique object so that additional changes to the original were not reflected in the copy, you would need to set that up yourself.

As a bad alternative, for Static Meshes, you can pull up FRawMesh from it, then create new UStaticMesh using that FRawMesh data. I’d still like to know if it’s possible to combine multiple UStaticMeshes into one efficiently though.

Misread the question.