How do I combine pieces of a mesh together so they act as one?

Development Rendering
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1

Hello Community,

I was messing around with the idea of a character creator. To start I pulled down a character from the market place and exported it into blender. I then began to cut the head of the mesh into different pieces (eyes, ears, etc). My thought was that if I could cut all the pieces into separate meshes then I could reshape the individual pieces and allow the user to select different variations of meshes to “build their own head” so to speak. Here are some examples:

320931-eyescut.png
320931-eyescut.png712×543 246 KB

320928-nose.png

320929-head.png

I then reimported all these pieces back into unreal. I put each piece as a child to the body piece in my character blueprint and combined them using the “SetMasterPoseComponent” to make them all use the same animation blueprint. This worked. All the pieces formed together with no holes and they moved together in animation as if they were one.

Here comes the problem when I zoomed in on the heads I noticed that the pieces all had very sharp distinguishable edges.

320930-together-1.png
320930-together-1.png453×583 235 KB

320941-together-2.png

It almost looked as if the shadows and lighting was casting improperly on the meshes as they were all actually individual pieces.

My question is, does anyone know how to properly combine these meshes so they act as one? Or if this isn’t possible, what is the right way to do this? A lot of games have character creators these days so maybe I am reinventing the wheel. Any help would be appreciated!

2

You could do different limbs and different heads and cut them off where the limbs and head meet the clothing but, for the different nose and eyes etc, I would make those as blendshapes and then access the values via BP. Those sharp edges are because the smoothing stops at the edge. So, not individual parts for noses, eyes, mouth, etc but, blendshapes of those varying parts.

3

Hey thank you so much! Had no idea blend keys were even a thing. They work so well. I now have sliders for individual portions of the face. This will work way better than my hacky way of doing it.

4

Glad to help :slight_smile:

5

The way I would go about it is to create an actor blueprint.
Then I would add Static Mesh components. You can then change the component’s static mesh, ie change the hair-mesh, eye-mesh, nose-mesh etc.

You could solve this ingame/runtime with blueprint (event graph) , or you could change it in-editor, also blueprint (construction script)

Do you feel you got enough info to continue, or you need any other help?