Greetings, I am relatively new to ue4, blender and 3d modeling in general so please excuse any major shortcomings or gaps in 3d computer modeling/animation knowledge.
I am trying to learn what it would take to use the existing 3rd person character (and all it’s included assets: skeleton, animations, etc) but modify the base mesh to have a cloth component. In this case I want to add a basic sheet on top of the character’s head.
I’m trying to make some ghosts from pac-man and a friend suggested using a regular character with some cloth sheet over them, I think that it’d make for a cool design and I’d be really happy if I could achieve this.
So I want to try to make a basic modification of the included 3rd person character in the thirdperson level template. The character has all those included goodies (animation, skeleton, etc) and I just want to add a cloth sheet on top.
I want to take a very basic plane mesh and try to use it as a cloth sheet with the existing cloth system in ue4. After following some tutorials, and reading up on the documentation for the cloth system, I crudely (and I’m fairly certain incorrectly as well) made this work by exporting the 3rd person skeletal mesh as a fbx, modifying that in blender by adding a basic subdivided plane with a separate simple sheet material on top, and importing that back into ue4. The new mesh has the plane & character. It kind of worked but I do not think I did it correctly.
I think a good looking cloth behavior would be if I could make the upper half of the sheet a bit more rigid/static and have hard points attached to the head and shoulders and have the bottom half be all billowy. If I can achieve that I’d be pretty happy, I’ll start with just trying to attach a sheet to the head for now though.
Also, I pretty much have zero experience with the animation/skeletal system for 3d animation. I’m familiar with the concept of using bones in meshes to drive animations but I have no experience actually making any of that stuff. There’s a bunch of resources for making animations/skeletal meshes in blender; I’m going through that animation blender stuff and trying to learn about the animation system in ue4 as well.
How do I attach a custom mesh (in this case a flat square plane) to the correct part of the ue4 mannequin that the cloth system expects so that I can still use all the included animations?
On a related note, when I exported the 3rd person skeletal mesh from ue4 as a fbx and opened it in blender the skeleton/bones were at the origin but the various lod versions of the mesh are off to the side. Is that just how things are set up? What would be the correct way to add cloth to this character mesh? I added a simple plane on the lod 0 mesh off to the side and that is what I exported out of blender into ue4. Was this the correct way to do this, just exporting out one lod? I quickly tried to do the same thing for all the lods but I must have messed it up as it did not work. And will I learn how to add cloth/modify existing skeletal meshes by learning more about the animation systems in ue4/blender?
What topic should I study next to try to accomplish my goal of adding a sheet/cloth to the 3rd person character?