I am trying to figure out the pipeline for a modular equipment system for different races and genders of characters. My original vision was to have a single skeleton for all races/genders that can all wear the same equipment despite having different proportions as well as only having a single skeletal mesh for each piece of equipment, as I want a lot of equipment in the game and this would very quickly get out of hand if I needed separate skeletal meshes for each gear/race/gender combination. So I figured this could be accomplished by morph targets being able to blend between the different races and genders. For now I just have human male/female.
Where I am running into issues is using the same animation on a morph targeted mesh. In the attached video, the first skeletal mesh is the human female chest that was exported from the modeling software separately, this one animates correctly. The second mesh is the human male chest, but exported from the modeling software with the morph targets. You can see that the animation does not work properly when morphed to the female version. Both of the meshes shown use the same UE5 skeleton. What am I doing wrong or need to do differently? Is what I am trying to achieve possible?
In both cases, the female mesh was created the same in the modeling software, just exported differently. So that makes it seem like I should be able to accomplish proper animations on the same skeletal mesh somehow. It seems like I could get around this by having different skeletal meshes for a single piece of gear for each race and gender, but that is going to get out of hand in the engine quite fast the more gear we add.
In trying to research this it almost seems like it has to do with the order of operations of how the morph target is applied based on this Blendshapes/Morph Targets on whole body working with skeletal animation - #7 by suneke - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions (this is in the unity forums but talks about UE). Is there a way to rectify this in engine or in the modeling or animation workflows?