Hi all!
The project I’m on has several characters sharing a single skeleton.
The characters have different proportions, and these are mapped through the conventions provided by UE4.
A post-process blueprint is providing doing some deformation work, including some that use animation data (mixing corrective pose data).
The post-process blueprint constitutes a single logic that should be shared for all of the characters, but the actual animation data is intended to be tailored for each character (sets of variants).
In archaic (UE3) terms, I would say I have a single graph, and I want to load it with data from different Animation Sets, depending on the context.
I’ve described my specific problem to make it as concrete as possible, but it’s probably just one example of a broad family of similar problems.
For example, I imagine my request is analogous to making variants of a blueprint for different weapon types, modes of locomotion, etc.
What is the correct way to approach this?
I’ve looked at child blueprints and blueprint retargetting.
Child blueprints seem to be good for layering structure on top of a blueprint, but I don’t see an obvious way to layer edits that substitute existing content within the parent blueprint.
The retargetting interface has fields to substitute data in bulk (very close to my own use case) but it seems to be geared towards transfer between different skeletons; unless I’m missing something, it doesn’t seem to be possible to use this for characters that share a skeleton.
I guess I could just straight up duplicate the blueprint… but that would create unwanted maintenance overhead.
Every time I edit the master blueprint, I would have to maintain all of the copies by hand. It would create a potential for human error; and doesn’t seem like The Future.
I’ll keep digging at the documentation, but a few words to point me in the right direction would be appreciated.
Thanks,