I have inside my game 20+ character that are all the same thing with diffrent mesh, same animations, same blueprints etc…
But in every update i will add 8 more characters, and i’m forced to do every change i’m doing in 20+ characters and that takes time.
I know that i can retarget some animations with a base skeleton and then just creating the animations for all characters, but this does not solve the problem with the character logic & code and does not redusing the final game size.
I was wonder how epic manage to do that in fortnite with so many skins…
I’m sure that there is a solution to this problem that i can’t find.
When you import a rigged model the skeleton is imported as a separate element and the mesh is imported as a separate element.
The skeleton contains the bone hierarchy that animations made for it can be applied.
The mesh contains the weight tables that allows the asset to be attached to the skeleton.
If you now need to have 20+ characters, and you have imported the two required elements for the first character, you can now import as many unique meshes that makes use of the same character rig by targeting the base rig during import. Thats to say you will now be using the base rig, along with all things attacked to it as a dependency and the mesh will still contain the weight tables, morph targets, material files.
In game you can then use the base rig for 100s of characters by assigning its use in the game play blueprint.
It goes a step further where if the character needs a custom set of bones unique to the character you can import the character and UE will create phantom bones as long as they are children of the main hierarchy.
My guess is this is how Epic does Fortnight along with how they did Paragon as every player character makes use of the same base Epic rig.
So simple answer is yes you can have as many different characters you want so it’s not a dead end solution and the rest depends on the context of what it is that you want to do as the final result