I have textured and imported a car model that comprised of multiple meshes, using Datasmith with 3ds Max. There reason I am importing with Datasmith is because I have already setup a hierarchy, so I don’t want to lose it.
I was wondering if it’s possibly apply a skeleton-mesh to my existing mesh after the import? I am looking to animate my car but haven’t really been able to figure how to do it for my specific problem. The cars I usually see using Chaos Vehicle have good topology and 5-15 meshes, but mine has over 200.
I know I probably started setting up the scene in the wrong order, but it would be preferable to be able to to it this way.
You can use the merge tools in unreal to reduce the amount of parts, but I don’t know if there is a way to convert static to skeletal meshes. (the other way around is possible)
Skeletal mesh has bone influence data baked into the mesh vertices and I don’t think there is any way to paint weights in unreal (there is vertex painting but just for colors)
Going with skeletal meshes you will also lose most of your hierarchy during the reduction of meshes.
I preferably don’t want to merge my objects, because I might want take the car apart in a animation in the future.
Well that doesn’t sound to promising for me. Is it possible to use a lowpoly model for the simulation then bake it and connect my existing mesh to the lowpoly?
hi,
by reading your post i was thinking about this, maybe i want a car too in unreal. i do not know exactly how its working in unreal, but here is a post and it should work like in unity 3d. in unity i made my car out of ~ 60 parts and combined them on gamestart to one mesh. when a crash happens you could look where the collider (simple representation of the car out of boxes) is hit and then do damage at position or split mesh apart and reparent it to minimize draw calls.
