Hi!
I am thinking about making an FPS project and I have two completely different assets in mind that I want to combine to make a player character. One asset is a full body mesh that uses the epic skeleton and the other asset is a set of FPS arms (+ weapons) that do NOT use the Epic skeleton.
The big problem (or maybe it isn’t) is that the FPS arms do not use the Epic skeleton and they also have animations that are not animated for the epic skeleton (the FPS arms are not from the Unreal marketplace basically).
Is it possible to combine the two so that the FPS arms use their own set of animations (walking, sprinting, weapon reload, aim down sights, shooting etc.) and the body uses another set of animations that are compatible with the Epic skeleton (walking, running, turning etc.) or is this just going to cause a big mess?
I have searched for tutorials on this but have found nothing useful. How would you guys solve something like this? Is there a better way?
Thanks!
potentially a Very big mess.
it depends on how you go about it though. Technically the FPS arms are always independent from the 3rd person mesh. unless you want a Real first person game. where you actually have the full 3rd person mesh as the main character.
Either way you are probably better off creating a custom mesh and combining the two - give it the epic skeleton as a base with auto weights.
The easiest pipeline would be to combine all the animations of the arms in a single file using the same skeleton
then you could copy transforms (blender term) from one bone to another and basically propagate the transforms from one skeleton to another.
The other way would be to re-target properly all of the arm bones to the unreal arm bones that use the epic skeleton as a base, so you can then export all those animations and apply them to the full mesh you created.
there are literally thousands of ways to get this done, it’s a question of how much time you have to spend on it, vs what you know how to do already.