Is there a clear and concise guide to replacing the 3rd person demo character?

Development Character & Animation
1

I have my own model. I don’t want to use the crash test man, I want to use mine. How do I start this grueling journey into pain and suffering?
Can I use the existing skeletal mesh with my own model? Is there a way to simply swap the character mesh out with mine? Can I adjust and place the bones from inside the engine? (where is that if so)

I’ve been reading documents for days and to me they are useless. Most of them actually just ramble on about how great the tools are without saying what the tools are or how to use them. And no one seems to have a coherent linear tutorial series, they jump all over the place into things totally unrelated to the initial topic.

I’m not expecting it to take 6 seconds but at that same token I’m not expecting it to take 6 hours of jumping around between 8 different programs.

I have a character model. It has no skeletal system (but I can make one if required) I want it to be inside UE4 and I want to be controlling it the same way that the 3rd person template has an immediately controllable character.

2

ok the quickest way for you is to use the Epic character rig, how you do this depends on your 3d program, but first you’ll have to export it from UE4.

once you have rigged your character you can import it and just copy the character blueprint from the third person demo, replace the mesh?character and then set your gametype to use your character blueprint

not simple or quick but once you have the character imported it doesn’t take long to get it up and running

3

Excellent. Thank you very much

4

I’ll just ask this here.

Why is the model sizing inconsistent in UE4? And why does it disobey model sizes?

For example my character is 5’ 4" in actual measurement within Maya. I understand that apparently UE4 takes things in CM or “unreal units”. If I change Maya to CM the character’s height remains the same, by measured in CM instead.

If I import the character into UE4, that character will be the size of an ant.

So I right click and edit and scale up to 4.0; Now if I drag a static version of that character it will be properly sized, however if I take the 3rd person player and put my mech in it’s place the character is the size of an ant again.

Why is it not obeying the size set for it in the editor?

There’s quite a bit in here is creating an excessive amount of work that the user shouldn’t have to use a single brain-cell on.

By no means should anyone expect to just push a button and get a triple A title but this really is getting ridiculous.

5

ok not sure with maya but in max fbx exporter you have to set the size to cm(centimeters) other wise you get a dwarf (small person)
you might also have to reset the mesh/rig scale again in max it’s called “xref” in blender hotkey Ctrl-a

sorry not much help with maya as it always did my head in :frowning:

6

The problem is that your software unit systems is inconsistent.
Mayas units is cm by default (as it is for UE4 and almost every 3d software out there) and no one should ever change that as it brings along a gazillion bugs and incompatibilities when working over several packages.
So heres how to avoid these issues: just work in centimeters. The conversion constant inch/cm is 2.54 … keep a calculator by your side and boom! easy life.

7

No, Maya is in CM (or mine is) unreal is in CM or “unreal units” because why follow a 30 year old industry standard and just use a proper unit of measurement? Regardless of what I do with any model, or how I set FBX exporting unreal will disobey the guidelines set in the file and it will import a very very small object. I have followed the same process in Maya, I had someone do it in 3DS Max (and watched them do it), I used the Autodesk FBX exporter application and tried to re-export the file from there. I checked the unit settings in every single program. it makes no difference. I then purged all Epic/Unreal assets from my computer including residual registry entries and temporary files, reinstalled it (after a cold boot) and attempted the process again. Same thing every time all the time.

I do the same thing betwen different asset production programs like Maya, Blender and 3DS and it works fine, the measurements match up to how they should be. It is UE4 and only UE4 that isn’t adhering to the size set out in the FBX file.

And for reasons that escape me. if I import the model and increase it’s scale to compensate, it will resize the model if it’s dragged into the scene/level as an independent object, however if I take that same mesh which should already be resized at the stage it was imported, and have the ThirdPersonCharacter blueprint/object use it as a mesh, it will be the size of an ant again, but only in that usage scenario. This in turn makes me wonder why I am being required to resize it twice let alone resize it at all when -----all----- other applications have no issue with it and indeed, do not require me to give it any measure of thought, they just do as they’re told.

So out of desperation, because ‘what the hell’ is the only thought going through my head at this point; I I just manually resize the model with the manipulator tool, which is a bad idea in both foresight and hindsight but at least the **** model looks like it’s the proper size ON the ThirdPersonCharacter finally, however if I make the character walk or move at all, they are suddenly walking on the air. I suspect this might be related to where the object manipulator is positioned on the mesh but at the end of the day I’m left wondering why I had to do any of that in the first place.

The standard was set many years ago. Unreal Units? They’re called centimeters, meters, and inches.

I must be doing something wrong but at this point I am very slowly and methodically following official tutorial series on the process and as far as I’m concerned, If I import an object and tell it to scale it at 4 times the normal size that change should be effective on the asset across every single one of it’s uses in the engine without question or exception. I mean really, why would anyone want an object to just magically be sized wrong in various parts of the program?

No doubt a solution will present itself to me through a seemingly unrelated process sooner or later but I have to say that some of the quirks in the engine, great as it is are incredibly ridiculous. Like I said before, no one should really have to use a single brain cell on this. My model is 5’4" or 163cm, the fbx file was set to follow that standard and preserve that information, unreal for some reason disregards that.

Edit: Epic, that’s now a swear in the slightest on any planet or in any culture.

I’d like to thank you guys for helping me out, regardless of this frustration I’m going to keep going with this but I really have to stress that this is an unnecessary point of frustration that should not exist. Even if the information wasn’t set in the FBX. the entire engine should be following the scale set on the mesh at import.

8

sorry i can’t help you with the maya issue, trust me i’ve been using UE for over 12 years and didn’t enjoy to port to cm’s as all my assets was in UU’s , fbx has been the pain of my life but if we want to use UE then thats the only option

i can only advise never scale on import, if you must use maya then have a look at Epic’s Art tool found in the Epic\Epic Games\4.11\Engine\Extras folder of your install, i realise this is for characters but it might help you sort out any missing point of setup/export

yes it took my a while to find useful settings in max and blender

9
  1. Create a new character mesh
  2. Fire up ART and rig the character, as well as add morph targets, etc
  3. Create some animations (if you got a different chierarchy of the skeleton than the default one or if you need more animation or if you need some extra parts of your rig to move)
  4. Import the character and animations to unreal, retarget preexisting animations if necessary
  5. Setup a new character blueprint, configure it, add inputs, mechanics etc
  6. Create an animation blueprint and add all the animations you want to it
  7. Press play

Edit: You sir need to sit down, watch all the introductory tutorials as well as the livestreams…It’s pinned…

10

I’m confused, was your Maya already in CM when you started working (that’s the default setting if I recall so it should have been). I say that because what your describing sounds like you rigged your character in a different measurement unit, and then converted it to CM. So basically the actual rig data thinks it’s a different size than the mesh.
That’s the only reason I can think of that the standard mesh would be the correct size in Unreal, but the Skeletal Mesh would be tiny.

Also, Unreal Units have been around since the engine’s inception, going on 20 years ago. At least now they’re 1:1 with CM…because they didn’t used to be.