So I’ve been pondering what’s the best way to split up the character to have for example a headpiece, chest, legs, boots and left arm / right arm.
There’s two ways of doing it as I see it.
The first is to attach extra gear ontop of the mannequin model via sockets. It works but it’s not to hot. I tried doing a test where I attached a helmet and hid the whole mannequin mesh, it kind of worked but the animations got streamed out with the mesh. I wonder if it’s possible to keep the skeleton but remove the mesh.
The ideal solution would be to break the mannequin up into parts and have a base bodypart for each slot though. Then as you equip the gear you set the base bodypart to invisible and show the gear. Question is, How would you even go about doing this? I guess you would have to do a seperate blueprint in the character-blueprint with just assemble instructions?
Why don’t you just set the mesh as an invisible character and have parts attached to each of the sockets to make up the base character? then you can just change out those parts with that same part with another mesh attached to it so it looks like you are just adding say a glove but really you are removing the other hand and replacing it with a hand and glove. Lets say they are fingerless gloves so that you can still see the original body underneath.
If i understand you correctly I actually did a test like this. I set the visibility on the mannequin to off (to hide it) as a test when I equipped the gear-part. It worked well but I also lost the animations which wasn’t that great. I’ll be recording up a video tonight when I get home from work to show what happens. Or is an “invisible character” something that exists? A specific actor or type?
I’ll be looking into it more and keep this thread updated with what I find out. I’m not the sharpest blueprint user around so that’s why I hope I can get some input from you that are
I’ve just done that for my project. The easiest approach is to use separate skeletal meshes and use one master component to drive animations on all of them. Check this thread out -
AH very cool . I’m way to stupid for C++ however so I’ll see if I can try my hand at doing some more tests in blueprints. I’ll have a thorough look through your thread/tutorial though and see what I can learn. There’s a few things I want to test out! Very nice!
