Link a Skeletal Mesh Bone to a different Skeletal Mesh Socket?

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hey all,

Sorry for what may be an armature question, but I can’t seem to find the answer anywhere.

I have a skeletal mesh in a blueprint (MainPlayer) and at runtime I was to add another skeletal mesh to him (called Item, in this case high-tech Nunchaku). I then want one bone from the Nunchaku in one hand of MainPlayer and another bone in MainPlayer’s secondary hand. So it would effectively stretch out one Nunchaku grip in one hand and other grip in the other hand.

MainPlayer has sockets in each hand and the Nunchaku has sockets on the grips, but also bones for the main grips (fully weight-painted).

I can spawn the class of Item and link the Root bone to a MainPlayer socket, but can’t seem to link the individual bones to separate sockets. Now, if I make the Nunchaku a Poseable Mesh this works, but I then can’t seem to add any anim blue print to it (essentially they “open up” when summoned).

I feel like this should be really easy and I’m missing something very obvious, can anyone point me in the correct direction or an available tutorial which might solve this?

Thank you!!

2

You can read the transform of the character’s hand sockets in your nunchaku abp (maybe by accessing the attached component and casting to skeletal mesh, or somehow passing the character’s component to the anim instance). I think sadly this has to be run on update (on the game thread)
You can then use the Transform Bone node to set the location of the nunchaku bones to that of the hands

Otherwise, if the names of the bones are the same, you can use the CopyPoseFromMesh node, which will copy the transforms of bones from the by default attached or otherwise provided source mesh to those of the same name of this skeletal mesh