Make a multiplayer character mesh?

Development Platform & Builds XR Development
1

Hello!

So I’ve done some research on animations and moving specific parts of an actor in Unreal. If my understanding is correct, then if you want to be able to move specific bones of a skeleton mesh you have to make a poseable mesh in the actor. However, a poseable mesh does not have support for animations. And normal animations does not have support for changing the locations of a specific bone in runtime.

With that being said, do you know of a way to make a multiplayer character that, while someone else is watching you in-game, can see you moving your arms around, but would also be able to see you walk forward with an animation attached to your legs for example.

Do I have to cut of the arms and the head and make them poseable actors while having the rest of the body be an animation? That’s the only way I can think of. Also I would then assume that the head and arms would float in the air and not be attached to your body which would look kind of odd.

Thanks!

2

Its the plugin that lets you export models that can be imported into SED. It was updated in a while so it only works with that particular version of blender i mentioned.

3

You would be feeding the non-deterministic data to all networked clients so that they can use that data to replicate the game state. In the case of VR, you’d be feeding the players HMD and Motion Controller transforms. These transforms should be inputs into an animation blueprint which get the animation to be in the correct pose. With this approach, you don’t really need to worry about per-bone transforms.

The exception to this is if you’re using Leap Motion, which has per-finger bone positions and rotations. The concept would be pretty much the same, but the amount of data being sent would increase significantly.