how is it possible for the default bluegreen character to be able to play as many animations as the pack you get for free in the Marketplace, called
the Animation Starter Pack, with the dark female like skeleton? I can’t seem to be using both for a fighting game I’m trying to put together. I’ve also seen a clone of the default light blue green character with different abilities to do other animations. can someone tell me where I am going wrong. please, its driving me absolutely nuts.
Animations has to match the rig so if you want a skeletal mesh character to share the same animations, in this case the default mannequin, you have to switch the “blue female” mesh to use the default mannequin skeleton. (as long as they are using the same rig configuration in the first place.)
what confuses me is that the same character is used, the standard blue bot character that is almost in all projecs, and then in the tutoiral changes animation, while leaving the user with blue bot character that cannot accept the included animations even though the tutorial itself is using the same character. I am not sure if that makes sense. so how would one go about changing one’s blue character to the character that is the same one used by the tutorial, which can accept dozens of included animations, which the tutorial uses but leaves you in the dust despite having the same blue character!?
Humm OK a few blank spaces to fill in that is not mentioned in a lot of tutorials so I’ll try to put it into some kind of context.
So to share animations between characters we have to assume the asset is using the base mannequin as supplied by Epic as nothing else will work except for re-targeting.
To set up the context you create a 3rd person template under UE4 and it works as should using stock animations. From the marketplace you buy and download Joe the super model and use the “add to project feature” making sure that you first see that it is compatible with the Epic rig. Of course it does not match up with the animations by default because it was “added” to the project instead of imported but you want to use Joe the Super Model with your 3rd person template.
OK to fill in a blank when imported a skeletal model (as well as static with exceptions) is broken down into separate and unique components usually consisting of skeletal rig, mesh geometry with weight table, textures and materials. Each are considered as being unique as dependencies as to how all the parts comes together as a playable model.
So now we have the default UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton rig matching up with its dependencies and Joe the Super Model with its UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton rig with it’s own unique dependencies but we want Joe to use the same animations and resources that the default is using.
There are a few ways of doing this but the cheat I found that works the best is to just delete Joe’s UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton rig. The dialog that pops up will point out the current dependencies, including the mesh, and at the bottom you will see Replace References. Just change none to point to UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton of the template Skeleton and press Replace References. Joe will now be using the same dependencies as to blue man including physics and animations but will maintain others like textures and materials.
As part of the process dependencies that were part of Joe’s skeleton are also transferred to blue man but if you just what the animation, no need for two blue men mesh assets, you can move just the animations by once again deleting Joe’s UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton and your animation sequences should now turn black as although the data is still there the target asset is not.
With the black selected right click and select Re-target Anim Asset > Retarget Skeleton on existing Anim Asset and select blue mans UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton and all of your animation will now link to blue man.
Now if you do not want to delete the rig there are a few other ways to transfer dependencies but as habit I would go the delete route to avoided having more than just one base rig to work with.