Maya to Unreal - Interchangeable Mesh parts with Animations

Hello All,
I need some help. I have a base model of my character. He is split up into 5 parts (head, chest, legs, arms, and feet) with the same skeleton. So what I did is I combined all the parts into 1 mesh for the skinning process. After I finished the skinning I transferred all the skin weights from the combined mesh into each individual parts. For animation purposes I used the combined mesh but that really shouldn’t matter.

My question is how do I export this properly into Unreal Engine? Do I select all the mesh parts (5 total) and the skeleton and export that? My issue with that is that my fbx file will be combined and I wont be able to separate the parts. For example, in the future I will want to have a variant of the chest, how would I add that into unreal when the fbx file is a combined one? I’m hoping I’m making myself clear, and really hope someone can help or point me to a tutorial.

Imgur
Imgur

For each geometry you need to select the skeleton and export selection.

Then you combine them using master/slave skeleton components in the engine and all of the slave components will play the animation of the master.

Keep in mind that once you imported your first geometry, the skeleton for it will be the one referenced in for the other imports.