Metahuman accessory bone?

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hello! We’re trying to make a Metahuman dribble a basketball in its blended animations. I think the typical game dev practice would be to simply add a bone, connected to the root, which is the position of the basketball in our animations.

However, the best way I could find to do this is to export all the Metahuman assets we want to use, add a bone in 3D modeling software, and then re-import it. We aren’t able to just use the Metahuman skeleton anymore, which I’m worried might cause pipeline headaches down the road if we want deeper character customization or something.

Virtual bones sounded promising, but it seems like you can’t animate them. They’re only for some specific IK-related purpose, and have a calculated position between two existing bones (you can’t animate their position manually).

Is there any better solution here? You’d think the need for an “accessory bone” would be pretty typical, and I believe it was included with the Unreal Mannequin skeleton, but it’s missing from Metahuman.

Thanks!

2

Virtual bones can be used just as an additional bone, there’s no constraint to use them just for IK.
Add a virtual bone to the root, then inside the AnimBP, you can access its transforms by using a simple TransformBone node, and then you can drive it however you want.