Hi guys,
I was really hoping it need’nt come to this
I have character. She has a skeleton and a whole bunch of animation for locomotion and such (~250).
Now I added her a spear as weapon and want to make some attack and defend animations.
PROBLEM:
I need to have control over the spear when animating in maya. (To have it slide up and down her hand and flip around depending on attack). How the hell do I do that?
A simple socket wont work as I need to properly animate that offest in maya.
An additional bone doesnt work either. I tried updating the skeleton with an extra bone for the spear (parented under her hand bone), but inside ue4 it shows up at the origin…wtf
Now I have a skeleton with a broken bone and no idea how to proceed.
TL;DR:
How to successfully add an bone animated bone AFTER the skeleton has already been animated and processed in the engine.
Update: got it kind of working the way I want. Only a little "bug* in skeleton viewport is left to which I have a new question at the end, else I got the workflow down.
Heres what I did:
update character mesh skeleton with the required bone (the main character mesh NEEDS to be up-to-date with skeleton or wierdness will happen)
make socket. *this is where that bug comes in as the new bone doesnt show up in the skeleton viewport. It does appear in its hierarchy view, but there it says “This bone exists only on the skeleton, but not on the current mesh”. Which is wired as I re-imported the skeletal mesh with that new bone included in the fbx. Its also not because it has no weighting as that notification is different: “This bone is used by the current mesh, but has no vertices weighted against it”.
Also adding a socket shows at the origin, if I ignore that and play, itll be fine but tweaking the socket like that is really undesireable.
attach weapon to that socket in bp or whatever.
make anim that uses that bone and play it in animBP when needed - profit
*question: How can I add a bone such that it does say “This bone is used by the current mesh, but has no vertices weighted against it” instead of “This bone exists only on the skeleton, but not on the current mesh”
Update 2:
I found out why the mesh bone appears with “This bone exists only on the skeleton, but not on the current mesh” in the skeleton viewer. Its because that skeleton is using an older outdated instance of the mesh. How can I change the default mesh the skeleton connects to.?
Edit: ok did it. Only way I found was to simply delete that older mesh and upon the deletion dialog specify the references to be replaced with my current mesh. Done, now the bone shows up properly in skeleton viewer and socket has proper location. I kind of overlooked it as the old and current versions of the mesh look identical safe some small details.
Thats it for this so far, sorry for the monologue, I hope this thread is of help if anyone comes across similar behavior.
Ill keep you guys updated for how I deal with the animations of that spear.
