I’m currently trying to make a character creation screen. The character is to be made up of seperate meshes. Head,chest,arms and legs for example. I have created seperatwe meshes for each. I’ve tried using mixamo fuse for this but the body parts do not fit back together seamlessly and also the head and arms look deformed. Therefore my question to the community is if you have suggestions of other free resources that may be able to be used to achieve this?
We used Fuse for our multi-mesh character, check out video. Around 2min18 we change mesh parts
/watch?v=IFXr9-HvTqI
Main thing is to tell sub-meshes to use main mesh to drive animations.
In C++ you do this with code such as:
Top->SetMasterPoseComponent(GetMesh());
Bottom->SetMasterPoseComponent(GetMesh());
Shoes->SetMasterPoseComponent(GetMesh());
// ...
In Blueprints, you do the same:
You’ll also need to cut out body mesh to make sure you don’t get occasional clip through, we’ve used Fuse’s mask texture to mask out body parts that need to be invisible.
What were the problems you were experiencing?
For example in UE4 my character after putting the individual parts back together looks like this in UE4
However, as a whole in fuse the character looks like
As you can see there is a bit of a difference!
Perhaps animation re-targeting went wrong. Is the same deformation visible if you remove all animations? (or just remove reference to Animation Blueprint, so you can view mesh in T-pose?)
After exporting from Fuse, you need to rig this mesh – that step, depending on how you did it, could introduce problems like this…
Good luck!
What I did originally was upload each body part individually to mixamo through fuse. Animate the body part and then downloaded as .fbx. I then imported these into my project and put them together (with the result you see above).
When i’m back later today I will try your suggestion above. What I will also try is instead of uploading and animating to the mixamo website i’ll export from fuse as .obj. Import into blender. Export as .fbx then import these into ue4. If I then have the T-pose showing correctly I can then worry about the animation side of it.
I’m not convinced it’s possible in the way i’m looking to do it. Below is a screen shot of the head and the torso taken seperately from mixamo and imported into ue4. It isn’t possible to match them up. Seems the only way to have them to join seemlessly is to do it in mixamo first which defeats the object of what i’m trying to achieve!
Hmm that looks like an issue with Mixamo Fuse – Unreal does, indeed, match meshes down to a vertex, as long as they were rigged and imported in correct locations.
Good luck!
Cheers,
I think my only option is to export the full body from mixamo so it’s all correct and then chop it up in blender. A pain in the backside but the only way I can see to get it done appropriately.
This is what I was going to suggest, I don’t know exactly how Fuse matches all the parts together but I suspect it does more than just scaling bones. But then again, if you want parts from different Fuse characters to be combined in one (why else have multiple body parts), their edges probably will not match even if you cut them up manually unless you make sure they have exactly the same cross sections in their attachment points.
You’re right. This doesn’t quite match up either. Am at a bit of a loss as to what to try next to be honest!
Is there a way to import the full character and then split out the body parts in ue4?
UE won’t do skeletal mesh splitting for you – rig the mesh, then split it in 3d app.
Why do you even want to have different parts instead of just having a single body mesh and customizing it by tweaking bone transforms?
One possibility would be swapping heads, as well as clothing. Js.
… or have 10 heads, 10 bodies, 10 pairs of legs, 10 pairs of arms, and swap them at run time for a total of 10k possible characters, without loading all 10k individually…
It certainly gives me a lot more flexibility. Due to some help on the mixamo forums i’ve found a way to do what I’m looking to achieve so it’s all good 