Hello Forums,
So I build a simple model of an OR-lamp to test how to properly rig and export it to UE4. Since I don’t have any experience in rigging, I watched a few tutorials on YT, but these were on “humanoid bodies”, not on something like this lamp.
How does the lamp work: Every arm is able to rotate by 345°. The lowest left arm will also be able to move up and down by 60°. The lamp heads are able to rotate and can be tilted.
I just gave it a shot and came up with the mess you see on the attached pictures. When imported to UE4 it seems like it’s able to correctly import bones and skin. I set the upmost bone to kinematic to make the model float. When I hit “simulate”, the other arms work somehow. They’re hanging down like the arms of a ragdoll. So I sure did something right in the proccess.
There’s a few questions I came up with while rigging:
1.: Is it okay, that some of the bones are outside of the skin?! Heard somewhere that this might cause trouble.
2.: If all of the bones have to be inside the skin, how would I set up the bones to achieve the desired movement?
3.: What do I need to do in UE4 to make this work? How do I work with the skeleton? How do I setup the physics? Do I need to build an animation graph? I want the lamp to be interacted with by the players.
Actually, if there’s someone who’s experienced in rigging it would be awesome if you could rig this simple model for me, just to understand how this has to be done in this perticular case. I will put the model up for downloading if anyone’s interested. Guess this will take like 10 mins for a professional while it’s almost impossible for me.
I would appreciate your help and tips on my project!
Regards,
Gordon