I’m working on a game that I’ve been updating for a long time. Recently I’ve been wanting to fix some issues with my poorly made skeleton. I create all the animations and meshes in Blender.
I want to add a few new bones to the skeleton and import it into UE5.3 while keeping all the hundreds of animations I have. Is there any way I can do that?
Just inserting myself into this conversation, as I am having a similar issue.
For me its not hundreds of animations, but hundreds of assets referencing the same skeleton…
I´ve also only converted a prexisting skeleton from 3ds max to Unreal, so I don´t even need to necessarily update the rig outside Unreal, I would also be open to using Unreals new rigging and skinning tools…
Probably helps if you can provide a bit more detail on your desired rig changes.
I´m working on a human anatomy model and I previously skinned all my spine bones (anatomical bones) to just three rig bones and that doesn´t give me enough flexibility, so I need to add an extra bone for EACH anatomical bone.
Which means I can´t just keep the existing hierarchy of the spine, I need to replace the existing rig bones with the new ones, otherwise it might be a simpler fix:
You´d get a warning about missing bones from your skeleton and wether you want to add them, but doing so wouldn´t break all your animation.
Generally, if you´re only worried about the animations, one workaround I could think of would be to just import the new one as separate asset and then create a retargeter, batch retarget all animations to the new rig, then “replace reference” the skeletal mesh with the new one.