Hi Guys, I swear a little while back i read something about either 4.2 or 4.3 supporting being able to delete bones from within a skeletal rig. I can’t remember were i saw this at the time. Can forum members or Unreal devs tell me if i was imagining this or not!. Also a quick idea for better bone tools in engine, Being able to import a very complex character rig (hundreds of bones for use with animations of a very complex nature like MOCAP data) but being able to import a simpler rig for the exact same character model for when complex animation is not needed but matching animations from the complex rig setup to the simplified rig (re targeting the animation from high rig to low rig). That would be really handy. Cheers KB
KingBadger3D,
We are planning to investigate deleting bones from USkeletons, but that requires a little bit of thought as it’s more complex than it looks. This wasn’t planned to support retargeting though, so I think you’d want a different solution for that.
Note that if you are only removing leaf bones, you can already use the existing LOD system. We use this for example to switch between cinematic characters that have lots of complex facial bones, to distant crowd characters that have very few for performance.
That sounds like it could be a good fit from what you’re saying. You can read more about LODs there:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/FBX/SkeletalMeshes/index.html#skeletalmeshlods
If you want to delete non leaf bones, then it gets more complex and you will need a rig to control how those bones are remapped. This is not something we support by default, but you could get creative and simulate this in an Animation Blueprint. For example you could have a bone chain that drives SkelControls (IK, pole vectors, etc.), and then different bone chains for complex and simple meshes. This would require a bit of work, but you could end up having your own rig driving and retargeting animations on different skeletons with different bone hierarchies.
We are thinking about improving our importing and retargeting (offline) tools, so we could do that retargeting process upon import. This would allow us to retarget more complex and more different characters without requiring a lot of horsepower at runtime. This is still some ways off though. 
Hope that helps,
Laurent Delayen, Your a star Budd. Ill start looking into that now. Your idea about tackling retargeting within the animation Blueprints sounds really interesting and a genius idea!. Can i PM you with some more questions and help on idea’s for implementation. If we can get it working ill share it all with the community and do some video tuts for fellow peeps on here. Cheers KB
Hi KingBadger3D,
We do not have the resources to provide 1-on-1 support, which is why we have both the community forums and AnswerHub. Our goal is that for every one person who gets an answer or resolves their issue, numerous other people can search and find that solution for when they are stuck on the issue themselves. We encourage you to keep posting your questions here on the forums, or use the AnswerHub if you get stuck on something specific, and you can continue to receive support from the community, and Epic staff as time permits.
Thanks!
Yep that’s fine, Just to make it clear i wasn’t asking for 1-on-1 support. It’s just that asking questions to reply’s like this that are very helpful sometimes don’t get spotted by that person and you never end up with a reply, Ill knock up some idea’s and breakdowns of what ive been trying but the lack of depth on documentation when it comes to rig bones LOD and the brand new FABRIK system, there was quite a few specifics i wanted to ask and didn’t want to fill the thread with a massive post.
One way maybe you could look at that questions on the forum are shown easily to the Unreal member who answered them when someone wants a reply by if that community member reply’s with quotes to the post it gets added to the unreal members PM box maybe under a special forum community member reply’s inbox so not to clog you internal PM system between staff. Cheers