Paragon Characters and UE4 Skeleton

Development Character & Animation
1

Hi,

I’m new to animation and rigging and have done as much research as I can before asking here but I’m struggling to understand a few things to do with Skeletal Meshes and their respective skeletons. When I look at any of the Paragon assets I see:

Technical Details Scaled to Epic Skeleton: Yes
Rigged to Epic Skeleton: Yes

However if I take any of the characters into 3DS Max and make changes, then import into unreal, shouldn’t I be able to use the UE4 Skeleton and then have it add in the additional required bones on a per mesh basis?

As far as I can tell trying to do this just breaks the Skeleton and bombards you with “The preview mesh hierarchy doesn’t match with Skeleton anymore. Would you like to regenerate skeleton?” when I open the mannequin after importing a new mesh and using the UE4 Skeleton. If you do say yes you just get the same thing when you try to use the imported mesh.

From looking at the bone structures in 3DS Max, none of the additional bones look like they should affect the hierarchy, so I think I’m just misunderstanding something.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help clarify.

2

For anyone else who has had any similar issues when trying to import a Paragon character using the UE4 Skeleton I noticed that Kwang for example has:

neck_01 -> neck_02 -> head

But UE4 Skeleton has:

neck_01 -> head

Quick fix was to take the model into Maya and remove neck_02 and make neck_01 the parent of head.

3

Yes the neck is different in some paragon characters. You might also want to be aware of the twist bones locations. Sometimes they are in the lower or upper half of the limb as compared to the Epic Skeleton.

4

Thanks for pointing that out, would probably have caused me some issues down the line.