Hey Denny,
great reply thanks a lot! I didnt quite know that custom attributes would import as curve tracks for UE… thats really really useful stuff! In the video I mention that I want to also look into facial wrinkle and blood flow maps so its definitely going to help there, thanks.
And yeah I get you there with the amount of joints. The skeleton is designed in a way where you can strip down ALL auxiliary joints and be left with the base hierarchy that is only 26 joints without changing the hierarchy structure itself so any higher res skeletal animation can be applied without problem. So I could actually (once I redo my whole project from scratch) set the lowest level skeleton as the main skeletal asset for the character, and import the animations with all baked joints. Then Ill have the mesh lods that are detailed in both polygon count and skincluster influence count. So the lowest lod would be a really lowres model skinned only to the 26 base bones. The next lod would have a selected number of additional joints for generic limb twistsing and volume preservation on important areas, maybe not more than 150 bones in total, and the highest lod would have all bones for volume preservation and facial bones included. Or maybe have an additional lod inbetween with all body joints but no facial joints too. And since the animations would be made with all bones baked out, they would play correctly on all mesh lods and loading only the joints that the current lod mesh is skinned to. Is that kind of correct? Could I go with a workflow like that?
Thanks for the tips mate, really useful.
-S