My goal is to have a Metahuman as player avatar and customize him by giving him modular armor set pieces, like in other RPGs.
I am primarily a programmer and do not know much about blender.
What I did so far is setup a Metahuman as a Third Person Character with the Set Leader Pose Component Approach.
Then, when assigning the armor, I noticed, that it started to deform strangely. Altough the Metahuman and the modular Armor Set use the same Skeleton and are vaguely similar in size, I suspect slight differences in shape and base pose to be the reason for that.
What I did then was setting a small offset to the armor and also converting them to a new skeletal mesh, that uses the exact same skeleton as the metahuman.
I feel I came closer to the goal, since most of the armor looks correct now, however, the hands still deform strangely and with setting an offset of -10 on the X asset for the entire armor makes the armor fit, but foot sinks into the ground.
I guess my entiery approach about this is flawed, and honestly I feel like I can not really get my head around it.
Realistically I wouldn’t waste time on metahuman compatibility.
Make your own thing.
Make the armor realistic.
Last time I checked, metal plate doesn’t squish or bend. You can only achieve this by individualizing each armor plate to its own bone - then setting up control rig on it to drive it.
If done right, your modular pieces would be able to be attached to bones and just work, regardless of what actor they end up on…
Ofc you won’t find tutorials or a way not to spend weeks on development to do thing right…
Otherwise, export both things and make sure the bones have the same rotations and rolls. That’s all that retargeting needs.
Then retarget the armor to the character.
Then replace parts of the character skm with the retargeted armor skm parts.
Thank you very much, I think you have a good point there, and somehow I have not really thought about individualizing each armor part for each bone. I will try to go with that!
However I must ask, what exactly do you mean by drive the armor with an control rig ?
Wouldnt it be just enough to assign the different modular armor parts to the socket of the bone in order to move properly with it?
Something like a lorica wouldn’t be able to follow along without looking silly considering its made up of about 5 segments and the base skeleton only has 2 spine bones in the area.
For stuff like that, you add control rig and set it up to somehow split rotational values or similar.
It also helps some with stuff like dangling bits, like skirts made of leather strips and similar. Mind you, it’s never perfect and it will basically almost always penetrate into the actual character. But, since you cant drive a skit from the thighs as it would look just wrong, simulating is just about the only way to go on it…
In your example, you likely want something like this for the shoulder bits. And maybe the gauntlets so that they don’t bend awkwardly.
There is unfortunately no easy way to prevent motion (which an armor should). If an animation moves a certain way, that’s how the animation moves… you can try to post-process it and finesse it a bit - but its easier to swap animations in this case, if you ever run into issues like that.
A good example on it is breathing chest-plates… most AC Greed games do that because the quality is 0 now a days…
