Question about Multiple player characters but different animation and skeleton+mesh

[BaconMaster]

This is just a question before I basically make a new character and find out it’s not going to work the way I was hoping. This is just more of a confirmation before I start doing it. I’m really new to UE but slowly learning bits and pieces here and there.

For my project I have one playable character with 2 “skins” setup. I understood because all I was changing was the texture and shared the same animations/mesh/skeleton but my question is what happens if you want to import a different model as a playable character? I am planning on having a few characters but a max of two (3 at the most) different model types (just skin changes overall).

The models are different so the mesh and skeleton are different too (as well as animation), do I just create the character the same way I did as the first one? Then it’s just a matter of setting up the game to load in the other model? The problem I am thinking is how do I add it to a game mode (I’m running off the third person template) and is tied to the level.

Would you have to load for example level 1 and have some kind of setup (perhaps on the character select level?) that if model 1 is selected load level 1 running BP_ThirdpersonGameMode but if model 2 is selected load level 1 running BP_Othergamemode (example names).

(my brain just thought of this as I was typing this)
Or am I able to just make a copy from the character BP I already have, change its skeleton and mesh in the copied BP and also do the same for the animation blueprint I have setup to match the other different model + animations. As while the animations are different (minus the jump) they are all the same thing (just different, walk, run, idle).

Thanks in advanced and sorry if this was a silly thing to ask.

[illspiritx]

If the meshes are similar enough, you can use the same skeleton for both chars and just have different animations. Manny and Quinn in the Third Person example content both use the same skele, Quinn just has her own anim bp which is a child of Manny’s and changes the walk/run/jump anims used by the state machines.

If the rigs are too different to do this, or you otherwise need unique player abilities or some such, best bet would be to set up all the logic in one character first, then make a child class of that and override variables and functions as needed.

To change between characters, you’d jut have to spawn one in and posses it. This could be done in game mode, level blueprint, or from the character itself even.

For example, I just added a name variable to the the basic third person character Then I made a child class (right click bp, and hit create child bp class) and on one changed the mesh and anim bp (plus the name var) to Quinn, and the other to use Manny.

In the parent class I added this quick and dirty test code:

Press 1, and it spawns Manny if you’re controlling Quinn or vice versa, then it destroys the old char.

[BaconMaster]

Awesome thank you very much! This helped a great deal and will come back to this when I’ve gotten a few other kinks in the game worked out