Question Regarding Rigging Skeletons for Unreal

Development Character & Animation
1

I am having trouble rigging a skeleton for a Bug like creature I have created in 3ds Max. I am fairly new to both unreal and 3ds max but have imported a few biped skeletal meshes without problem before. This one is a bit different though…

The bug has disconnected sections of it’s skeleton between the body, legs and wings. So the left wing is it’s own bone hierarchy (but disconnected from the other parts of the bug), right wing it’s own bone hierarchy (but disconnected from left wing, body and legs). Legs are it’s own bone hierarchy and body it’s own bone hierarchy. All of it fit together into one full character I want to animate and bring into Unreal.

Within 3dsmax everything works the way I want it to. So I select all parts of the character (including bones) and export. But when I import the one .fbx bug character, Unreal splits each portion of the character into it’s own skeletal mesh. So instead of the full bug character I get a left wing mesh, right wing mesh, body mesh and legs mesh. The animation then only imports to one portion of the body (so instead of a bug with flapping wings, I just have a left flapping wing not attached to anything).

Rigging a full one piece skeleton with a biped is easy but trying to do the full skeleton as one piece with this bug I don’t think is going to give me the results I want.

-Is there a way to connect the separate bone hierarchy’s (left wing, right wing, body, legs) in 3dsMax together so Unreal recognizes it as one full character on import?

-Or do I re-connect the whole thing back together in Unreal somehow?

-Or do I just need to think through my character and bone structure more thoroughly and put the whole skeleton together as one full piece (so both wings, body and legs are all one single bone hierarchy)

I really don’t need the whole thing to move, it is primarily the wings I want animated, It just seems like as soon as Unreal recognizes one bone hierarchy it only imports what those bones are connected to and ignores the rest of the mesh (which forces me to rig the whole mesh even though I don’t need it to move)

Thanks

2

Can you take a few screenshots of what it looks like? I think UE4 needs 1 root bone so you will need to link all the different parts together (i think from what you have said you have about 5 root bones). You can always edit the skin weights after you rig it to fit better what you want.

3

As Steve said, only can have 1 root bone. So in 3ds Max just “attach” all the root bones to 1 bone. The root bone can(should) just be a clean zeroed out bone at the origin.