So when doing anything in the engine, I feel like its a good practice to emulate the same practices the unreal devs have already done in the engine. They know what works and is efficient and so on.
Now, I have a custom character in blender. I am trying to rig it with a similar bone structure as the mannequin in the default 3rd person template, although not to the same specifications. I don’t need fingers, balls of the feet or the forearm and thigh rotations. I only need the major bones.
Now in this picture, you can see I have hand selected on the left. However it highlights what i think is the forearm bone. Also I can rotate the hand alone. Not the forearm.
In this picture I have the LowerArm selected, but the bone shows what I think to be the UpperArm. When rotating, it rotates the forearm.
My questions:
What is the hand bone? It seems like its the wrist. Yet I can’t see a bone for it.
Do bones differ in presentation in ue4 than blender?
Can someone explain to me whats going on in these pics?
And lastly, the reason I need to know all this is to correctly imitate a bone structure similar so that i can re-target the default animations on to my custom character. Many thanks.
No thigh rotations? Are you sure? Retargeting default anims without thigh does not sound right to me. You characater does not walk and only uses upper part of the arm? Most anims are done via rotations. If your armature is the same you don’t need retargeting. If the armature is different but the pose of the chacracter is similar then you can retarget. You can even retarget if the default axis from Maya (or UE4 mannequin) is X axis while there is no way to change it from Y in Blender. You can check this if you edit your armature and choose “Bone Roll” (CTRL+R). You would see you can modify the direction of Z and X but head-tail is always along Y in Blender. This is not the case in Maya. That’s even the reason why I gave up trying to get the exact same rotation of bones. Blender to UE4 still works well if you take the retargeting path. For retargeting your Blender armature it’s very important to get a RestPose that is similar to the UE4 manequin pose.
