I literally started game development two weeks ago. In that time I’ve put about 120 hours total into this… and it’s been an amazing discovery. I am absolutely in love with all aspects of it and have gotten to the point where I am writing my own bluescripts… programming menu systems… and developing assets without the need of constant handholding from tutorials.
With that said… I absolutely cannot get certain aspects of the process to work correctly for how I want them to. Not only that but certain aspects are so much harder than I ever imagined… mostly in the art and asset creation section. Throwing together prototype levels and doing scripting via blueprint is easier than I ever expected however and I must commend epic on the work they have done here.
I am using Blender for model editing and rigging (with rigify) and this pipeline just isn’t working how I want it to. Tonight I downloaded a model off blendswap and spent a few hours rigging it with rigify. After completing this and testing it out with automatic weighting… certain parts weren’t even moving. This is when I learned about weight painting. I studied this for a bit and painted my model to a point I was satisfied with how each bone was rotating the mesh.
I exported it to FBX correctly, used the FBX converter to convert it for UE4 import… imported… and hey! it looked great. Skeleton came over… texture and materials came over… but I was slapped in the face with a “bone too small unable to create physics asset”.
So I googled.
This lead me to manually creating a physics asset with a smaller scale… which totally messes up. I can’t even see my model in the physics asset window and when I try to trigger ragdoll on the character it disappears from the game world.
I tried uping the scale in blender and re exporting and importing… but I get the bone too small error no matter what I do. I tried 500% scale… etc. Part of me wants to give up on this workflow but I’ve spent the better part of a week learning the various aspects. Using “makewalk” from the makehuman guys is a breeze to load and retarget free mocap data even on the custom rigify rig I built tonight for this character.
I am tired of beating my head against a wall. Maybe it’ll be easier tomorrow.