Replacing the 3rd person mesh

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’ve prototyped my game entirely using animations from the market that are targeted for the 3rd persion template default character and skeleton.

I’m now at the stage I want to replace the default 3rd persion character mesh with my own model, what is the correct course of action?

The character model is ready to be used, there are two options as far as I can see.

  1. I can rig it with using the default character skeleton so all my animation will keep working ‘out of the box’?

  2. I can rig the character myself (using mixamo), and retarget all default skeleton animations to the new skeleton?

In the future I will add more animations, some from the marketplace others self made, so I would prefer to keep using the default skeleton, that being said, I’ve tried using blender to take the default character skeleton and make it fit into the new character model, had serious issues with that, im sure it can be done, but all my attempts failed in some capacity and I cant say I see a way to make it work with my current modelling/rigging skills…

2

Not sure what you mean by “rigging” but if the skeleton of your model follows the same bone name and hierarchy convention as the UE4 mannequin you can retarget all animations in the Retarget Manager. Just use the humanoid rig to make the association.

3

So you’re saying, create a new humanoid skeleton for the model, and retarget all the existing default mannequin skeleton animations to the new skeleton, and basicly use the new skeleton from now…

4

No, that’s not exactly how this works. So you said, you have a new model, in which case you probably already created a skeleton for it in your 3d program and bound the skin to that skeleton, right?

What I meant was just make sure the bone hierarchy is the same as the one by the ue mannequin (it is also nice if the bones have the same name but it is not a requirement.) because that is indespensible if you want to share animations that belong to a standard ue4 mannequin

When you import a 3d character into UE4 a skeleton asset based on the skeleton you previously created in your 3d program, gets generated. And that skeleton asset will remain permanent, there is no (legal) way to change it really unless you Reimport the whole character. What you can do however is “build a bridge” to another skeleton asset to use its animations.

You can do this via the retarget manager.