Rig + Skin of mechanical mesh

Hi all,

I´m new to Unreal (have been using it for a few months), and I´m trying to make an animation of a mechanical device (robot like parts). Pretty sure it´s a noob question, but could not find an answer anywhere.

The mesh was built in Solidworks, so I export it to FBX and import to UE 5.3 like Skeletal Mesh, to Rig and Skin it in UE, but when I Bind the Skin to the new created bones, the moving parts deform (like a bio character). Any tip on how can I Rig and Skin the Skeleton Mesh in UE so the parts move without deforming?

Thank you in advance!

To do it in-engine, you’d probably have to go through the mesh one part at a time and paint the bone weights so that each rigid body part is only using one bone. This can be time consuming, but it’s really not hard, per se.

To speed things up, personally I would suggest exporting the bendy mesh UE generated, and editing it in Blender (or some other 3D software) so you can select vertices by surface and quickly assign them to a vertex group instead of manually trying to paint things which might be overlapping in the ref pose.