Rigging individual parts of a mesh

Development Character & Animation
1

I have a turret I am building and the base should rotate around and the barrels should be able to be rotated up and down separately. How do I rig that in Maya? I looked at the FBX import pipeline and it mentions that everythhing has to be skinned to one skeleton. The way I currently have it is that these two separate parts are combined into one mesh and skinned to these two bones. This has the issue that when I try to move the top bone, the base also deforms.

Any tips? I am a total noob to skinning and skeletal meshes.

Here is how it currently looks in Maya

turret.png
turret.png891×560 21.7 KB

2

Skin both meshes to the root bone ( one at the time ), then import them inside UE4.
For the base you’ll import both the mesh and the skeletal rig.
For the barrel you’ll import the skeletal mesh and set the skeletal rig to be the one associated to the base of the turret.

By doing this you’re sharing the same rig between two separate meshes

3

Thank you! That is exactly what I needed. I guess this means I also only need the bone in the base because I can do the barrel movement off the top joint only ?