Sharing animations with more bones

I have an animation pack that has weapons as part of the skeleton/mesh that I want to use with other characters. I was able to get through prototyping with retargeting the bodily animations and using sockets to hold the weapons, but moving forward that won’t work because in some of the animations the weapons “leave” the body (throwing the shield, tossing the sword, etc).

In the asset, the weapons have their own bones and are part of the mesh itself, so using the sockets to attach a static mesh doesn’t seem to be the right answer, unless there is something more advanced that I’m not aware of.

I’ve tried posting this question to many places, including with the creator of the assets and the unreal forums, reddit, discord groups, etc, but have come up empty handed each time. I understand that the answer might involve going out into blender or something to change some stuff around, and that’s fine, I’m just left in a place here where I have no idea how to move forward and trying to search the internet just returns a ton of basic retargeting tutorials (seriously, why are there so many tutorials for the same thing?!) that don’t cover anything like this. I’m really just hoping someone can help point me in the right direction here.

sword — ImgBB This is a picture of the models to get a better idea of what I mean. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

that wont work unless the skeletons youre retargetting to have the weapon bones as well. What i would recommend you do, set the material of the weapon on the character to an invisible one, then use sockets to attach weapons to their hands, which you will be able to detach whenever you want.