Sharing Animations With Similar Skeletal Mehses

[ChezyTheMessy]

I have 2 skeletons that I’ve been working on in Blender and have imported using Send2UE plugin. I imported them both which are the exact same but the second one has 2 extra bones for a sword attached to thier back. i want the characters to have same walking and crouching animation without recreating it for each skeleton and after reading UE docs it says that the boens have to be named the same, same order and same location which I have done. problem is I keep getting this bug whenever I import to Unreal. First I exported from blender to FBX files using the plugin, then I imported the base character which worked fine, the second character I selected the base characters skeleton using the import dialog and i get the bugs below

Im not sure what to do as this is a main feature in all First Person Shooters // Class Based Shooters.

[Udongein0710]

you have already mention that there are two extra bones.
That means they are two different bones.
So they definitly cannot merge.

[ChezyTheMessy]

Rules for Sharing Skeleton Assets

An important feature of Skeleton assets is that a single Skeleton asset can be used by multiple Skeletal Meshes. Best of all, the bone hierarchies in each one do not need to be identical. They do, however, need to have the same general structure. Most importantly, the bone hierarchy from one Skeletal Mesh to another cannot be violated This means that the bone name and order of your bones must be consistent.

For example, consider a 3-bone limb with bones named 1, 2, and 3:

If you had a second Skeletal Mesh that you intended to use the same Skeleton asset, it would need to keep those bones in the same order with the same names. You can, however, add bones that are peripheral to the hierarchy (characters that don’t have those additional bones would just not use that data). So for example, your new hierarchy could look like this:

this is from the official UE4 Skeleton Docs

[Udongein0710]

you should not merge them, because they still two different bones.
you can add another bones and REKIT them easily to make animation use in two bones.

[ChezyTheMessy]

I could but then I would have to make new animations for each skeleton and new animbp, the whole point of this was to not create new animations or retarget them when I’ll be making multiple of the same type of skeleton with just a few new bones.

[Alicia_Magis]

Hello!

I think to achieve what you want you should import a new skeleton for your character with extra bones.
Then in your skeleton window in the “Retarget Sources” tab you can add compatible skeleton, it will enable animation’s sharing between them.

Hope this help!

[ChezyTheMessy]

I figured out what my problem was, When exporting the two models with Send2UE plugin, one of them had used the name of the object as the root bone while the other did not. Just uncheck that and I was good to go.