Single instance of animation blueprint to controll multiple skeleton meshes ?

Development Character & Animation
1

Hi

I have a problem with right setup of my character(s), they are all aliens, and by design have modular body, that player can adjust to do various tasks.

I’v got them (from our fellow 3d artist(s)) in form of ONE skeleton/animation FBX (contains the skeleton and all the animations) and various modules (FBX meshes).
Meshes are individual parts (bodies, legs, and heads)
Ideally since all those parts share ONE skeleton and ONE animation (for examle idle, walk, attack, dig) I want them to have ONE INSTANCE of animation blueprint
but with the structure like this:
AlienDefender (blueprint)

  • CapsuleComponent
    |+ BodyMesh (SkeletalMeshComponent)
    |+ HeadMesh (SkeletalMeshComponent)
    |+ LegsMesh (SkeletalMeshComponent)
  • CharacterMovement

I need to specify that same AnimationBlueprint to all 3 of them (and thus have 3 instances of this animation blueprint - with is very bad, when for example animation blueprint is big, complicated & contains randoms to pick random animation from the set, synchronizing this across modules is a hell of a mess :/)

But sadly I don’t see any other option right now - any idea how to setup this ?
I cant have one base object and attachments on sockests since attachments are skinned meshes animated by that same skeleton and animation as base.

2

After little more digging I’v eventually tried once again ‘SetMasterPoseComponent’ in and WHAT A SUPRISE - after upgrading from 4.9.2 to 4.10 it actually works out of box and does not crash whole engine - so problem SOLVED !

3

Cool, is that something you do at the beginning of the Anim BP? can you share some screenshots of how this works?