I’ve been looking for a way to replace Skeletal meshes in ARK to no avail. What I’m trying to do specifically is swap any of the vanilla dinosaur meshes without changing anything else. I have the new source fbx files ready for import but that’s where my progress stops.
I’ve followed all the tutorials I could find for replacing core files or adding custom meshes but they don’t seem to apply for purely cosmetic changes such as the ones described above. If anyone could point me in the direction of a tutorial for this type of dino mod I’d greatly appreciate it.
I’m not sure how it works with ARK specifically, but as long as you select the right skeleton (the existing skeleton asset for the dino you’re replacing) you should be able to just straight up assign the new mesh as a replacement without issue (e.g., animations play etc.). There may be a reason this doesn’t work for the ARK dev kit though.
It does re-import and preview fine in the editor. My issue is that I seem unable to find a way to overwrite this specific type of conten with the tutorials I’ve found. They all focus on non-dino cosmetic changes so I’m a bit lost since the files like blueprints, pawns, etc… aren’t similar.
You could swap a mesh, but none of the dinos actually use them. They Use Skeletal Meshes: A mesh rigged with bones. So you’ll need to import your mesh (with the proper bone structure) in as a mesh and replace that.
