Skeleton relationships

Development Character & Animation
1

I’ve spent the majority of the weekend working on a Character and going through the documentation. I’m getting a bit of a handle on it, but it leaves me with additional questions that aren’t being answered through the documentation or the tutorials.

When creating your characters, do you create a different (or create a duplicate of the existing) Skeleton for each character or if you use the same skeleton for every character whose mesh fits the skeleton?

I’m trying to understand the relationship between the Skeleton, the Character BP and the Anim BP and feel like I’m beating my head against the desk here after totally destroying this character…

The biggest issue I keep having right now is that I don’t want to use the default mannequin, but actually figure this out in a practical sense, so I’m using the downloaded Infinity Blade Warrior set, but all the screens I end up going to shows me the default, for lack of a better term, Storm Trooper dude and won’t let me change the mesh. I’m assuming because it’s an inherited trait and you need to change it where it’s inherited from, which so far has not been explained. I follow along in the documentation and it says, Do this, do this, do this, but doesn’t explain the relationship between the various components it’s having you setup and in some cases, it has you set up a blueprint, but doesn’t actually explain what the various nodes are and what they’re function is within the blueprint. Some things it’s simple to catch onto, but other things it’s like beating your head against a wall.

I’m hoping someone can enlighten me a bit and have it click. That’s where the question comes back to. The only place I can seem to change the Mesh used is the Skeleton itself, so do you have to have a different skeleton for each character being created?

Thanks for any input on this,

RJ

2

Here are a quick summary of a couple of conceptual things…

First, an FBX can contain both a skeletal mesh and/or an animation.

The skeletal mesh consists of a polygon mesh and a skeleton.

The skeleton is a hierarchy of joints. The mesh is rigged so that each polygon is associated with 1 or more joints.

When you import the fbx, you can either create a new skeleton asset, or assign an existing one you have already imported.
Assigning works if it is similar to the existing one.

Animations are keyframed positions of a skeleton.
When importing they can be assigned to existing skeleton or create new one.

In practice, you can have multiple similar meshes share the same skeleton and animations.
You can also have different skeletons (and animations) for each asset.

The character BP contains the main logic of your character
The animation BP is used to select and play the various animations

On the Character BP you specify the skeletal mesh to use (polygon mesh and skeleton) as well as the animation bp to use ( animations for that skeleton and how to play them,)

3

Thanks, sometimes the simplest of information can put you back on the right track. I’m progressing again with, what seems to be, all the right components in the right place now.

As a side note, the characters were downloaded from the marketplace, so there was no direct importing of an FBX file. Just added to the project through the library.