When creating a SkeletalMesh, I’ve noticed that in Maya you can parent geometry directly into the hierarchy and when imported into Unreal it behaves the same in engine as if the pieces were skinned to the joint/bone with 100% influence.
Looking at Jeremiah’s article on the Valley of the Ancients, it sounds like there was an advantage to controlling static meshes directly, though this is explained as the solution to handle using dense Nanite meshes. This has me curious on potential performance gains from using static meshes instead of skinning, or…
Question 1a:
How is SkeletalMesh data structured under the hood?
Question 1b:
In the SkeletalMesh storing this data the same in each instance, or is it recommended to parent into the hierarchy over skinning?
Question 2:
If there is a difference, how can this be achieved in packages that do not allow for mesh objects to be parented directly into the hierarchy?