Standard Unreal Arms With Unweighted Bones

Hello.
I’m in a little dilemma. I’ve imported the Unreal arms & skeleton into my project and deleted the skeletal mesh so I can use my own. Now I’ve attempted to import my own arm mesh using the exact same skeleton, but Unreal tells me there are bones that aren’t weighted.

Now what confuses me is that the Unreal arms have the exact same problem, I’ve even double check the weights table and I can’t see a single vertex that has any weight onto the unused bones (like the neck, head, legs) but for some reason the Unreal arms import without a problem.

I have the exact same set up: the same skeleton, the same hierarchy, the same bones weighted to the mesh but for some reason Unreal doesn’t like mine. Now this can be resolved simply by just deleting the unused bones but that leaves the question: why do the Unreal arms work with these unused and unweighted bones, and why is the entire skeleton packaged together with the arms anyway if it’s unused? Some one please enlighten me?

They probably just reused the mannequin skeleton and deleted everything that wasn’t needed (everything but the arms). It’s okay to have bones that are unweighted, like if you have one character with wings and everything else doesn’t you can still have every character share the skeleton with the wings. The character with wings will use those bones and the ones without wings will just ignore any animation data for those bones, they’ll still work.

It’s just meant as a warning if you’re making a full character and you may have missed some skinning or something. As for the UE4 arms I have no idea. Does it matter though? Your skeletal mesh still works right?

Thanks for replying. Sorry I forgot to enable notifications for this thread :frowning:
I have yet to test it being fairly busy, but it imports fine with the bones deleted when importing my own arms. I’ll try report back once I test, I still find it weird how the UE arms are almost identical in almost every way but Unreal treats them differently.

So deleting the unused bones allows me to import the arms without a problem. I’ve ran into the problem though, that Unreal can’t import animations when exporting just the skeleton, since exporting the mesh and the skeleton together would be a waste of space. Looks like deleting the bones is a bad way to go, and just not exporting them along with the arms for the initial skeletal mesh import is enough. When exporting animations only exporting the entire skeleton, legs and all is what works.
I’m a little unfamiliar with this, but here’s hoping I don’t run into more problems.