Hey! I’m totally new to Unreal Engine and I couldn’t find any information on the specific thing that I’m looking for anywhere on the internet, so I’m trying my luck here in the community.
Here’s the thing: I’ve got a whole bunch of organic props (roots, branches, etc.) and I need them in many deformed variations for my level design. I figured that it would be cool to model these assets in straight form, rig them with bones and deform them to my needs in the level editor. That way I could also reuse a small amount of assets with lots of variety.
The only thing that I actually managed to achieve so far is importing a rigged asset and manipulating it’s pose by creating a one-keyframe animation in the animation editor. However, the asset is isolated in the animation editor, which makes it hard to find the right pose (e.g. to wrap a root around a stone) and also it feels a bit weird to play an animation on every deformed asset, which might cause performance issues.
So, I wonder, is there a good way to achieve what I’m trying to do? Can I deform a rigged object into a static pose directly in the viewport somehow? Or is there even a better way to do it like sculpting/tweaking an imported mesh without any rigging?
Some input from experienced Unreal users would be much appreciated!