I’ve been using the Unreal VR Template for awhile, which inverts the scale of an axis for the left hand. This has the obvious benefit of sharing animations between left and right hands. I’ve also played with the VR Expansion Plugin, which uses a separate asset for each hand. This was to overcome a bug with physics assets when there’s a negative scale factor.
Inverting the scale on the left hand feels like a bit of a hack, and has already given me headaches when accounting for it while interacting with my custom components. But it does let you share animations between right and left hand, which I can’t do when I use separate assets (mirroring the animation data doesn’t work when the bones aren’t in the same skeleton)
Does anyone know what the preferred method is for major titles?
That’s… surprising, @Astrotronic . I went to https://forums.unrealengine.com, clicked on “Asset Creation”, and clicked “New Topic → New Discussion”. I checked it a few times last night (0 replies there).
You found it in Fortnite?? I don’t even see that as an option from the top level.
Hey there @Inconceivable! I am facing this exact same issue. Been working with the right hand up until now in my VR game and I was able to work fine with a single set of animations. The left hand is just mirrored. This was fine until I decided to have hands with physics ( each finger has collisions ) and I realized the left hand had gravity pushing sometimes fingers upwards and other weird shenanigans which turned out to be related to the inverted scale that I was doing in one axis.
To fix that, I decided to try having two separate meshes, one for each hand with separate animations too. I managed to clone the right hand and mirror it properly in blender and that did the trick worked with the physics asset and now I have both hands working properly with finger collision. The issue I am facing now is that I have to clone all animations and that is definitely hard to mantain.
Did you ever find the better way of doing this?
I checked the VR template from unreal and they have 2 separate skeletal meshes for each hand but the skeleton asset is both hands smashed together which is a bit weird.
But the good point is that all animations belong to the same skeleton and it seems they do some magic in the animation blueprint to mirror the animation, allowing it to only have 1 set. Still I am not sure if a physics asset and simulating physics activated would work with that mirror node.
