I have a scythe as my characters weapon. The scythe is skinned to it’s own bone inside 3ds max. For every animation i have with the character, that bone is also animated…
It’s not always held in the same hand, and sometimes it’s animated on it’s own(twisting in char’s hands or attacking kind of in a magical/devil may cry type of way). this is why i animated it inside of 3ds max.
What is the workflow i need to know to make this work inside of ue4?!
Hmm… not sure if skinning it to a bone is the best course of action but i guess it depends on your requirements. I have a spear… that i attach inside UE4 to my character. Because i want him to be able to throw it etc.
Or when the character dies i want it to drop… i wanted it separate.
I guess your approach would work as well and you can then control that bone of the weapon specifically…
I do EXACTLY this in my game, and my approach is very much like yours, loopers. I have a bone (actually, a small group of bones, since the weapon has multiple parts) which controls the weapon itself, and I animate it along with the player. This allows me to get far more complex than socket attachment would allow.
In-engine, what I do is I export my player character without any of the weapon verts skinned; the bones are just empty control bones. Then I export my weapons as separate meshes and, inside my character BP, I attach those meshes to the player mesh using socket snapping (so that, rather than being snapped to the player’s hand, it’s snapped to his weapon-control-bone). The advantage to doing this is it lets me easily control attachment and visibility; for example, if the player throws his weapon and it needs to move through the environment, I can spawn a simple actor which has a duplicate of the weapon’s mesh on it, and I can set the default, attached weapon mesh to be invisible.
ooooooo, that sounds awesome. I need to try this approach. How hard is it aligning your spawned actor to the skeletal weapon? Im wondering if there are snags regarding aligning them if your mesh is different… then again im guessing if you align it that bone it should work.
If i understand correctly, you just hide your actual weapon as in visibility, then spawn an actor on top of it to “throw” the weapon…
Also im curious what are the benefits when using stuff likes swords and static weapons. I can understand guns and weapons that have animations or complex behavior.
But i don’t fully understand why i want to animate my spear.
Just trying to understand the though process behind it… as it could benefit me and well… the community.
Oh wait… if i want to flip my spear i can use your method… which would work. Sweet 