Hey everyone, hope all is well!
I’ve come to a point in development where I would like to create a better rig for the characters I’ll be creating. As I’m coming from a Unity background, I’ll be using terms that are native to that environment to hopefully better illustrate what I’m asking.
Within Unity, in order to fully utilize all of Mecanim features (IK and retargeting being the ones that come to mind,) you had what I would call a rigid hierarchy of bones and a pretty set number of bones. Anything deviating from their standard would disqualify your character for retargeting, for instance, and if I remember correctly, even IK wasn’t an option at that point.
Such things that I’ve grown accustomed to, such as twist bones, simply weren’t something you could feasibly do if you wanted any advanced features of Mecanim. More than two or three spine bones? Good luck getting that to work.
I mention all of this to say what the title implies: within UE4, what sort of skeletons am I limited to if I want features such as retargeting and IK? So far, I’ve not seen anything definite concerning this topic. I know that to share animations and have the ability to retarget, your characters need to share a common base skeleton, but within that base skeleton, can it not have twist bones, for instance? How many bones are you limited to within any given part of the character?
I suppose what it all boils down to is this: are you locked into very specific standards when it comes to what kind of skeletons UE4 accepts, and in general, what are the specifics as to what you can and can’t import?
Thanks, and take care!