Prodedural Skeleton + Skeletal Mesh at Runtime

Ben1138
Fri, 24 Jul 2020 12:05:23 +0000
World Creation

Hello there!
I’m trying to figure out whether it is possible in Unreal to create a procedural skeleton with a procedural skeletal mesh on top of it, with vertex weights and everything, and animate it aswell, everything in C++ at RUNTIME!

Imagine a procedural generated tree or worm that has bones that are slightly animated. I’m also trying to load external skeletal meshes at runtime, which should be no problem if that kind of dynamic creation is possible.

I’ve seen the GDC talk of Kate Compton (Spore) and I get how it works and what needs to be done. I’m also aware of UProceduralMeshComponent, although I switched to the better RuntimeMeshComponent in my project for procedural static mesh generation, which works fine.
But when it get’s to dynamic Skeletal Meshes and Bones, it feels like hitting a wall. Can’t find anything about that topic in Unreal and from what I’ve seen by browsing the UE source code there’s no way to just Instantiate USkeleton and USkeletalMesh (I tried, crashes the Engine in fact), constructing Bones and weighted Verts from scratch and then animate it.

Am I missing something obvious here??

As an alternative, I already thought about implementing my own system on top of RuntimeMeshComponent, storing some transforms as bones and manually updating the vertices myself accordingly every frame…

I’m thankful for every single piece of information that is out there!

2 posts - 2 participants