UDK Bone calculation question

weebrett

Hello everyone, I am currently creating a animal for my game and have a question about how UDK calculates bones.

Currently I have one Armature, with 50 or so bones but only 30 are used on the animal. The other 20 are used on something that is attached to the animal. The reason I have done it this way is that it makes animating it easier, as I only have to animate one mesh.

Does UDK calculate that the 20 or so bones the animal is not using, or does it realise that the mesh the excess bones have to deform is not present, and as such not render the bones and save processing power?

The file size gets larger with more bones, but I cannot tell if UDK knows whether or not to use the bones.

I did do a quick search, and was unable to find a concrete answer. Hopefully people on this forum will be able to help

Thanks,

Brett

JohnnyRaptor

UDK only calculates the skinned bones. So if your skeleton has 200 bones, but only 68 of those are skinned, you are fine and within the 1pass limit.

weebrett

Ok thanks! Just for clarity, If i have two meshes, and one skeleton, and one mesh uses half of the bones and the other mesh the other half. It will calculate which bones to use and not render the left over ones? Because this means that all the bones have been skinned, just in some meshes the skin isn't there

JohnnyRaptor

Are these separate meshes exported as one, in one fbx?

or are you exporting each mesh separately ?

weebrett

Seperate FBX per mesh

JohnnyRaptor

Yeah that's fine. Each skinned mesh is treated separately, even if they are on the same skeleton.

You can double check this by using the copy skinned bones to clipboard (or something like that) from one of the menues.

weebrett

Ok thank you very much! This has made my life much easier knowing this !