Importing a Character

ozaffer

Hi I'm looking to get started in UE and was hoping to get pointed in the right direction when it comes to uploading characters and animations.

I have a character made up in 3ds max, textured and ready to go. I'm about to bring the base into blender and start rigging & animating him. If anyone has a good up to date tutorial on a max>blender>UE workflow I'd appreciate it.

My main concern atm is the clothes/obj's. Shirt/tunic/belts/weapons/sheaths/ and the base are all seprate obj's and uvw maps atm. 

So to follow the base will I need to combine all of these objects before rigging/animating him or bringing him into UE? Or is there a way to rig and animate the base then upload the obj's to equip the character with interchangeable clothes and weapons that will follow the characters animations?.. I assume you can for weapons as they normally attach to and follow invisible dummies in most engines but the tunic and holstered gear I'm guessing will need to be united with the base mesh/uvw map..

Obscura

Have you done any research yet? There is an official engine documentation and it has a bunch of topics related to characters and skeletal meshes. Interchangable cloth and body parts is kind of more complex but again, there are a bunch of documented stuff already available on the internet. Just look it up on google.

ozaffer

Obscura said:

Have you done any research yet? There is an official engine documentation and it has a bunch of topics related to characters and skeletal meshes. Interchangable cloth and body parts is kind of more complex but again, there are a bunch of documented stuff already available on the internet. Just look it up on google.

thats the plan when I get some time, just jumping in blind is like talking to ai instead of a person though. can waste a ton of time doing old methods, following old tuts, or doing it one way when it could be done another. thanks for the tip on the docs just looking for anyone with some helpful guides on que.

Obscura

So you say looking at the official documentation is is a bad way. Alright.

ozaffer

Obscura said:

So you say looking at the official documentation is is a bad way. Alright.

my bad for commenting at work. But it can be, a lot of programs dont update their guides, don’t put in concise info, or leave things out. I’ll give it a shot when I have time though.

Obscura

Here you go:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Content/FBX/SkeletalMeshes
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Content/FBX/Animations

Luckily, the skeletal mesh pipeline is kinda standard for years so the most of the information available in the doc is still valid. Doing the simplest search unfortunately did not result in good links regarding the interchangeable cloth, but I would say its kinda straight forward. There is a part in the doc where it talks about single piece of mesh versus parts. So from there you could figure out how to do it. If it turns out not to be so straight forward, I'm pretty sure, further search will give you what you need. There is a huge community for Unreal, so there is good information already available in the forums.

ozaffer

Obscura said:

Here you go:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Content/FBX/SkeletalMeshes
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Content/FBX/Animations

awesome it hits on my main concern in the first paragraph, tyvm! I’m alittle raw to maya, might give it a shot just to learn the rigging/animation workflow in there being such a widely used tool. But if it proves to frustrating hopefully I can get blender compatible with the workflow.