Character creation with multiple different meshes

Development Character & Animation
,
1

I am planning on having my playable character customisable by giving a choice of different types of limbs. I have an idea of how I could go about doing it but I am unsure if it would work/be the most efficient way.

The way I thought would be possible is if I were to create each individual limb, animate them individually and connect them in the engine using the bones as points of connection? If that is a possible solution, does anyone have any tips on how I would go about doing that?

If this is a bad idea or there are better ways of getting around this, any help would be greatly appreciated!

(P.S. I’m just asking for a push in the right direction, any tutorials or links you could provide would help as I aim to learn how to do things like this rather than just copy others)

2

Hi, I tried to do character creation once too, but didn’t know an actual tutorial for it. What I eventually did was having all the limbs separate as you have said, but I animate the entire character as one. Basically I imported the limbs one by one as skeletal mesh, and then import the animations, which will drive multiple skeletal meshes. You can use blueprint to switch out individual limb as you change character.

For reference to what I said about multiple meshes, you can read the “Single Mesh vs Multi-Part Mesh” part of the article.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/FBX/SkeletalMeshes/index.html

3

That’s fantastic, thanks very much!