Been working on trying to mod Ark: Survival Evolved with the Ark Dev Kit and add a new dino complete with a custom, Blender-made mesh. I started off exporting the Giganato skeletal mesh into Blender and then edited the mesh to make a new theropod dinosaur and it looks great. I then tried exporting my new modified mesh back into the Dev Kit making it use the same skeleton as the default Giganato hoping to just use its animations for my new dino. All seems fine at first except that my dino appears super small, and when I try to view it’s animations borrowed from the Giganato, the model contorts, twists, and deforms into a complete mess during animations. I’ve tried researching dozens of different tutorials and help topics and while my minimal knowledge about this stuff makes me think it’s a scaling issue during the export from Blender, nothing I do seems to help. So I’m here asking for more specific help from more experienced users to my scenario outside of generic tutorials and help topics
What you need to do is re rig and skin the model in blender it must use the same bone config as the original and then it should work. Because what is happening is you are changing the vertex data between the original and your new mesh. So there may be unassigned verticies that have no bone animation. That’s what it looks like. Unreal doesn’t have the ability to skin a mesh.
Of course! Just checked it and even though I never directly edited the mesh there, the legs and arms vertex groups are not assigned to any actual parts of the mesh. Working on reassigning groups and hopefully everything will line up!
Also seems some vertex groups are still assigned properly for the most part on the tail area, but a few of the bones on the tail overlap greatly with their vertex groups, could this also cause strange animation deformities as multiple bones try to animate the same part of the mesh?
I figured it out, you were partially right, and that did fix half my issue so thank you, but also when I was learning unreal engine turns out I overwrote the game’s skeleton for the Giganato with a compressed one or something so no matter what I did with my new model in Unreal or Blender it would be referencing that bad skeleton! Fixed it both issues now and it animates beautifully!
