How do I change the position of the arms of the default mannequin?

I have the SK_mannequin and UE4_mannequin_skeleton from the third person template (the game is third person). I’d like the character to hold a gun in front of him like in the first person template. Are there any good tutorials on how to do this?

gdeep141 was asking how to adjust the third person skeleton, not the first person. :3 I was wondering how to do this too.

If I go to the animation asset, I can make adjustments to the mesh, like this:

But how do I “apply” these adjustments to the original animation?

(On an entirely separate note: Epic has released an “animation starter pack” for free on the market place, and it includes gun animations. Just in case you’d like to use that instead.)

You’ve probably figured this out by now, but for anyone coming through with the same question, you need to go into the character’s blueprint, and from there, click on the Viewport tab (should be at the top left, right under the Compile button).\

Here you will see the camera and any other assets you’ve added to the character. You should be able to grab the 1P rig and move it around in relation to the camera, or vice versa.

Ugh, totally misread that ><

In that case, while your’e not wrong, I’d say it might be easiest to export the TPose skeletal mesh and create your animations/poses in Maya or Blender or something (if you have it) with the gun in place, then import the new animations as needed.

I mostly only say that because as far as my experience goes, UE is not very intuitive with posing and animation, whereas with Maya or Blender you can do some very basic, simple rigging and get some really nice results a lot more easily.

Like ninthtale said, it might be better to make animations outside of Unreal, (like in Maya or Blender,) Especially if you want the mannequins movement animation to change. As I’m pretty sure Unreal’s animation editor (Persona) does not have many advanced tools. But I’ll go ahead and show you how to attach the gun to the mannequin, and offset the arm positions. Just remember: Since we’re not changing the movement of the animation, it will look good with small handheld items, (like a handgun,) but it may or may not look silly with larger items. But don’t worry, you could add some separate animations for large items (like long arms) later.

For attaching the gun: (I have attached a lamp in the image below.)

Import a gun mesh into Unreal. Now go to your third person BP and click on “+Add Component” and choose whatever your gun is, (static mesh?) and drag it below the mannequin mesh to make it a child. Now before you adjust the position, click on “parent socket” in the details panel, and choose the hand. Now the gun should be moving around in sync with the mannequin. Now use the transform tools in the top right of the viewport to disable grid snapping and position it as correctly as you can. If you click on the mannequin mesh, you can check “pause anims” in the details panel which might help.

Now for offsetting the arms:

Go to the animation asset tool for your mesh, double click on the animation you want to edit, click on a body part and use the transform tools to make adjustments, then click on “key” in the header to apply them, now save it, and the animation should be updated. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, that would definitely be better for creating new animations, Which he’ll probably have to do for holding large guns at least.

However, I finally figured out how to apply adjustments made in Unreal. All I had to do was click on “key” to apply the changes, then save, and the animation updated. : D I’ll go ahead and post an answer including this info.