I’ve worked out how to flip flop crouch and uncrouch in the MyCharacter blueprint eventgraph and assigning the Defaults to allow crouching (for the camera) and setting up a hotkey for crouch in the project input settings. But there is no crouch animation in the VIM for the skeletalmesh to actually do a crouch.
I thought maybe I can just skelcontrol the pelvis down (apart from the fact they feet would likely go into the ground), but I’m not sure where to start. Can someone refer me to the right information?
Does the thirdperson template character actually come with a rig so we can animate and extend on it?
Worst case, can we grab the .fbx bone hierarchy into another application?
I suppose it’s probably simpler to just start from a new rig altogether.
Last question - the crouch flip flop switches immediately from fully stand up to fully crouch. Can we have an example of blending from one existing anim to a second over time )?
in the anim blueprint itself you can easily blend between poses
the first step is to get a crouched pose
If you are actually trying to make a game of any sorts you will want to rig your own biped in 3ds max, if you want to use 3ds max.
That is the easiest route I know of!
I tried exporting the TPP skel mesh and moving the bones around but the skeletal mesh did not conform to the bones for some reason.
But in any case, creating a crouching animation is beyond the UE4 scope
that is the realm of 3ds max and lots and lots of online tutorials
#Skeletal Controller Solution
if you wanted to use skeletal controller you could use single bone to move the pelvis down, which will move the whole skeleton down most likely
than use two Two Bone IK to move the feet back Up
set the bone to be the foot
that will bend the knees appropriately for you 
Enjoy!
Rama
Well here is a CAT rigged 3dsMax2013 version of the ThirdPerson mesh.
The bones are in a layer.
The skinning is not really that perfect but I expect anybody’d only want to use this for testing. Feel free to update it.
Import it to Rocket as None (new character) and name the new SKMesh asset.
Animate the Maxfile and export the mesh only per motion file.
Remember to export with bake animation, resample all.
Import the animated FBX to Rocket using the Animation radio button (and set the named skmesh asset as its boss). Then have fun trying to create a Persona/Vim of some kind.
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ooh nice, thanks for sharing!
um, sooo is your question answered then?
Rama
Yes Rama, thanks - I guess I will learn to construct my own VIM/Persona blueprint instead of using the one I can’t access the animations well.
Well, here’s a version autorigged using Mixamo’s online tools - converted to CAT with their script. Pretty darn cool. Much smoother result than my version. I’ve only used Mixamo twice but both times the results have been impressive, and the CAT script is awesome though bones may need to be renamed afterwards.
http://www.mixamo.com/
CAT script: http://www.mixamo.com/c/mixamo-auto-cat-script
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Looks like the mixamo file somehow gets two root bones and Rocket spits it out (even though in Max it doesn’t appear to have two roots bone it won’t import to Rocket and that’s the error message).
The earlier Cat skin Maxfile (mine) exports/imports fine but remember to set the following on export from 3dsMax
1 all the rig objects properties need to be set to By Layer
2 (i hide the rig layer and put the mesh on the base layer by itself)
3 the fbx export should be FBX2013 not FBX2014 (it seems)
4 the advanced > axis setting should be Z up
5 tested and working at my end
If anyone knows what’s up with Mixamo version file, please let me know.