Adding animated arms to arm-less player mesh

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hello, Im wanting to make an FPS and im fairly new to UE4 coming from unity, I want it to be first person but using the 3rd person character because I want to be able to see rest of my body, and the player and network player to see the same thing. (dont like the idea of 2 characters visible to only 1 of either players)

So I have got the main mannequin rigged into blender and separated the arms and the body, using the same rig set up. My Idea was the get a gun and animate it onto the arms and have the animations run from there, and for the rest of the body to use a blend space locomotion type system, from the starter animations pack, My goal is to connect the arms on the same bone I took them off and use there own animations

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but with the arms to follow and inherit the bodies rotations and position. All I seem to find vague correct or making sense is animation blending and or using a socket within the arm skeleton and then blueprint attaching the arms that way to the socket.

Can anyone shed some light on the situation, hope you understand what im wanting to do.

2

Hey there, i did the same thing for my game and the way did it was the following:

  • Place the camera a socket that is child of head bone.
  • On the animation blueprint i did a layered blend per bone on spine_01 and created 2 state machines (lower body and upper body). Lower body does the movement blend space, Upper body plays all animations for the weapons and such. There is no need to split the arms from the body, you use the whole thing. One thing you need to take into account when doing this approach is that you might need to create sync groups for the movement to sync up, but that’s up to you.