Skeletal Meshes

Since version 1.1, I use the default UE4 mannequin for the character skeletal mesh.

I use Blender to create the Armor Meshes and the animations. I'll present my workflow to integrate everything inside UE4 and being able to retarget everything to the default Mannequin.

I have two separate Blender projects : One for animations and one for all the armors.

Also, I am using the UE4 Tools by Lluis Garcia, which is extremly usefull because it provides a rig with the same hierarchy than the UE4 skeleton.

The main issue when working with skeletal meshes from blender is that their bones don't have the same orientation than the ones in UE4. For animation, it's not an issue because the retargetting tool of UE4 manage to properly retarget the animations to the default UE4 skeleton.

But a problem occurs when you try to import armors as Skeletal meshes : If you try to set the same skeleton for the default UE4 mesh and the imported armors from Blender, animations won't work.

What we try to achieve :

The solution is simple : You need to export the default UE4 mannequin to Blender, then you need to link your armor pieces to it and finaly export them to UE4.

The imported UE4 skeleton inside Blender and the linked armor pieces. You can see that the bones have weird orientations. It's not a problem because we won't make any animation with this skeleton, we will just skin the armor pieces to it and re-export it to UE4.

And here is my project with the amination and the UE4 Tool. When the animation are finished, I export them to UE4 and I retarget them to the default UE4 mannequin skeleton.

Note : You will also find few skeletal meshes which comes from Blender and are not compatible with the default UE4 mannequin but are instead fully compatible with the skeleton from the UE4 Tool. I left them inside the project in case you have a full workflow from Blender and want to use them.

Note that I use the Skeletal meshes which work with the default UE4 mannequin in the project (And I won't update the old Blender-only skeletal mesh).