Modular Character Adventure

    In this week's episode of things I do for fun that makes me want to rip my hair out, we have modular characters. So all last week it was our intention as a group to use a paragon character as our main hero, mainly because they were free, nonetheless, I had run into struggles with skeleton structure on some of the characters and being able to remove certain items that we did not find aesthetically appealing. After further discussion, we decided to change the main character. How bad could that be right? Our next build wasn't due until Thursday and I was confident in my ability to provide a quality character with animations because I had already done all the basic research and implementations on the paragon character. I assumed that I would simply change over the meshes and switch over the animation blueprints. It didn't take long, once I received the assets on Tuesday evening, to know that it was going to be a struggle. I am incredibly new to Unreal Engine and when I opened the assets looking for the mesh, the only thing I was able to find was a whole bunch of pieces and had no idea how to put them together.  

    So the first issue I ran into, and I am still uncertain if the solution I found was the most efficient, was the fact that each animation needed to be retargeted to the provided demo model skeleton that was provided with the asset. I thought this was interesting until I realized that I needed or should I say found a source that said I needed to retarget each piece of equipment/body part to the skeleton as well. Once I completed this step I was able to start animating the character which is where even more fun began...but you will have to wait until next week for those details!