[Solved]Multiple Skelelton on one mesh?

[tyrone70]

I'm trying to make a herd of swans. It's basically one mesh made of several elements. Each element is a different bird and has their own skeleton. They're all skinned fine in Max, but when I bring it into Unreal a few problems happen:

1. Only the bones from the lead swan are recognized. The other birds lose their bones and are rigged to the swan's head for some reason.
2. The test animation I made turns the rig sideways.
3. I made a "procedural" animation in Max (path constraint and a spline). I now I have to bake those animations first and there's an option when export to bake the animation, but nothing seems to have been exported in the editor.

Is it possible to export several skeletons in an FBX file, and if not, how would I got about making this all work?

[CreativeCoding]

I'm trying to make a herd of swans. It's basically one mesh made of several elements. Each element is a different bird and has their own skeleton. They're all skinned fine in Max, but when I bring it into Unreal a few problems happen:

1. Only the bones from the lead swan are recognized. The other birds lose their bones and are rigged to the swan's head for some reason.
2. The test animation I made turns the rig sideways.
3. I made a "procedural" animation in Max (path constraint and a spline). I now I have to bake those animations first and there's an option when export to bake the animation, but nothing seems to have been exported in the editor.

Is it possible to export several skeletons in an FBX file, and if not, how would I got about making this all work?

No idea. Can you name all of the first bones as "Root"?

[tyrone70]

I'll try that and see if it makes a difference. I'm trying a few different things right now. Do dummies matter in Unreal?

[obihb]

I am pretty sure you can only use one root bone for any single skeletal mesh. In your case, you may have many birds but you should consider it to be a single skeletal mesh if you want to handle it in this particular way.

So, in Max you would have your root bone and every bird's full skeleton would use that one root bone as it's root. All bird skeletons put together essentially then forms one big skeleton with a single hierarchy.

Another way is to export each animation of every bird as a separate animation. You can of course with ActorX contain this all in one animation file even though it would still be separate sequences. Then you export one bird. Duplicate the bird in UDK and assign a different animation for each bird.

Another option is through Matinee. You export one bird and one "fly" animation that is a "in place" animation. Like a walk loop.. only it's a fly loop. Then have matinee play this and do the actual translation through matinee as well. Key frame the bird to move through the air. Do this with how ever amount of birds you want to have.

About Dummies. If you mean to use dummies as bones.. yes you can use them as bones if you like.

[tyrone70]

Wow! That helps with everything. Thanks!
I created a "linking bone" between each of the birds and that worked just fine.
The reason I was trying to use dummies is because I've worked with a different engine that let me use them as root node. Again, thanks.