Scaling Skeletal Meshes (Maya to UDK)

[Stellaire]

I've recently been told that bones with scale values can't be imported into UDK. And indeed when I tried, I got a weird problem of the rig being rotated but the mesh remained in the normal position. I read in another thread that scaling a skeletal mesh in UDK will cause problems as well. When I tried it however, everything seemed to work fine. I only dragged it inside a scene and had it perform one animation though.

Are there other things to consider when scaling skeletal meshes, or are there no more issues with that in the more recent versions of UDK?

[Hitpawz]

As far as I know, there are no reasons you cannot scale a skeletal mesh once it's inside of UDK. Even the default character and 1st person models that ship with UDK have (or had) been scaled by a small amount.

The reason you want a one for one scaling is when it comes time to do things like animating a particular sequence where the character needs to be in an exact position dependant on another object or within the world. Any sort of stealth kill type of animation where two entities need to be "attached" together at a certain point would be extra difficult if scaling values where off. It might also be a little weird placing a character inside of a vehicle. All of that is just more natural to fit together if it's all scaled at 100%. It's not saying that you can't move these things around later by shifting sockets or just trial and error, but it's a little harder.

The only limit I do know of is that you can't really scale a ragdoll asset down too far. The engine is optimized for a certain scale for the physics and anything too small just cannot be processed good. However, I scaled a spider with ragdoll up to about the size of a 2 story house, shot it and it died just fine. So scaling up appears to be fine.

[Stellaire]

Thanks a lot for the answer, that's going to save me a ton of work. Rigging and weighting are not exactly among my favorites, so if I don't have to do it again that's great news. The character will be used in a side-scrolling platformer, so the difficulties you mentioned most probably won't affect us too much.

The stealth kill problem might be an issue later on, but I'll worry about that when we get there. From what I understand I could even avoid it altogether by just creating all characters and rigs at the same "wrong" size, so they'll all have the same scale values in UDK.

[mightyenigma]

This reminds me: Our characters come into UDK very very small and I have to set their defaultproperties drawscale to 10 or 15.

When I want to set up physics assets then the physics assets are HUGE by comparison. Is there any way to make them smaller so they fit on our tiny characters?

[segerina]

U can always change the size of ur character in your PlayerControll class with unreal acript, worked for us, now she's just 0.2 units. and animations works also , doesn't matter what size she is.