Importing Character with seperate accessories to UDK

[johneiger]

I have a character that has about 6 or 7 seperate accessories. The main character is skinned to a biped and the accessories are linked to the bones so that they will move accordingly. I have an animation on it already now im trying to export the whole thing to UDK. Is it possible to export the mesh even though it has seperate accessories that are attached to the mesh itself. I've tried to do it but when I do UDK just crashes. Im using FBX to export the mesh and animations. What is the best way to go about this?

Thanks

[JessieG]

If the accessories never change in the game, they should be part of the mesh that's skinned to the skeleton. You can combine them with the base mesh, skin it, and weight the verts of the accessories to 100 percent influence of the bones you were attaching them to.

You may be able to instead import those objects as separate pieces and attach them to the skeletal mesh using those bones they were parented to as sockets, but that might be a bit messy if they never get changed out in game.

[johneiger]

Alright, thanks for the help. I figured thats probably the best way to do it, skinning the accessories to the mesh. So is the proper way also to erase the underlying mesh thats beneath those accessories or just hide the accessories as you are skinning the underlying mesh. I work in 3DS Max and its a pain to try to skin the accessories and the underlying mesh because there is not hide feature in skin mode. You have to jump over to editiable poly and run the risk of all of your skinning work getting messed up.

[geodav]

if your skinning/weighting the whole accessory to one bone, in the skin modifier tick the select element box this will then select the whole section which you can flood fill with the set weight, have a look at some of my ut3 videos its the same work flow

[johneiger]

Cheers! I will defintley be checking out your tutorials