Unreal Engine 5.3 - Adding a skeleton to a mesh - Quick Tip

hi so this morning unreal 5.3 dropped and thought I would download it take a look um have a look at particularly the skin weight painting which is what I was interested in and did a very quick test so this is all this is just to show how simple it is to now add a skeleton simple in some ways uh to add a skeleton to a mesh in Unreal Engine without needing another DCC so let's take a quick look I'm going to jump over to Unreal Engine here and uh first thing we're going to do is go to modeling mode and I'm going to create a cylinder and I'm going to place that in the scene and I'm just going to add some height subdivisions We'll add 12 for now and we'll just hit accept so adding that just means I've got a simple cylinder here and if I go to wireframe mode see that it has some subdivisions so that we can deform it with the skeleton so quick and simple what I'm going to do is I'm going to go find this mesh I'm gonna move it into a folder here just so that I can isolate the mesh so I've got this mesh which was created by the modeling tools next thing that I want to do is I'm going to right click on this mesh and I'm going to go up to the top here and say convert to skeletal mesh that means it's going to turn it into a skeletal mesh which is the type of mesh that you can deform with the skeleton and the uh just using the defaults here so I'm going to say convert create new skeleton and now you can see that it's created two new assets here so we've got the skeleton and we've got the skeletal mesh which is typical for a skeletal mesh of those two assets I'm going to double click on the skeletal mesh and open that up now you can see that we have our mesh right here if we go to this blue button right here that says editing tools we'll you will be able to see this panel on the left here so what we have on the left and we've got some tools to create a skeleton so I'm going to create the skeleton with the skeleton button here I'm going to click on edit skeleton and then I'm going to go to add now the projection type here for creating bones in the skeleton is set to within mesh so the within mesh which just means that it will actually try and find out where's the midpoint in the mesh and create a bone for you there as opposed to creating it on the outside or just it's a helper tool I guess so I'm going to click at the bottom here and I'm going to click upwards of that towards the top here and I'll just create another one and we'll hit accept and create another one outside the top of the cylinder and hit accept so if I rotate around this object here you'll now see that I've got my skeleton but there's a couple of things that aren't quite right I've got a bone at the top there and at the bottom there they're a little out of place so we can go back here to edit skeleton and with in edit mode here you should be able to just grab the transform controls and just move the bone in like that the bomb and then we'll move the bone at the top there just to line those up it's probably a better way of doing that but anyway um I'm going to hit accept so now we have a skeleton which is pretty cool and then the last step really is to go back to edit skeleton here again and then we'll see the um the skin over here there's a little skin button here so we hit skin and then we're going to do bind skin which basically does exactly what it suggests it takes the skeleton and binds it to the mesh so if we go to skin and bind skin and hit accept you'll now have bound the skin the skeleton to the skin or to the mesh now if we jump up here to the top right and take a look at the skeleton we can as we could before grab the bone and rotate it like that and then you'll see that we've now bound a brand new mesh inside unreal we've created a skeletal mesh and we've created a skeleton and it's deforming the mesh which is awesome being able to do this and it seems very intuitive I think it seems to work pretty well off the bat um that's about as far as I've investigated with it but I just want to make a quick video and just show that this is now possible in Unreal Engine without having to go outside and uh yeah pretty cool stuff anyway hope you enjoyed this quick tip and I look forward to doing another one take care everybody foreign

Channel: Edward Dawson-Taylor

Views: 17,460

Keywords: UE, UnrealEngine, SkeletalMesh, ue5.3

Id: FebmlYAJ0Uc

Length: 5min 25sec (325 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023