Skeletons and skinning

Work on skeletons: bones, sockets, morph targets, skin weights, physics assets and cloth.

What it’s for

Ask your assistant to change the structure of a skeletal asset: the Skeleton, the Skeletal Mesh and its Physics Asset. That covers the work you would otherwise do by hand in the Skeleton, Skeletal Mesh and Physics Asset editors. Bones and bind poses, sockets and virtual bones, morph targets, skin weights, ragdoll bodies and constraints, and Chaos Cloth bindings are all in scope.

Use it to set up or fix a rig without opening those editors. Add a muzzle socket for a weapon, generate a ragdoll, create a blendshape for a facial expression, or clean up skin weights on a remeshed character. Most changes are saved to the asset. A few, like driving a morph weight or previewing physics, only affect the editor preview.

This area is about the skeletal asset and its rig data. For animation clips, montages, retargeting and Animation Blueprints, see Animation and Animation Blueprint graphs.

Things you can ask

Add a weapon socket

You get a named socket on a hand bone that props can attach to in game.

You: On SK_Character, add a hand socket called WeaponR anchored to hand_r.

Added the WeaponR socket on hand_r in SK_Character.

Generate a ragdoll physics asset

You get a new physics asset built from the mesh’s bones, with a list of its bodies.

You: Make a ragdoll physics asset for SK_Character and show me the bodies.

Created /Game/Chars/SK_Character_PhysicsAsset with 18 bodies, starting with a simulated pelvis.

Create a facial blendshape

You get a new morph target shaped into the expression you asked for.

You: On SK_Head, add a Smile morph and push the mouth corners into it.

Created the Smile morph target on SK_Head and moved the mouth-corner vertices into it.