The Distortion

When creating a game nothing is more important than having a good mesh and model for your player character as often times they will take center stage. One of the core problems I ran into while trying to find a model though was getting a good one with an Epic Skeleton mesh at no charge on the FAB store. You see, importing meshes and models to already existing animations, like the UE5 Manny animations, is not as simple as plugging them up to the new model, as you get less than desirable results like this one.

I had a few options, I could continue using the Manny Model, but that came at the great expense of the game lacking visual distinction. I could use another model like Sci-Fi warrior, this model had the visual theme that I was looking for. This solution has one glaring issue though, the skeleton for this model used the UE4 Skeleton and was missing bones that exists only one the UE 5 Mannequin skeleton, creating results like twisted wrist and pointing hand

My last option was not perfect either, Fab offers paragon assets for free and on the surface seemed like the ideal pick. These assets are known for their high fidelity and they use a skeleton similar to the UE5 Mannequin skeleton. The glaring problem with this one was extremely related to the structure of how our game is built. You see, all the attack and shooting code/functionality lied within our rifle weapon class, not our player. The issue with this is paragon assets always come with a weapon in their mesh and work off the basis that your attack functionality is based in your player and not your weapon. The result was a floating weapon that followed the player no matter where I went, since the weapon is attached to the skeleton, seen below

Distortion Solution

After mulling over my options I decided to go with the the paragon asset, as I felt it was the asset I could do the most fixing to. I couldn't use the Manny mesh long term and it needed to be replaced eventually. The sci-fi warrior was just missing bones that I could not add myself, as I am primarily a programmer, not a rigger. 

So, concerning the choice of the paragon asset, the first hurdle was dealing with the issue of the weapon. I decided that moving my attack code over to the player was my last resort. Lots of other classes called/casted on the weapon class and I would need to spend a lot of time rewiring already existing functionality to make it work. Getting rid of that weapon attached to the skeleton was my best choice. I couldn't delete it, Unreal Engine doesn't allow you to remove bones from a mesh in it's editor and I couldn't hide it, unless of course, I could. I realized I could just apply a transparent material to the gun within the editor window of the mesh of the asset and the first hurdle was passed!

The last hurdle proved to be much more complicated than I originally anticipated. You see, in order to make  a  newmodel use animations made for another model, like Manny, you need to retarget them. This involves first creating an IK rig to retarget all of the bones from the source skeleton and apply them to the target skeleton. You then need a separate Blend Space and an Animation blueprint to run that retargeted blend space as well to run any sort of reactive animations. Luckily all the functionality for this already existed in the original Manny animation blueprint I created. The functionality just needed to be duplicated or moved over to the new retargeted blueprint. 

After much time spent learning more about animations and skeletons than I ever thought I would learn, I had a working animating paragon asset with Manny animations and no distortions.