How to Change the Character Model

Introduction

In this guide, you will learn how to swap the character in the asset, in this case we’re referring to the first-person arms as a character too and use your own custom character!

Note: This process only works for Skeletal Meshes that are rigged to the Unreal Engine Mannequin, so please make sure that the character/arms mesh that you want to use is set up that way!

How To Change The Character Model

• The first step we’re going to need to do is find some arms to swap the base low-poly arms for.

• In our case, we will be using Ironbelly’s Animated FPS MP40 Pack.

• Once you have your arms that you want to use, we will import them into Unreal Engine. If you’re not sure how to do this, you can check out the Asset Packs section of this Unreal documentation page!

• Now that we have the Asset Pack in the project, we need to find the arms Skeletal Mesh. In the case of the asset we picked, this is at: IBWP3DMP40/_IronbellyRig/FirstPersonBPIronbelly/Arms/SK_FPSArms.uasset

• The process from here should be simple!

  • We first make sure that the Skeletal Mesh has the LPSPCharacter Skeleton assigned. This can be done by right-clicking on the Skeletal Mesh and finding Skeleton/Assign Skeleton.

• Once we’ve clicked on Assign Skeleton, a new window will show up, asking us to pick what Skeleton we wish to assign to this Skeletal Mesh.

• In this window, we need to find the SKEL_LPSP_Character Skeleton.

• This is the Skeleton that we use in the asset and is what all our animations and animation blueprints are set to work with.

• Once we’ve found it and selected it, we can press Accept at the bottom-right corner of the window.

• If the engine asks to merge any bones after the last step, you can go ahead and press Ok for that too.

  • Generally speaking, we don’t really want any of the other skeleton’s bones to be in our animated one, but the engine won’t allow us to proceed without this.

• There is only one more thing to do now, and that is to check that the Retargeting Options of our new Skeletal Mesh are all set to Animation.

  • We can do this by double-clicking on the Skeletal Mesh to open it, and going to the Skeleton Tree, which by default is on the left-hand side of the screen.

  • Once here, we can scroll up to the top, and find the Options/Retargeting Options button, and make sure that it is set to be enabled.

• We can now just right-click on the top bone, in our case that is the root bone, find the Recursively Set Translation Retargeting Animation option, and click it.

  • This will make sure that everything works fine!

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