how do I "attach" items to characters?

EEFilmz - You can attach imported objects to characters using Play Plus. You can use FBX or ASE files.

You pick which point you wish to attach so you could create a suit of armour and attach it to his chest. After a bit (OK, hours and hours) of adjustment you could position it so it looks convincing.

The trouble is with movement - the armour will move with his chest, so his legs and arms will keep poking out of it and the whole thing will look weird.

I have one character that I have done something like this for and let's just say he's not as mobile as he used to be (in fact I've cut him out of one scene completely as he's now too much of a pain).

EEFilmz wrote:

It's done through the character edit section. If you want the gun in the character's right hand, you'd edit the right hand of the character. Along with the regular attachments, the first option will now be a sort of box-like icon. That's the one that lets you import an attachment to the hand.

It's not done by sticking the object to the character, but by making it an actual part of the character. Hope this helps!

blender has a new fbx version it was created when unreal 4 was released i can't remember now if it works with muvizu but you can get the autodesk free app converter and run it through that to change to fbx 2012 or 2011 .. which is what muvizu uses.. I think its 2011 but it might be 2012.. again I can't remember

but there is no need (assuming you are using play +) to use ase format for anything any longer

you need ASE for muvizu free version though.

You kinda need to understand what is going on to learn a lot of this stuff unfortunately you need to learn how the basics unreal works and what is meant by collission and how to add it. There is a wiki you might want to read that unfortunately it might sound like greek if you haven't spent time to learn the underlying stuff.

It sounds like collission and where your origin is set because when it comes to fbx since its used for holding animation information you need to set the location, rotation and scale of the thing. You will need to look up info on blender and unreal engine if your using this stuff. (well really when working with any software) I posted some videos awhile back from youtube on an explanation of how to set up the loc/rot/scale they are generic videos but this is what you need to do. (add collission such that muvizu recognizes it and set loc/rot/scale of the objects and put the origin in a logical place for the object your working with)

I really can't teach this beyond telling people what to look up because most problems revolve around understanding the mechanics of it all.

Sorry

Its not really hard once you learn it but it does have a curve to it.

EEF, I feel your pain. This is why I don't usually use FBX files, and just stick to plain old ASEs out of Sketchup. I can't get on with blender either, because I don't know what it's doing under the wall of text. Unless you really need something to be shiny, I'd just avoid the whole FBX thing altogether. Sorry, that's not helping much I know, but it's what I did to save my sanity, so it might save yours

yes the loc/rot is because unreal 3 had some intersting ways of interpreting info and its only needed if your importing FBX formated files ASE does not suffer from this.

You should just need to worry about the origin of the model which sets the pivot point of the model and collision mesh which obeys unreal engine parameters but again these are all game engine things one learns.

These are all mechanics that are not limited to unreal but are present in all of these game engines so once you learn it with one engine you learn it for the rest. The modelling you learn in blender will be identical in maya or 3dsmax or any other 3d program the only difference is the blender user interface. And once your getting into FBX you start to need to understand some of the principles of things otherwise you will never learn and retain the information.

Any issues I have seen people have all have related to understanding what a material is or a uv map is or collision or some other basic modelling principle.
edited by urbanlamb on 19/03/2015