Here is a little technique that I often find people don’t know about.
Did you know that you can turn a pose from an animation into a static mesh asset?
If you would prefer to watch the video version, check it out here
In my example below I have a death animation and I want to take a pose from it to use as static mesh for a dead body lootable which I am going to place around my level.
This is very easy to do. Open up the animation we want to take a pose from and scrub through the timeline to find a pose that you like. Then we just need to hit the Make Static Mesh button at the top of the screen.
It will ask you where you want to save it to and ask you to give it a name. When your done hit OK.
It’s as easy as that. If you go to the folder location you picked you will see that there is now a static mesh asset. You can then do whatever you want with it; drag and drop it directly in the world, use it in other actors, etc
A useful thing to remember is that if the pose in the animation isn’t quite right for what you want, you are able to tweak the pose in editor and then use the make static mesh functionality. For example, if the leg position doesn’t fit with what you need then move it around. I talked about how to do this in one of my other Quick Dev Tips which you can watch HERE or read about HERE
The whole process seems to be exactly the same in the Early Access version of Unreal Engine 5. The only real difference seems to be the general UI changes, the flow/process remains the same.
I’ve used this a bunch of times in the past in the way we talked about above to quickly create static mesh dead bodies assets all from within the editor. This makes the process so much easier than the original way, where you would have to go back out to a 3D program use your anim rig to pose something up from scratch, bake the posedown, and export/import into engine. Anytime you have to switch programs you are burning time. Sometimes it’s unavoidable if you want to create something of high quality, other times you can get away with it.
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