Author: Todd Zipp

Posted on 03/14/25

Hello everyone, a problem that occurred this week that I had to solve is the main character model had its sword and shield together with the character mesh. Now if the idea was to just keep the same weapons and shields throughout this wouldn't be a problem, but it limited the idea that we wanted to have a bow and potentially other weapons. Thus creating a very limited play style if it is unchanged. Finding a way to separate them opened up more possibilities for combat or even resource gathering should we choose to hold tools. I wanted to keep this model though because graphically it is a detailed model.

After doing some research into these models and my very limited blender experience it came down to two options. The first one would be to simply make a material that was set to translucent and make them invisible. This isn't a bad option per se but does add to performance cost as its still a material being added and is still in the scene. The second more tedious option was to put the model in Blender and start going at it with deleting. This option while much longer is the better option overall. It took me some hours of loading the model and carefully deleting the sword and shield to get the character by himself. Putting them back in fully and deleting the character and the shield to just have the sword. and then doing the same for the shield. I did find that using fbx, or gtlf the materials that would export with it when putting it back in Unreal just wasn't as good either. So I took the models and put the original meshes back on them and came out perfect!

This is after I got everything separated in Blender and imported it back into unreal.

In this image, you can see on his arms how the mesh isn't looking right

This is how the arms are supposed to look after I got it all figured out and the meshes right.