Animations and Morphing in UDK

So after some trouble I managed to get the blend shapes working with a simple animation in UDK. One of the main things to remember, when you wish to import a skeletal mesh into UDK. Is that your mesh must have at least one bone/joint, skinned to this mesh. It doesn't require any animation but otherwise the engine will not register it as a skeletal mesh or import its blend shapes.

In UDK blend shapes are mentioned as Morph Targets. Unfortunately it is not as simple as to just combine morph targets and animations to one mesh. It requires a little more delicacy and detail, especially the naming, the type of mesh you set into the scene and the nodes you have to use to make it all work together.

Luckily I managed to find some information and combine it to figure out how to properly structurize the animtree and set it up in kismet and matinee. 

 

It might not look all that complicated, but forgetting to move one slider can already break it. UDK seems very sensitive about that.

Here below you can see a short video of the result, the animation and morphing is playing real-time.

I noticed that in Maya and UDK the morph can still occur on the skeletal structure on the mesh while it is animated. This way you can create an animation while the character is morphing.

Also UDK seems to use the same envelope from 0 to 1 like in Maya which means that it is possible to add an in-between blend shape. I will however need to test if it works.

I will check if it is possible to also morph the rig in maya, however I believe it might be easier and overal less time consuming within a pipeline to create the bipedal and quadruped rig set and swap them in UDK after the morphing animation has finished.

This way you can also create seperate, walk, run, jump and other animations on those different rig sets. Instead of having a lot of different animations on one rig, it seems to me to be more organised. 

Next will be to see if I can make the human form block-out work with all morph targets within UDK.