Baking skeletal meshes and their materials in Unreal Engine 4

What the talk is about

Ihor Pakhomov describes how his team built a character editor in Unreal Engine 4 for a city-building game, after moving from an in-house engine to Unreal. Instead of hiring many more character artists, they cut characters into parts and combined them: 52 costumes, hundreds of pieces, several body types and heads produced over a thousand elements and hundreds of finished characters. He shows the editor's interface, vertex-color painting that stops hair from poking through hats, and re-skinning parts to the right sockets. The core of the talk is baking several skeletal meshes into one: custom UVs, merging materials into atlases, baking textures, recalculating normals, sections and clothing, plus engine changes needed after version 4.16. Useful for technical artists and programmers optimizing modular characters.