Why are the rifles all skeletal meshes?

You must have noticed that I am asking a lot of questions nowadays, but I just can’t help it! Sam noticed that the rifles are all skeletal meshes. He said he didn’t know why. I, instead of using the regular weapons, wanted to do something a little different. I added a pack from the marketplace. It also has skeletal meshes of guns, instead of static meshes. Why is that? I thought that skeletal meshes are only used in “objects that have a life” :skull_and_crossbones:

So I am going to put out a guess and my logic of just noticing the difference between the two. First is when you have to shoot a weapon you want to be able to put a muzzle flash at the end of the muzzle. Static meshes will not allow us to add sockets so we can add muzzle flashes or projectiles. It can also help if you wanted to have the ammo clips drop again you would nave to be able to add a socket so it could fallout or taken out for a reload.

I think that can also be achieved with a static mesh by adding a Particle Effect component.

That could be why, but I guess you could just spawn an empty mag(is this possible with a static mesh)?

True you could just add the component but again getting the location that you want it is 10 times harder were you can just link it to a socket which on the skeletal mesh. On static meshes you can’t link any sockets as its needs to be a skeletal mesh. Its also because static meshes don’t take any animations and is usually used for level design.

Sorry, I didn’t understand this line. Could you please clarify?

Sorry I meant to say you can’t link a socket in the static mesh. I made an edit on my reply.

Yes, agreed. There could be some more reasons why these rifles are all skeletal meshes, so I will try to research about this. Thanks for the time, @justice_neyedli!
PS - If anyone has more information regarding this, I would love to hear that.

As far as I know it’s for animations. Can’t pull a trigger if it’s static

Dan is correct. Skeletal meshes are used for a lot of weapons so that they can support animations and this is more feasible that making them out of several staticmeshes that you then need construct.

Agreed. And my research brought up nothing, except this link. Guess I am getting bad at searching Google :laughing:

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