Characters

nanos.world Characters use Unreal’s Default Mannequin Skeleton. So any Skeletal Mesh which uses it by default will probably work in nanos world as a Character. In this guide you will learn how to import and use custom Skeletal Meshes in nanos world Characters.

For this Guide, we will import a Skeletal Mesh from Stylized Character Kit: Casual 01 (which is a Free Marketplace Content for September 2020).

Also, we will be using our Assets Development Kit - ADK, make sure you downloaded it.

Downloading the Asset Pack from Unreal Marketplace

The first step is to download the Asset Pack Stylized Character Kit: Casual 01 from UE4 Marketplace, do to so, open Epic Games Launcher >> Unreal Engine >> Library and scroll to VAULT section, in there you will find all your Marketplace content you have in your account, to download it click on Add To Project and select the Assets Development Kit project, this will download all files and ‘install’ them into the ADK project.

You can now notice that there is a new folder Content/SCK_Casual01/ in the ADK project, this is the Asset Pack you just downloaded from UE4 Marketplace:

And you can find it’s Skeletal Meshes inside Content/SCK_Casual01/Models/Premade_Characters/:

Copying the wanted files to our Asset Pack folder

For this example, let’s import the Skeletal Mesh MESH_PC_00 to nanos world and use it as our Character’s Mesh:

The first step is to copy it and all it’s dependencies to your AssetPack/ folder inside the Project:

Note

If you want, you don’t need to do this and instead you can generate an Asset Pack with all files from the Marketplace, which will create a big and kind of useless content for nanos world.

To do so, just drag-n-drop MESH_PC_00 into your AssetPack/ folder and select Advanced Copy Here, this will copy all files and all dependencies in there, i.e. only the real needed ones:

Press OK to confirm:

And now we have only our wanted Skeletal Mesh and it’s Textures/Materials into our Asset Pack folder, which we will export:

Converting the Skeleton to nanos world’s Skeleton

Now it’s of paramount importance to convert all Skeleton references to use nanos world Skeleton instead, if the Skeletal Mesh you imported is 100% equal to UE4’s Mannequin Skeleton, this convertion won’t be even noticed, but if the Skeleton of the Skeletal Mesh you are importing have more bones or is different, it won’t work! You can try remake/modify it in a 3D software like Blender and make it equal to UE4’s Mannequin.

For that, just right click on your Skeletal Mesh MESH_PC_00 >> Skeleton >> Assign Skeleton, and select our Skeleton SKEL_Mannequin, press Accept to convert:

After it’s converted, save everything and you can delete the old Skeleton (which was located at SCK_Casual01/Mannquin/ folder):

Exporting / Packaging / Cooking the assets to nanos world

Cooking/Packaging Unreal Engine Projects is very straightforward (this is the same as ‘generating’ your game’s .exe if you are making a game in UE4).

Before we export it, let’s say to UE4 to only export our AssetPack folder, otherwise it will compile and export all folders in the Project. You can skip this step if you don’t care, but will increase the packaging time.

For that, open the Project Settings >> Packaging (or search for Directories to never Cook), and let’s add a blacklist of directories to skip cooking (exporting), I’m selecting the one from which we imported: SCK_Casual01/ which we don’t want exported together because we had already copied the files we want to our AssetPack/ folder:

And now we just need to Package the Project! File >> Package Project >> Windows (64-bit), and select a folder in your PC to save it:

Getting the Files & Generating Assets.toml

We are almost finished! Now, let’s copy all cooked files into our Server/Assets/ folder! For that, find and open the folder which you just Packaged from UE4, you will have something like this:

The folder we want is inside Content/YourAssetFolder:

Let’s copy it into our Server/Assets/:

And the last step is to generate an Assets.toml file! For our luck, the ADK comes with a Tool which generates an Assets.toml configuration automatically for us!

We just need to put the AssetPack/ folder name in there and press GENERATE:

Now you just need to create an Assets.toml file inside your Server/Assets/MyAssetPack/ folder and paste the generated configuration inside of it:

Using the Skeletal Mesh in a Character through Scripting

The last step is to use it! For that, you just need to use it’s Key MyAssetPack::MESH_PC_00! E.g.:

Character(Vector(0, 300, 100), Rotator(0, 180, 0), "MyAssetPack::MESH_PC_00")

And… voila! Imported and integrated with all animations!