Best Practice for Skeletal Mesh hierarchy in outliner?

[Anonymous]

What is the best arrangement for Meshes and their skeleton in Maya? I normally put the skeleton and the meshes into groups within a single parent group, but then I saw someone put their meshes under the root of their skeleton. For those making characters in a game engine such as Unreal Engine, what is the best way to arrange assets in the outliner?

(Below are two examples)

[jacobreuling · Accepted solution]

I personally like to keep things very simple when modeling and rigging for a game engine, so I don't parent the geometry or the root of the skeleton under anything at all. If you want to be organized then you could put the geo into a group, but I would not advise parenting it in the skeleton hierarchy as that will probably cause issues with skinning and double transforms. I also would not parent the skeleton root under anything itself, because anything it is grouped under will be exported as well when you go to send it to Unreal which can add a needless layer of offset/complexity to the skeletal hierarchy.

In short, go with the second image but get rid of the "Horse_Base" group.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for answering that, I appreciate it!