How can I move bones of a skinned mesh renderer in the editor?

I’m coming from Unity. Normally I’ll import a rigged .FBX, Unity will auto-add a SkinnedMeshRenderer component and the bones will come in as transforms in the hierarchy, and I can pose it or animate it by translating/rotating those bone transforms. I never pull in baked animations from Maya; I do everything in Unity.

When I import a rigged mesh into PlayCanvas and pull it into the hierarchy, it just shows up as a “Model” in the inspector. I can see the lines indicating the bones inside the model, but I can’t see where the bone “components” or “transforms” or “variables” actually are. I’ve been trying to find an example project, tutorial, forum post, etc., but every forum post I’ve found is more specific and complicated, and I haven’t been able to find an answer. How do I move the bones of a skinned mesh?

Hi @knipsch! As far as I know you can only access the bones by script at the moment. A new feature is coming that will show the bones as an entity in the hierarchy, but I don’t know when it will be released.

Ah, gotcha! Thank you so much for the fast response. Do you happen to have a resource or example of how to access the bones via script?

If you use the script on a parent entity you can use this.entity.findByName("BoneName") otherwise you can use this.app.root.findByName("BoneName").

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Hello @knipsch,
You can import the hierarchy of the model in question to acess the bones by enabling the “Import Hierarchy” in the Settings
image
just be sure to re-import the model

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Ah, I didn’t know it’s already released. That makes it a lot easier!

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