Transferring Model From One Armature To Another In Blender?

[Pinwheel Arts]

I've been extracting a lot of models from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice recently to try and expand on some Feudal Japan-set content.

Is there any way to transfer an extracted character's mesh to an existing SFM one while retaining all the original weight paints? Ideally I'd like to be able to attach everything to MadIvan's existing samurai characters.

[Pte Jack]

Only if the bones ends are in the exact same place and are named exactly the same as the originals. (Meaning No, mesh is weight painted to vertex groups, which carry the same name as the bones that are driving them.)

The easier way to do it would be to just rename the bones (which will rename the vertex groups) to what they need to be based on the other armature.

Animations will not work if you do this and are planning to bring those over as well because animations are based on the armature that they were created with, which is not the one you renamed the bones in.

And if you're planning to bring animations from the original armature, they will be broken because of the bone name changes. The only animation that may work is the one that was active when you renamed the bones.

[Pinwheel Arts]

Funnily enough I actually watched your very video on this and learned that there was no easy solution!

What I've done is simply renamed the bones manually, as that at least allows me to easily parent parts of certain models together. It'll certainly do for the time being before I try anything more elaborate.

[Pte Jack]

OMG!!!! Someone who actually watched one of my videos!!!
Thanks!
LOL!!!
Hopefully it was informative enough for you though.

[Pinwheel Arts]

Oh I've watched a bunch of your videos over time, they helped a lot during the early days!

[Pte Jack]

Gals to hear that some have helped. I'm in a hiatus right now with a computer without a video card. When they finally come back on sale I'll have some new ones.

[Pinwheel Arts]

While we're on this subject, here's something related:

Can I change the orientation of one model's bones so that they match the orientation of another? These two models that I'm trying to merge don't have the same bone rotation so they deform horribly when zeroing them to one another. I know how to work around this bit it would just be more convenient in general if there was a way to fix this in Blender.

[Pte Jack]

You would have to do this in Edit mode on each bone you want to change, one bone at a time (unless your a python genius and can write a script to do it).

If both models are depcompiled and in Blender you may be able to use some sort of rotation constraint, (I would do this on a duplicated armatures to see if it works). Once the constraints are created from the original to the target, you may be able to apply them, make the target a real armature (apply pose as rest position) and use that new armature to test.
But I would not get my hopes up as constraints are made in Pose Mode I believe, not edit mode and may may rotate mesh to the new position, I personally haven't tried doing this.

[Pinwheel Arts]

I'll look into it, but it does sound pretty difficult! Might have to see if anyone's interested in working together on getting these suitable for workshop as I've got the hang of extracting and making materials but I still suck at rigging.