Hi! I’ve done a lot of blueprint coding, but I haven’t done anything with slicing or exploding static meshes. I have a solid rock that I want to make an animation for. I want to explode the rock outward into maybe 15 pieces, and then somehow make an animation for those pieces reconnecting to form the original rock. I only need the reconnecting part of the animation–I don’t actually need the explosion part of the animation.
I’m not sure where to start, but I am very comfortable with blueprints and navigating UE4.
Interesting… i plan in future make this for skeletons - reconnecting their bones…
Imo this is easy to do with animation (just reversed animation), but how you make your rock broken to 15 pieces, with destructible physics? If yes then im afraid this is not possible in blueprints, but if you find a way how to do it then share ideas
One more idea i have is when rock is destroyed, make 15 child actors and kick them off with impulse and then use some kind of manual reconnections with some “move component to” or location nodes…
Yea I’ve been messing around with the destructible meshes now, but there is no clear way to recombine the destructed mesh through blueprints or other editor options. Owell, guess I’ll have to start learning about animations if I want to accomplish this effect. Not really sure where I should start off there either haha, thank you for your input!
I’ll have to check out the Physx Lab as well, that looks awesome!
The dominant idea for me is to record the explosion and replay it in reverse to recombine the object. Recording the animation within UnrealEd is the solution I would seek and Sequencer & the Replay System are what come to mind.
If all else failed, I would devise a means to record and replay the animation myself by exploding the object and tracking each of the fragments Transforms {Location,Rotation,Scale} each frame in a array of arrays.
The other option is to record the explosion animation in 3rd party editor export to skeletal mesh.
Didn’t even know UE4 had a replay system, looks like its only usable by console and C++ though…if I want to dive into that. I also haven’t done anything with the sequencer, so this looks like a good time to start playing with that. Thanks again for the great ideas! I’ve got a lot of learning and work to do haha.
