Another question about soft bodies

Development Character & Animation
1

Hi.
Let’s imagine that I have a character walking around, holding a sausage by the middle. As he walks or shakes his hand, the sausage’s tips swing dynamically.
What’s the best approach to achieve this? Is it best to rig the sausage or is it possible to do it without a skeleton? If without a skeleton, do I have to use a third party plugin like Nvidia Flex, VICO Dynamics, TENDR Dynamics, etc or does UE has it’s own way to do this? I read in the UE DOCs about ‘Vertex Animation’ - is it appropriate for this case?
It’s basically a soft body that has mass and reacts to gravity and that the player interacts with - grabbing/holding and dropping it on the ground.
Thank you.

PR

2

I have zero experience with softbody or Nvidia flex.
But based from traditional methods I would create a simple bone chain with the root bone in the center, expanding out in both directions to each tip of the sausage.
Then make an animation BP for it and use spring controllers and have a smaller stiffness value for each bone moving away from the root

3

Thank you for the feedback, AlphaWolF.