[Brainstorming] Mech with modular and destructible parts

I was wondering if you guys had any input on how to go about making a mech Character / Pawn that has modular parts?

My first instinct is to make them as seperate actors and/or skeletal meshes attached to a main torso. Would i run into problems animation-wise with that method? Is there maybe a better way to go about this?

Is there maybe a way to have a skeletal mesh that has modular limbs?

Any help is welcome

The way I found to have a skeletal mesh with modular pieces is to splat a hitbox in phat that approximates the resulting shape, then make the modular parts static meshes. The static meshes need to have collisions removed otherwise it behaves weirdly (UE4 does not tolerate collidable stuff within other collidable stuff).

Pic of proof of concept: AI With Bumper Properly Placed GIF | Gfycat

Few questions:
What do you mean by “Phat”?
Do the static meshes need to be attached programatically to the skeletal?
Can you animate it using statemachines?

Thanks for the reply!

Phat stands for physics asset. The static meshes need to be child components of the same actor that has the skeletal mesh. As for animations, I don’t know (I don’t use them)

I think this BP from the MarketPlace will be really helpful to you ^^, it’s a good start. some times investing some money in BP from marketplace can help you to some headache learning from 0 because you will get a base to start working on your own system

@NightmareSystem - thanks for the reference, ill be sure to check it out.

So I guess no one thinks it’s a good idea to Frankenstein together several skeletal meshes huh? It seems like the most flexible / least problematic (at least if I can figure out a decent way of setting the thing up in the first place) method of doing this…