Hi! Thanks for viewing!
Could anyone assist me with Character Weathering/Destruction, I would like for my game, as the fight goes on for my characters to get bloody, and facial damage, along with ripping and tearing of clothing… Would that have to be done in my character development software? Unreal? Or is it an equal effort? This isn’t required for my game, but in this age, we love when developers pay attention to small details!
The simplest thing you could do, is to have several materials with different textures with varying levels of damage painted on them and then using a “set material” node whenever the right conditions are met (ie. when Health < 50).
You could also use dynamic materials and blend between the different textures in a single material and only set a scalar parameter for different degrees of one or the other.
Or you could also apply decals (like a cut or a bullet hole) onto your character to have more customized damage. You can use a projectile or weapon hit location and applying a decal to where it was hit. The problem with that would be that bigger decals would look stretched on curves, because decals are only a planar projection.
If you need any significant mesh deformation you would need to change the mesh itself to one that has the damage already modeled on it. But it’s worth keeping in mind that changing a mesh could mess with your currently playing animations and/or any cloth physics simulations.
So it very much needs cooperation between your modeling/painting software and unreal.