Collision between a blue print's particles and it's skeletal mesh's physics asset

Development World Creation
1

My goal is to put together a blueprint of a treasure chest, the kind you would find in an aquarium. Every few seconds, the lid to the chest will open, revealing the gold inside, bubbles will spew forth and float up, and after a few moments the lid will close again, sealing off any further bubble activity.

So far, the blueprint consists of a skeletal mesh of the treasure chest, paired with an opening/closing animation, along with a particle effect for bubbles. I’ve also setup the physical bodies for the chest; a cube for the box of the chest, and multiple cubes making up the concave shape of the treasure chest lid.

Now, what I would like to have is for the bubbles’ emission to be set to constant, and have the physics of the lid I’ve set up contain them all, until the lid pops open. Once the lid is open, the particles would be free to float away.

Maybe this would be pretty resource intensive though? My original goal was to have the bubbles actually force the lid open, once enough had collected. I’ve found the physics simulation in UE4 a bit too touchy to pull that off reliably, though, so I just resorted to animating the opening and closing of the lid manually.

Anyway, none of that matters, because I can’t figure out how to get a blue print’s particles to interact with the physics bodies associated with the blue print’s skeletal mesh component.

Is that even possible?

I realize I could probably key the bubble effect to my liking, and that’s where I’ll probably end up, if I can’t get this to work. Just feels like cheating that way, though, ya know?

If anybody could point me in the right direction towards getting this to work, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a bunch!

2

Well, youd have to closely regulate the lifetime of the spawned particles but with the right optimizations i can see it being workable.

That said what exactly is the problem? Is the off-the-top-of-my-head solution of (1) going with a static mesh emmiter effect, (2) setting collision for the spawned mesh to true, (3) adding a constant upward acceleration to each mesh, running into some unforseen snags?

And as an aside, going the physics route is asking for trouble. Just hard code parameters to cheat physics like its the 1999 lol. Basically, if the bubble spawn rate and chest opening pressure are constant, the chest opening interval would likewise be constant. Unless you have some weird gameplay scenarios that affects either. And even then you can just use variables and some math operations to cheat the physics and add variable opening intervals to your chest actor.

Good luck!