Hello,
I’m trying to build a spaceship with deformable meshes. To do this I made a mockup for a section of hull consisting out of 3 pieces (outer hull and the interior section, see screenshot). Each section has 9 bones in it and it all is connected to a root bone in the back. The spots on the last image are decals I’m spawning on the hit location.
What I would like to do now is find some way to connect multiple of such pieces together, to form a bigger structure (like a spaceship). My aim is to somewhat accurately show an impact with another object, deform the mesh and when passing a certain damage tress hold I want to be able to disconnect the damage piece and have it scatter/float off.
so far I’m mostly having 2 issues.
I can’t find a way to connect multiple pieces together. I want to have a spaceship blueprint that consisists of multiple of such pieces. It needs to be able to move around and collide with other ships and objects.
So far I’ve tried using a skeletal mesh as a backbone to my ship. I then spawned the ship sections on the correct bone locations and attach them. As soon as I simulate physics on a section however, it automatically detach themselves so that doesn’t work.
Next I tried out Physics constraints, but this doesn’t seem to work either. When I constraint multiple simulated static meshes together and have the “parent” move around it all works fine as I would expect. When I use one of my skeletal meshes however it stops working. The exception being that it works fine if i don’t simulate physics, or when I have collision detection disabled or set to query only. I however need the hit event, which only works when simulating physics collisions.
I apply impact damage to my hull section. when it reaches 0 health I want the different pieces (top and bottom hull and the mid section) to disconnect from eachother and go their own separate ways. Is there some way to break apart
a bone chain? So far all I’ve found is something about removing the constraints from the physics asset, but this doesn’t seem to give me the result I’m looking for.
Alternatively I’ve tried to import the section as it’s individual pieces (so tophull, mid section and bottom hull) and add them together in a blueprint. This still gives me the same problem as I dexcribed at (1.) however in that I need to keep them together in some way until I want to disconnect them manually myself.
Here’s a screenshot of the mesh and its components in 3dsmax.
