Controlling Ragdoll

Hello Everyone, I’m thinking about potentially using the ragdoll effect when my player dies and with enemies, but I want to control the areas where that can happen on the body. My goal is to allow the player to “break” portions of the body such as arms from the elbow and the shoulder and control how they fall so that there is no unrealistic bending. Is this possible?

Thanks!

It is possible, I’ve been working on something like that. One solution that I found is with modular characters. I have a system of characters that are already broken into parts and each part can ‘ragdoll’ on it’s own. Each part has a complete skeleton that is a slave to one master skeleton until the character dies. So, for instance, I have a mesh that is an arm, but that arm has a complete Epic skeleton. That Arm Epic skeleton is the slave to a head mesh that also has a complete Epic skeleton. The arm therefore is a part of the head and follows all actions and animations applied to the head and is positioned in the exact same spot as if it were an arm part of that body. When the character dies the Master/Slave relationship is broken and the various parts do whatever they need to do when they ragdoll. You could also place a particle system inside your character, destroy your entire character, and then have the particle system fire out the various body parts. That might be simpler but I’m not sure if you could use a skeletal mesh with that. But then again if you broke your character down into small enough chunks you wouldn’t need the ragdoll effect anyway.