Is there a smart way to make a robot with destructible limbs for a skeletons? My initial thought is that you just make a bunch of sockets for the skeletal mesh and then attach the individual pieces of the mesh that would get destroyed. Is this efficient? Is it too taxing on the machine to have a lot of sockets on a skeletal mesh? Is there a better way?
simplest way I can think of is to have a static mesh version of the limbs which can detach.
also have an invisible material which can be assigned per limb.
then if you want to destroy the arm, you assign the invisible material to the skeletal mesh arm, spawn the static mesh arm and enable physics so it drops to floor.
You mask the transition with particle effect and reaction animation. It happens so fast nobody can see the magic trick.
I haven’t done this with skeletal mesh so there could be some little caveat that causes an issue but the basic theory has worked from simple destruction of static meshes.
The main benefit of this system is that its pretty stupid simple and doesn’t require you to change anything about how the skeletal mesh is authored.