I took some screenshots of our BP setup that I hope will answer some questions.
The first and main thing to do, in our case, was to leave the Destructible Component’s Destructible Mesh asset null:
Leaving that null removes the default hard reference to the destructible mesh asset, which in our case was the reference that was being loaded prior to the Apex module being ready.
Next, we created a soft reference variable (of type ‘Destructible Mesh’), which we use to choose the destructible asset we want to load in during runtime:
We tie the soft object reference variable to the destructible component in the BP graph, loading and assigning the desired destructible mesh at runtime (at BeginPlay in our case, but you can choose to make the call to Load Asset whenever you like):
Finally, we assign the proper materials to the destructible component neatly calling a custom BP function, which looks like this:
Hope this clears some things up, but if not, let me know and I’ll try again to help!