Help me understand physics assets

Development Character & Animation
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1

Can someone help me understand physics assets a bit more? I’ve been searching for tutorials but so far haven’t been able to find anything that really goes into depth on physics assets. Most tutorials just brush over it

I have my character imported and created a modular character so that I can change his clothes, hair, shoes, etc. Everything is working good so far I’m just a bit confused on using physics assets. Unreal automatically created physics assets for each of the modular parts.

What I’m confused on is what do I need them for? My biggest concern is the hair since I’m using alembic hair I made in Xgen. I obviously don’t want the hair to clip through my character so I understand have physics assets on the hair itself. But do I need capsules on each of my characters bones? Also all the capsules are way too large for pretty much everything. I’ve been resizing everything manually which is very tedious. I made sure everything was the correct scale before importing yet the capsules don’t really match the bones.

I’m just kinda stuck on what does and doesn’t need physics asset capsules. How to use them properly, etc. Just really don’t know what I’m doing regarding physics assets

2

The capsules are only needed if you are going to do something with them. For instance, if you turn on physics (ie. set simulate physics to true) on the character, the character will become a ragdoll, and those capsules are used to calculate how the character falls down and interacts with itself or the environment.

They are also used for hair and cloth physics. For example, the capsules tell the hair physics system where the hair shouldn’t pass through. I believe you don’t need a physics asset for the hair or clothing if they are separate pieces, since you paint those to tell them how to interact with the capsules on the body. I would think that those capsules would push the hair out in a weird way. I’m not 100% sure about this though since I’ve never made a modular character in Unreal.

Here’s a good example video about cloth physics: