how to create collision between bones for a jellyfish type charater

[Mkraft857]

Hello,

I’m creating a very large jellyfish type character.
Its made up of joint chains like fingers radiating out from the center of the mesh.
With planes that connect the finger joints like webbing.

I was just going to use per poly collision, but it’s very performance heavy and doesn’t seem to trigger overlap events with other actors.

So I’m thinking now I might have to use spline meshes to connect the finger joints.
But I’m kind of stumped on the best way to populate them for for the space between each joint.

For example lets say i have 2 finger joint chains where the naming convention is:
Finger1_1, Finger1_2, Finger1_3,
Finger 2_1, Finger2_2, Finger2_3

so I would need a plane spline mesh where the 4 corners connect to finger1_1, finger1_2, finger2_1 and finger2_2 and so one for all the sections between the joints.

Where I’m stuck at is how to organize all the joint names so i can use a for loop to get the relative joints for each section.

What I think would work would be like a spreadsheet with rows and columns for the joint names
But I don’t really know of anything in UE that I can use to get entries relative to other entries in both rows and columns

I hope that makes sense.
Sorry if I’m missing something really obvious.

[Mkraft857]

Ok I figured out how to populate the spline meshes, but now I have a new problem.

I’m using get bone transform in actor space to get the start and end location and tangent and the distance to the next bone to set the scale x of the spline mesh, which works perfectly.

Then I’m breaking the bone transform and using the rotation pitch of the bone to set the spline mesh roll, which also works when the skeletal mesh is zero’d out and at bind pose, but as soon as I add in any movement, the roll of the spline mesh breaks.

I’ve tried using a seperate transform in parent bone space for the roll which is what I Imagined would have worked when I set out to build the rig, but no luck.

I’m sure the problem has something to do with the local space of the spline mesh, But I’m not really sure how to translate the pitch of the bone into the roll of the spline mesh (or what their relative rotations are in relation to one another)

I’ll attach the relevant BPs to help make things clearer.