How to give player character custom collision?

[OkItsTheChris]

Hi everyone

Usually character BPs come with a capsule collision. That works for anything with a rough shape of the capsule, eg a standing human, a beach ball, etc.

But what do I do when my character is an animal that’s rather small and long or broad? In my case a capsule could cover either only less than necessary or too much collision space. And as a sad matter of fact I can’t rotate the capsule component.

I have looked things up on the internet, also one thread from here, where people said I would need to create my own pawn. But for some reason the BP class “Pawn” does not get a character movement component.

And adding my own collision boxes or even static meshes in addition to the capsule for some reason doesn’t help either, as if they’d had no collision at all.

Looking forward to your replies … in hope someone knows how to properly do what my player char needs.

Thank you,
Chris

[VisAgilis]

Hey @OkItsTheChris!

@OkItsTheChris

I can’t rotate the capsule component

Yep, it must always stay upright! You can only rotate it by constantly setting its rotation.

@OkItsTheChris

people said I would need to create my own pawn

No need!

@OkItsTheChris

But for some reason the BP class “Pawn” does not get a character movement component.

Yep!

So what you’ll wanna do is, navigate to the Components window on the top left, select the capsule component, then while having it selected, navigate to the Details window on the right side, and under the Collision section, set the Collision Presets to Custom, expand it, and under the Object Responses section, set Pawn to Ignore like this:

Then navigate back to the Components window, select Mesh, whie still having it selected, navigate to the Details window, and under Collision > Collision Presets > Object Responses, make sure that Pawn is set to Block.

---

Refer to this post of mine:

Collision settings for components

Hey @volumetrix! Collision settings of the parent doesn’t override the child’s. Here’s a nice example! You can have the capsule component of a character block everything except for the pawn class, and have the mesh block everything. That way, the player character (or any other pawn) still can’t phase through the character but can get inside its capsule component, while normally there’d be a big gap between the two meshes. Hope this answers your question

---

Hope this helps!

[OkItsTheChris]

As of at the time of posting this I was a bit frustrated already, so after posting I fiddled with the capsule more and got it to an acceptable scaling, then kind of forgot about the post.

Now, since I don’t need a custom collision for my char, what we do with the post?

[VisAgilis]

Hey @OkItsTheChris! It’s great to hear back from you

@OkItsTheChris

so after posting I fiddled with the capsule more and got it to an acceptable scaling

If you’re happy with it, you can leave it as it is of course. Though you can still try my suggestion out if you like and see how it works for you.

@OkItsTheChris

what we do with the post?

You can close the topic if you have no further questions. Feel free to let us know if you do tho if you were to experiment more with my suggestion. Btw I’d recommend having the capsule block pawns if it’s not gonna be too noticable anyway.