How to separate the head from the body

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Hi, I have an enemy in my game and I want to implement a feature that if I kill him, his head will fall off. What techniques would you use?

Should I pre-create a mesh of just the head and body without the head?

2

Hey there @Rumburak29! Generally you would want a separate head mesh to generate on the spot. The trickier part is handling the changing on the body mesh. Here’s a video that goes over this method of mechanic:

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Thanks for the link. I wanted to avoid Blender… :smiley:

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I understand! Though Unreal’s modeling toolkit isn’t quite as effective as a specialized tool built for modeling, while you can likely pull it off in engine alone, I’d recommend working in some time to practice Blender or another 3rd party 3D tool, as the skills and versatility are worth it!

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You’ll want to have 2 separate models, and call an attach component to component on begin play, using skektal mesh bones, on kill detach the head and hand it over to physics handle

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the way SupportiveEntity suggested is the by far quickest and easiest way to do it.

I’m not gonna say it isn’t possible without blender, it is.but it’s most certainly not easier.

You would for starters need a different physics asset for each limb (A physics asset tweaked to behave like the mesh has only that limb, ignoring all other limbs), then to separate the limb you would spawn another identical mesh and apply a custom material to it that uses an opacity mask to hide all of the mesh except the desired limb, and for the original mesh you would probably just use hide bone by name to make it disappear.

From there you’d have to make adjustments, like for example the spawned mesh will need to be in the exact same pose as the original mesh, which means you have to save the pose of the original mesh and load it for the new one when it is spawned so that the limb starts at the correct location.

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