How would you create complex collisions for a skeletal mesh?

I have a skeletal mesh and I would like to have a collision that is more complicated (and diverse) than a bunch of capsules for gameplay purposes (not physics, but collision with projectiles). However, per poly-collison seems to be total overkill. In 4.14 I do not seem to be able to change capsules in favor of spheres or cubes and I do not seem to be able to add additional cubes, spheres and capsules on the physics body asset.
Am I missing some checkbox or workflow to do that?

I read that one could theoretically attach collisions to the bones or sockets. Is that a good idea?

Would it not be a good idea to enable users to add skinned low poly versions of the mesh for collision purposes?

Could I drive several (separate) meshes with the same skeleton at the same time (saving on the recomputation of the bones for each segment)?

Thanks for your replies, in advance!

We tried this idea way back in 4.1 > and for some reason at the time the line trace would only return the location of the capsule of a skeletal mesh object and not surface information so had to resort to using the physics rig. Out of the blue another project I’m working on started to detect surface information so a low poly collision mesh might be wort a try once again but in general it is the old school way of doing zone based collision.

You don’t need separate meshes but a single mesh broken down into independent material ID’s representing the required zones and sample for the material name, or maybe just the ID, and add it as the main character component of a character BP.

So, one thing I discovered in 4.14: When you delete the physics asset and recreate it, you get all sorts of options for generating the collision geometry, including automatic convex hull generation! This is great and pretty much exactly what I want, but one major issue remains:


As you can see in the attached screenshot, it is not possible to add or remove primitives from the array of collision meshes in PhAT. I believe this is a bug, because this seems to be the intended behavior based on the UI. How would I even report this as a bug if this is one?

Have you looked into the new physical animation component? Apparently that gives you the ability to make use of phat capsules on a per bone basis and have your animated character collide dynamically.
Not sure if this is what it would be used for, but putting out the name anyway.