Is there a shrinking limit for collisions?

Development World Creation
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1

Hi,

I am trying to shrink my 1rst person character (setting the scale to 0.01) but there seems to be a limit to how close i can get to the ground.

No matter how small i decide to be, my point of view still remains a few tenth of cms above the ground.

I am new to ue4, so did i miss a hidden component whose collisions i should modify, or is there a ue4 limit to collision shrinking ?

Thanks

Cedric

2

I don’t know about any fundamental limit, but I guess there could be one. I couldn’t make the Z on my tiles 0 for instance, so there may be some deeper mechanics at play.

You can try this though. To modify the floor’s collision boxes you will have to open the floor assets up, click the button to make collision visible, and then try out the various collision settings.

Also make sure your player’s collision box isn’t also limiting you somehow.

3

Thanks for you answer.

I am using a per poly collision on a static mesh (so i have no collision primitive defined) and i get the same results with a bsp floor.

It’s not related to dynamically changing the scale, i get the same behavior when modifiying it before playing.

I tried to change my scale both by changing the character overall scale and by changing the capsule height/radius, same.

I tried to enable/disable “simulate physics” and get different but still unsatisfying results:

  • without simulate physics: no change under a few tenth of cms
  • with simulate physics: when too small, i fall through the mesh/floor (even with blocking collisions enabled) so i can’t check my character’s height. So there seems to be a minimum size required to interact with the polys.

It is still not clear in my head how the character/capsule/mesh/pawn are related and manage their respective collisions with the environnement (what are the priorities and so on), plus i don’t get the sim/no sim physics difference when it comes to collisions.

Not to mention the camera component, which is currently absent from my character (but i nonetheless sees the world !?), so maybe my “default invisible camera” has some volume of its own ?

Well, too many things i still don’t get, so i probably shoud take some time to make tests and reread docs, maybe the answer will come by itself with a better understanding of things.

Still, thanks a lot for your time and answer.

4

Until someone comes back with a solid answer for this issue, there may be a couple workarounds you could try.

You could scale all your other assets up until your character’s minimum height plays nice with the floor.

Or you could Instance the floor and instead use a collision volume that is slightly lower than floor level so the end result has your tiny guy running around on what appears to be the ground. Of course if he falls through the polys I don’t know what we can do there but make your floor collision volume have tons of Verts or something.

5

I was going for the first solution, but your second suggestion is very interesting as well, i didn’t think about it. Will try !

Thanks again !