Greetings,
Ive been learning UE4 and have been building a game where the player interacts with a spaceship. Entering and exiting the spaceship while it’s landed involves the ship door opening, and a ramp extending to the ground. I opted to make the ship a skeletal mesh, and built a simple armature to move the door and place the ramp.
the ship is basically a hollowed our sphere with door in it. I’m familiar with using complex as simple for static meshes, and have been able to import custom collisions using blender, but only for static meshes.
I’ve been able to use multiple convex hulls inside the physics asset editor in UE4 to adequately build collision for the door and ramp elements, but the ship exterior and interior itself is less perfect.
I’ve followed the advice in the docs and created a set of cube meshes that break the concave ship body into a set of smaller, simpler components, and named them using the UBX_… convention (tried UCX as well). None of it is working smoothly, and when I do get to the point of trying to swap the default capsule over the ship mesh root bone with collision from a static mesh, nothing happens - no errors, but no results either.
im looking for guidance on how to either specify a custom collision from a mesh or fbx for a portion of the model, namely the static portion. I’d also be open to the idea that a skeletal mesh for this type of actor is unnecessary.
thanks for any advice, I’ve searched a good bit and have been unable to sort out the way forward.
Build the collision directly within the PHAT asset.
Thanks for the quick reply -
I’ve spent a couple days trying to sort out how to do that. I attached a pic of the mesh - id love to build a few simple boxes to define the exterior, and interior of the ship, but I cant sort out even how to edit the vertices of the primitives. am I missing something? do I need to create a skeletal mesh in each wall or something in blender to facilitate the process? I’m using Blender for the 3d modeling.
Thanks for any more info you can provide.
You can’t edit the primitives, you just have to add different bodies to match your custom structure.
Sounds good, and thanks for the advice - I was able to build a workable collision using a bunch of boxes, with multi convex hulls on a couple objects where it worked. I cant imagine this is how people handle this though, there has to be a better way - specifically, a way to use an FBX as collision. Can you point me toward more resources? Youtube, blog posts, etc have very little info on this topic, and the UE4 docs are a little sparse too.
Being new to the forums, can you recommend a different/better place for me to post about this topic further?
Thanks again, I can at least move on with my project, and can come back to improve the collision once I sort out exactly how to do it!
I asked for an update on the ue4 docs about it a few months back. Unfortunately there was no such update.
I believe the collision is auto generated per-bone based on the mesh paint. However in testing i was unable to create shapes that actually worked.
Either way, short of managing it manually there really isn’t a viable solution for skeletal meshes.
you can break up the model to not be a skeletal mesh. So as to use custom collision, but thats about it.
Much obliged, this really helps. Given that I’m pretty new to this still, Its tough to sort out if you’re missing something obvious, or running into limitations based on design choices. I appreciate the context.