Options for bending a fishing rod.

I am learning Unreal and so thought I would make something from real life that I enjoy…fishing.

I’m finding some bits of it quite difficult and my solutions not very satisfactory.

I would like to have the rod bend when a force is applied to the line. aka when a fish has been hooked.

To do this, I have created a skeletal mesh and rigged it for the rod, created an at rest animation and a max bent rod animation and an animation blend between the two, and then finally introduced a variable that allows me to control the “force” being applied to the rod that determines how much the rod is currently bending.

It all works, but the animation looks terrible, the mesh is bent into a number of straight lines along the bones and then an angle at the joint.

Is there a better way to get a smoother bend in the rod?

Do you have some pictures of what you’re seeing?

It sounds like the weighting on the mesh needs to be smoothed out.

A Spline + Spline Mesh Component could work well here for something simple. You’d need to do the rod bending math.


A more fleshed out version could revolve around physics constraints. The visualisation can come on top of that in the form of a spline. Depends on how realistic this needs to be.

And yet more nuanced effect could be achieved with the new experimental physics control plug-in. It’s quite the beast, though.

Thanks, I will have a look at the spline method, I did actually wonder if that would be an option.

I did start down a full physics solution, and looked into both the constraints and control components. I couldnt get the look I was after with either and they were really quite temperamental, I struggled to get components to move in a realistic way which is why I ended up going down the animation route.

I’m a little embarrassed to show you if I’m honest :slight_smile: I will see if I can get it looking a little more presentable this evening and then post it.