I’ve been fighting with this for a long time and am unable to find a solution. I am new to using the physics asset tool and new to working with skeletal meshes in the engine. I have attempted to follow Epic’s tutorials but to no avail. I am working with blender (2.78) to create my meshes and skeleton rigs. In my opinion, the rigging, be it primitive, is solid. I am able to bring the skeletal mesh into the engine with no problems. I am also able to manipulate the skeleton from inside of Unreal, and the mesh deforms as it should with no issues. Animations also seem to work fine with me skeletal mesh.
The problem comes in when making a physics asset of the mesh. To make one, I right click the skeletal mesh in the content browser and create a physics asset, assigning default values for the asset tool to work with in generating the asset itself. To simplify what I am experiencing with my character model, I created a “noodle” model to test the asset tool and see if I was doing anything wrong or if something was wrong with my (more complex) character rigging.
Below is a view of the noodle asset inside of the physics asset editor. The mesh has a simple skeleton that consists of six bones that run in a straight line through the mesh, like a spine. Below is a screenshot of what the automatically generated physics asset looks like.
Upon hitting simulate, it flops around like a noodle; as expected.
If I delete one of the collision bodies (in this case, from bone_005), then the physics still simulate as they should, minus the joint bending between bones 004 and 005. I run into problems when I do this with my character model. The result I get upon hitting the simulate button will be described later.
Back to the noodle model, if I go to add a collision body back to that bone by right clicking the bone name in the hierarchy > new body > and I leave the default values for generating a new sphyl, then everything appears to look as is does in the first image of this post. This, however, creates the problem my character model is having when I try to remove or add a body to any bone. Upon hitting simulate and expecting the noodle or character to flop on the ground, I need to take a lot of screenshots very quickly to show you how they explode like this:
Looking at my models as they fly away into the nothing, I can describe what is happening to the new bodies that I’m adding, or adjacent bodies to the one(s) that I remove; the bone(s) seem to shoot out a fixed distance away from the rest of the mesh. If I simulate only bone_005 on the noodle mesh, then you can see how this looks. After launching away from the mesh and remaining at a fixed distance from the mesh, the bone does not move in any way except for rotating on its joint. As I tested with my character model, the bone is impossible to move closer to where it should be and will manipulate the rest of the skeleton as if it were attached the way it should be.
I’ve tried seemingly everything; that “trick” of exporting the mesh with a scale modifier of 10 and importing it with a scale modifier of 0.1, I have applied scale and rotations to the mesh and armature from in blender, I’ve tried removing morph targets from the character model, turning all self-collision off on the physics asset, exporting with/without leaf bones, exporting with/without deform bones only… I have no idea what the problem is…
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
