Procedural SkeletalMesh Slicing has been made!

First, I must say Hello there mighty devs (1st time posting in the forum I also have little experience for now with UE4)

So, I was having a great time experimenting with the sliceable procedural meshes and all that but I missed this feature with the skeletal meshes of course in the livestream training they say in the Q&A section Ian said that is not supported yet so I was like whatever i guess we have to wait.

Until! I was bored and searched on Instagram #unrealengine and discovered this amazing guy named phenycks it seems from his videos he tried to pull this out since the feature was available and he actually did it look at the video he posted folks: VIDEO

After watching this like 7 times because I could not believe it I read in the comments some people asked for the source code but obviously, he won’t share that hard work just like that. But he actually said how he did it without showing the code, here are some of his comments on this

“I replace sliced bones by procedural meshes, then rebuild the bone tree” “Replace cut bone by procedural mesh slice and attach it to the bone root, key is extrapolating bone verts/tris etc” “I had to fake it a bit with Procedural Meshes composed from bones, so technically it’s still the same slice code”

Here is one of his comments where he says a little bit more: “Nice! I guess its creating a static mesh from the skeletal mesh, slicing it, then reparenting to skeleton?” … “Switch that for ProceduralMeshComponent and you’re right :)”

So, lets resume this, He takes a skeletal mesh to a static one then he would make a procedural one from that (I already did this and it slices well) and then “reparenting to skeletal” this is where I don’t know what that means, maybe it’s a stupid little thing but I have little experience with UE4 sorry for being a noob.

So, seeing all this is there someone with more experience who can reveal the mystery with this info? Thank you I will post here if I discover something new, see ya.

Hi there, nice collection of info there.

I am actually currently working to solve that issue too. But I wasn’t able to find an option to convert the skeletal mesh to a static mesh at run-time in BP. Do you know how to do that? Is it even possible? Because then I would convert the mesh, as soon as the enemy got hit, then I would save the hit direction and convert it to the normal for the cut plane. At least this would be my approach to a work around. Of course it would be nice if the sliced parts could have some sort of rag doll effect, but since my enemies dispose quickly after dying, it wouldn’t be necessary in my case.

Or have you been able to make some progress on that topic?

Any news since then? Did somebody continue implementing the slice on skeletal mesh bones?

Any news? Does anyone have some tutorials?

Here to follow all the slicing process:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?145155-testing-SLICE-and-CUT-meshes-and-skeletal-meshes

this would work with the manekin, but would nt work with a skinned mesh… unless he also rebuilds the skin weights. It s doable in C++, but I have doubts on that with blueprints. Copy procedural mesh creates a collision mesh, and a static mesh. Reparenting in to the bone structure is not really difficult, but repairing the skin … mmm

Does anyone know how to copy a skeletal mesh to a procedural mesh? I’ve managed to get the Vert locations and normals in C++ but I can’t find the triangles.

Hi, now you can check this out on the Marketplace! :slight_smile:

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