[QUESTION] How do you properly resize a dinosaur? They keep floating ;)

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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Hi there! Quick question for you - probably pretty easy to answer.

How do you properly resize a dinosaur so it doesn’t float in the air when spawned?

Currently, when resizing the skeletal mesh OR resizing via the character blueprint, the dinosaur spawns and then walks around in the air. If they by some miracle touch the ground, then they connect and behave normally, but I’d rather not have an Ark full of anti-gravity dinosaurs. :smiley:

I’ve tried resizing the collision component, but to no avail. No matter how accurate I get it, it still doesn’t want to work right.

Are there any tutorials on this or can someone explain it to me?

Help much, much appreciated!
An example of the problem is attached.

Cheers.

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Ark Modding Tutorials - ARK: Survival Evolved - Unreal Engine Forums doesn’t list anything to do with Dinosaurs, you could leave a suggestion here, there are people who have done and made Dinosaur mods, so someone will know and you should probably have a look at discord.

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Thanks!! Hopefully I can get some help with this. Appreciate it.

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Can’t say this would be a side effect or not, but scaling will pull back to the centre of the pivot point.

I don’t know where that is on creatures… I don’t really work on them other than when I’ve mocked things up in their graphs for testing things, but if it’s in the overall centre of the mesh, then scaling would pull everything up and away from the “ground”.

If the pivot is more or less at the bottom of the mesh, then this probably won’t be the cause, but it’s possible that you may need to move the mesh down until the feet touch the “ground”. All I can suggest is to experiment with moving the mesh (and capsule for that matter) down until they’re closer to the ground and keep going back and forth until you get the desired effect.

But, as I said, if the pivot is not at the centre and is at the base, this likely will have no effect.

-WM

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@WoefulMacabre in the BASE BP of the dino, the one with the link to the mesh, do you know if it has a “position” option like structures? Cause that could be his issue, if he’s shrunk the mesh by 5%, and the BASE BP says it’s at origin +/- z it will float or sink.

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All actors have a position, rotation and scale… well any mesh in an actor and probably really any “component”. That is essentially what I said though, if the pivot is at the centre, scaling the mesh and capsule to be smaller will pull everything to the pivot - as is expected to happen - and may very well require moving the mesh and capsule down to meet the ground as it’s local z-offset would be different and technically incorrect in regards to the meshes now-new local location.

-WM

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So basically, I just need to tinker with the meshes Z offset to the collision capsule until I get it right?

I did notice that some dinosaurs scale and work without any adjustments to the collision capsule. Raptors can be scaled to any size, apparently.