My problem:
I have an animated character (SkeletalMeshComponent). I want to be able to slice it in half and have both parts fall as separate ragdolls. I don’t want the slicing to be pre-made in the mesh. It has to be procedural (yes, like Metal Gear Rising)
My vague solution:
I want to more or less follow this plan:
- Prior to cutting, save all bones, vertex, skinning, material, ragdoll colliders info
- Procedurally generate two new meshes that represent the two halves of the original mesh (based on the saved vertex positions and material)
- Generate two new separate rigs that represent the bones that were originally assigned to the two new mesh parts before they were cut
- Re-apply skinning information
- Regenerate ragdoll colliders
- Apply ragdoll
Result: I swing my sword at someone who is running at me and it should slice them in half, and both parts should be falling to the ground in ragdoll :eek:
My Questions:
- Can procedural meshes be skinned at runtime? Can they even be animated at all (using ragdoll)?
- If ProceduralMeshComponent cannot be skinned, is there a way to generate a procedural skeletal mesh?
- How are bones represented in UE4? I’ve seen methods for retrieving bone names and indexes in SkeletalMeshComponent, but how do I access a bone’s information, like the associated vertex skinning data?
- How can I manually create a new bone at runtime and set its skinning info? Or is skinning info assigned to vertices?