I have a wrecking ball that has a timeline of it simply rocking back and forth. However, I want to add mass/force/etc. so when the player actor gets hit, it feels the force hitting it. I have it so the wrecking ball simulates my actors physics (ragdoll) when its health reaches 0 but when simulating physics for the ball, it acts very distorted and breaks the animation.
It sounds like you may not want to simulate physics on the ball itself. If you’re driving its movement through animation, then simulating physics on the object is going to conflict with what the animation is doing.
You may want to just generate hit events on the ball, and when it collides with something apply an impulse on the colliding body (in this case your character) based on the collision event.
I am a little new to the collision system of UE5, but when doing what you said, i get the error that the collision type is incompatible. I have simulate physics on for the actor, and no other collision preset seems to work and most just ragdoll the actor on start.
I know I added a collision component to the sphere but it seems to be a limited understanding of how collision works for the actor.