Hey all I’ve been in the process of trying to learn deeper ue4 concepts. The biggest problem by far is I’m self-taught/hobbyist. I don’t got lots of time maybe an hour before/after work and then friday is the only day I’m off. So anything really takes a while for me to learn as again; I don’t got much time. This coupled with the fact that the ue4 docs are minimal and outdated. Really makes learning this engine difficult and slow. Despite this I’ve still sat down every day for the past 3 years to learn this. Cause I really like the engine and hope to be a dev one day. I don’t got constant projects more just mini concepts I make, flesh-out, bug fix then add to my portfolio which is just a flashdrive. I only use bps, I plan on learning c++ eventually but I know nothing about it. With that in mind; I’d still take c++ solutions, now is a good a time as any to start learning.
Right now I’ve decided I’d like to take my understanding of the engine physics to the next level. For the past month I’ve been trying to make a simple physics based movement system for pawns. It’s my understanding the default movement doesn’t work with physics being simulated. Something something the engine can’t do it, idk. So I need to figured out have to make a custom pawn movement system and make it work with my pawns skeleton-mesh/physics-asset. This is my issue. I’ve made a simple slime character in blender, I figured this would be extremely easy to start as I really just want some simple jello physics as it slides across the ground. And by that I mean it jiggles from momentum, that’s it. Think tiddy physics I guess lmao. And then have the movement be controlled by a behavior tree while the engine default physics system holds it in place and jiggles it.
The issue is that there are absolutely 0 docs that explain setting up a physics asset. There are 0 docs that explain constraints, bodies, how they interact, skeleton meshes or really anything about setting up physics based movement. Now I know these docs exist but when the doc says “constraints are the constraints” or the only tutorials are live streams from over 5 years ago, it’s not too helpful. Despite this I’ve still managed to figure it out and setup a very simple physics asset for my slime’s skeleton mesh. The mesh in total has 9 bones/bodies, 1 to each corner of the mesh(which is just a cube) and then the root.
Ideally I’d use a simple ik-system asynchronously to tell which bones are touching the ground and make the front two slide forward and pull everything else. But I can’t even figure out how to simulate physics and keep the box collision connected. I can’t figure out how you even go about making an ik-system. And forget that; I can’t even make it move with completely unanimated physics. I’m literally talking just make it slide across the ground with the behavior tree. The problem is that even with custom pawn(floating movement) I can’t figure out how you keep the skeleton attached to the collision. The collision moves but the skeleton just stays in place.
From my googling it seems a possible solution is to add a bone to the root and make it kinetic. If I do this my body flys away at mach 10 and I don’t know enough to make it stay or figure out why it’s doing that. I have a bp that is just a character bp for it as well as that was my first attempt and it does move with physics being simulated… Except for some reason one of my bones is awkwardly raised above the others for unknown reasons.
At this point I’ve made countless threads on r/unrealengine, the answerhub, gamedev stackexchange and have gotten either 0 replys and the thread gets buried under all the others, or solutions that are pretty basic such as making sure my blender mesh is good and things like that. Which not to say I don’t appreciate those replys or anything but, my blender model and export/import settings are 100% perfect. More then anything; I’m searching for learning resources, tutorials, people much smarter then me and docs. Stuff that I can soak up and actually learn how to do “x”. So, after that long winded multi-paragraph essay I’ll keep this short if you don’t wanna read that far.
- PHAT Editor help would be much appreciated. I don’t have an entire understanding of it and many things are left out of the docs or just not well written/explained.
- Simulating physics while being able to move the pawns(ai, Behavior trees). It seems by default they(capsule/skeleton) dis-attach and reparenting them doesn’t fix this.
2.1. Custom pawn movement that can use physics if the above isn’t achievable. - How to tell bones to move a certain way and keep some in certain spots before it’s allowed to make another step(People don’t step with both feet at once). I imagine you’d write a bp function and call it repeatedly from the behavior tree?
Thanks for your time and literally any help being appreciated. I can absolutely chop out any picture of my code if you need it for help. I absolutely despise being stuck on a coding problem this long but at this point I’m thinking I may just stick with art cause this advanced stuff goes way over my head :/. Thanks again.