Like most everyone else in the known universe, I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout 4 lately. Fallout 4’s weapons have a tendency to sever limbs and heads. While not realistic, it’s kind of satisfying in a morbid & grotesque way.
I’ve seen many requests for a tutorial on how to do achieve this dismemberment in UE4. Back in UDK/UE3, there was a “BoneBreak” functionality that made doing this easy. That functionality is still in the engine in UE4, so achieving this affect is really quite easy, but there’s a catch: You can’t do it with only Blueprint. For some reason, the skeletal mesh BreakConstraint function (same as the old “BoneBreak”) isn’t made available to Blueprint.
It would be relatively trivial to write a plugin to expose the functionality to Blueprint, or to do a custom build of the engine that made BreakConstraints callable from Blueprint, but as of right now, you have to use at least a little C++ to make this effect work.
I’m hoping to record the tutorial using C++ over the Thanksgiving break here in the US so, with any luck ("lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise), it should be available by 11/29/2015.
I’ll probably also write a plugin to make this functionality available to Blueprint-only users and a corresponding Blueprint version of the tutorial, but no timeline on that yet.