Week 6 - Moving into Engine

After encountering the problem with the Rigid Body Simulation in Houdini and spending some time unsuccessfully trying to find a solution, I abandoned the idea, or rather left it as a stretch goal for the summative hand-in.
I then moved on to modelling a few assets for a small scene in Unreal.

1 - Swing Door and Sign
The first thing I worked on was modelling and setting up the Blueprint for a sign, that you can shoot of a wall. This was my first time working with physics constraints and after some fiddling with the parameters I got a decent result.
I added collision boxes to all the letters and on the upper corners of the sign and on overlap check, if it is the Player Projectile colliding.

Blueprint in action

I basically did almost the same for the swing door, only difference being the addition of an angular motor.

And it works ... mostly

2 - Chairs and table
Both door and sign where a pretty good warm up for moving to the table and chair. Both where a bit more complex, having more parts and being completely destructible.
I decided to build the in blueprint, rather than the destructible meshes, because of the issues I mentioned in the week 1 post and it gave me a bit more control. the downside was having to model all the pieces in 3DS Max, spending a lot of time fixing normals. However I managed in the end.

To simulate the destruction of those assets I again added collision boxes to check for collision with the projectile, but this time I had to figure out how to simulate physics, since for example the table legs consisted of multiple parts. I ended up parenting the meshes to the one above them, detaching the piece on impact and setting simulate physics to true.
I ended up taking out the ability to break the table top, it just felt a bit too dramatic...and unrealistic.

2.1 Table

2.2 Chair

Here is a clip of how it looks and works. I ended up replacing some chairs with static meshes, since a huge amount of BPs has an impact on performance.