Ponytail physics Tutorial in Unreal Engine 4

today i'm going to show you guys how to have a character with some physics-based ponytails in unreal engine let's get started okay so the first thing you're going to want is a rigged hair so here we're using the example of a ponytail and you can see all the bones control everything without these bones this will not work okay so let's say this is your player character we're going to go to edit blueprint but before you do anything go to your mesh double click it open up the skeleton and you need to add a socket this is what's going to hold the ponytail in place so go to head right click add socket and save now going back to your third person character blueprint here you're going to uh add a skeletal mesh make sure that it is a um a child of your character i'm just going to call it ponytail and here's where the mesh is gonna go but not quite yet so first we're gonna go ahead and import it so we're gonna import it do not select a skeleton i use to as reference pose um sometimes that causes issues but most of the time it fixes issues okay now this is a big problem you can see i've only got two bones listed and if you try to simulate this it's just a mess but i figured out how to fix this so uh go up here to options and show all bones now hopefully you named your bones better than i did but this is just for an example so i'm gonna go ahead and delete these and we're gonna start from scratch so bone two is the base bone where we don't want movement and basically from this bone onward is where i want them actually from here because keeping this solid will make the the physics behave a lot better trust me i've done this so selecting this entire chain right click and add or replace bodies there we go now this is a little tedious as you can see these are rotated the wrong way but they do function you can see there they are for the most part working now what we have to do is go in here and rotate each bone to the correct direction okay now with all of these collision capsules selected we're going to go down here to the constraints select all the constraints down here and then click to skeletal what this will do and this is important to know is it changes the angular limits specifically your twist motion to 15 which prevents your ponytail from just kind of spinning around and collapsing within itself and breaking which is not what you want so i know that the whole other mesh went through the floor but the ponytail itself is behaving the way we want now the last thing we want to do is once again with all of these selected go up here to physics and change default to simulated uh there's two ways to simulate physics this is the easy one let's go ahead and reopen our character blueprint now if we go back to ponytail go down here and select the hair i have to resize mine because i had issues uh while your charac while you're trying to do this it can be really annoying uh but select your character and uh pause anims that prevents your character from doing his idol movement while you're trying to place the hair uh before you do this though because you're gonna have to redo it if you don't go to parent socket and you're gonna attach it to the head socket we created earlier if you do not do it that way you're gonna have to do what i just did where you have to put it back now this is where it's just going to line up to your character however it needs to be i'd recommend turning off uh snapping to 10 units just to make it easier and we'll just stick that on just to have that there and nothing's happening right okay now here's where this gets a little stupid and wonky but let's go back to the character and unpause the animations which will not work in game either so make sure you do that now with your ponytail selected you're going to have to go down here to collision and you see here it's set to no collision which is why when i simulate nothing happens so i would i usually set it to ragdoll that is a pretty good whoops never mind now before before you finalize this i i made a mistake now i know that the chain starts here you actually want to go to the bone before it starts and um add or replace the body just add something it doesn't even matter um i would put it up here so it's not colliding and make sure this is set to default this is sort of what's going to anchor your physics in place and i'll show you in a moment okay so now going to your character if you hit simulate this happens the reason this is happening is because it's colliding with your actual character capsule so what we're going to do is selecting the capsule go down to collision presets and set it to ignore only pawn and now it's working but it's clipping through your character so one more thing we got to do like i said this is stupid now in your character mesh go down to collision presets just set it to custom it'll keep all the same settings but here query only set it to no query collisions and now it should okay that one didn't work so query and physics is that the one okay here's what's going on so i have it set to ragdoll but you can see it's ignoring the pawn so if we hit it to block there we go okay so you can see it's twisting a little bit but it would twist all the way around if we hadn't changed the settings to what they were so with that and there we go bam behaving the way that we want we got a ponytail uh i made this tutorial because it took me about a year to properly learn this um there's just not a lot of information about it i hope this helps you guys and um yeah go go make some ponytails and and hanging bits off your characters and have a great time and don't forget to subscribe for more tutorials

Channel: Ink Ribbon Tutorials

Views: 8,389

Keywords: ink, ribbon, blender, tutorial, how to, unreal, model, unreal engine 4, unreal engine, physics, unreal engine 4 tutorial, unreal engine 4 tutorial beginner, unreal engine 4 physics movement, unreal engine 4 physical component, unreal engine 4 physical animations, unreal engine 4 active ragdoll tutorial, unreal engine physics tool, unreal engine tutorial, engine, blueprints unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4 games, unreal engine 4 active ragdoll, physics engine

Id: T5pCaj0trAQ

Length: 7min 14sec (434 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DarthJandis]

Thank you for sharing!

[u/tijmen_dejong]

MAD RESPECT, you still figured this out, like so much options so many wrong options

[u/cybereality]

Thanks for the tutorial. But the opening scene with a bunch of robot dudes with ponytails, totally giving me an Aphex Twin kind of vibe. LOL.