Building Procedurally Destructible Car

The project itself is actually my graduation work for DAE. I researched different ways on how to do procedural deformation and finally settled with a system I put in place myself. The system works as following:

UE4 has a skeletal mesh system which allows the user to import rigged objects using fbx files. These objects can be given physics and can be simulated like a ragdoll. What I’ve done is I’ve taken a skeletal mesh and I’ve given it very high damping. This renders the rigged object inanimate, except when another physics object collides with it with a certain speed and mass (and thus force).

Problem is that the skinned object does not fall to the ground and has no other physics than the deformation. So I looked for a way to make it simulate in a local space. I achieved this by taking the same mesh, unskinned, and setting it as a simple static mesh. I give this static mesh physics like a normal static mesh, so it falls to the ground and behaves like you would just set “simulate physics” to true.