No collisions when bone set to kinematic

Hey all.
I am working on an animated forklift and I am trying to get the collisions on the fork to work properly.

Obviously the fork needs to be able to pick things up from the floor and will need to make the vehicle stop when hitting a wall. When I leave the bone physics type of the forks at default, the collisions with walls etc work but the animations however stop working.
When I set it to Kinematic, it’s the other way around; the collision boxes stop working but will move with the working animations.

Does anybody know how I could fix this? Or is there maybe another way to do this?

You can create your blueprint with two static meshes, one for the forklift body and another for the forks. You can then change the relative z of the forks to pick up stuff without animating it.

Hey and thanks for the quick reply. That would be a simple sollution indeed but this truck is a skeletal mesh which makes use of complex animations. For exemple, animated chains, multiple extending mast parts etc. Since this project is going to be a game with details as deep as a simulator, everything has to practically work the same as in reallife. In other words, i can’t really drop the animations :(.

Edit: Extra info:
I had come up with another sollution to this attaching an invisible fork static mesh to a mesh socket of the animated forkbone. That gave me the possibility to pick stuff up from the floor but does not stop the fork from going through the walls.

I would go down the route of not using skeletal mesh’s and just use mesh’s linked by physics constraints etc

Hey Lunar,

Have you found a solution for this problem yet, with animations?
I’m having the exact same problem…
There has to be a way to get it working with animations?
Or did you use alperenakyuz’s advice?

Hey JGI-,
I ended up seperating the fork from the truck and used blendspaces as a way to move the fork up/down/left/right. The fork was a static mesh I attached to one of the bones of the skeleton of the truck. By converting one of these bones to a socket, I could give the fork a collidable mesh without stopping the animations. There was still no way to have the forks collide with the wall however.

I spoke to somoene from Epic about it a few days ago and basically there isn’t really an “airtight” sollution for this. What i did in the end was putting up a line trace from the tip of the fork (and at the sides) and measure the distance to my wallblueprint. If the distance would reach a certain threshold, while pushing “forward”, I would just simply make the truck stop. This can also be used for collision with other objects ofc. Since you have to do these traces in every direction this can get a bit heavy on the engine so I was advised to not have the traces fire on every frame but rather once every second. I hope it helps.

Have you tried to use the “Simple” physics type, instead of “Kinematic”? (Kinematic does not work, just try the “Simple” type instead)