Are these all of the current ways to attach one mesh to another?

I’ve been having a hell of a time trying to get attachment to work the way I want, and everything I try seems to have issues. I’ll list them all here so others don’t have to go through the same Hell I did.

It may well be I’m doing something wrong, so please chime in if you have any tips / disagreements. Seems excessively hard for something that should be a core function?


1. Straight parenting (ie, AttachParent = MyMesh)

  • Produces a nice rigid attachment
  • Doesn’t work if you simulate physics, which means you can’t get Hit events
  • If the object collides with a physics object, the other object goes flying.
  • Seems reliable
  • Replicates well

2. Physics Constraint

  • Allows physics to work, so you can get Hit events
  • Often not rigid, so you get wobbles. Can be sensitive to mass scaling
  • Seems to provide good physics interaction (ie, other objects don’t go flying)
  • I’ve had issues with replication becoming excessively jittery

3. Welding

  • Produces a rigid attachment

  • Allows physics to work, although there are issues (see below)

  • Mass and center of mass move, seemingly independent of the mass of the attached object. This can be corrected via direct PhysX calls only.

  • Different collision settings on different components like Overlap or Block don’t seem to work, at least not for me.

  • It produced a bug where deleting Actor B caused a welded component on Actor A to detach and have it’s physics reset. The Actors are not related in any way, with no obvious references to each other.

  • Replicates well

  • Not sure how it works with skeletal meshes and other more dynamic content


Have I missed anything? Does anyone have any tips or other options I’ve missed?

Make your own custom attachment system. Set component position on tick, whey way you want, for example basing on socket position. Also why you need replication on something visual, can clients deal with it?