Killing Floor 2 has the best dismemberment/gore system by far.

No other game comes even close; how enemies react, segmented body parts depending where you shoot them, how dead bodies react, etc.

Is there an easy-to-set up system, but with scaled down features, for the Unreal Engine 4, while still offering the same visceral physicality?

Wrong forum?

42 minutes ago, Armantium said:

Wrong forum?

Probably not, because your asking about 3rd party tools. The thing is that what your looking for is already in Unreal.

Gore is a combo of 3D meshes, particles and decals; all of these are in engine. You will have to learn how to use these to make your gore.

Finding a already made core combo system is going to be real hard, you will have to hope there is some talented artist who got together and made one. 

My advice is this: Learn particles and decals, it's the easy part.

Buy this: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/generated-gore-dismemberment-kit It's good, using a shader to deal with the "hit". In short it just stops rendering those pixels and renders a second mesh there. It is actually better for performance than physics joints and easier to use.

Forget about realistic AI reaction and settle for something simple. Killing Floor 2 spend a huge amount on motion capture.

13 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

Buy this: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/generated-gore-dismemberment-kit It's good, using a shader to deal with the "hit". In short it just stops rendering those pixels and renders a second mesh there. It is actually better for performance than physics joints and easier to use.

That's more than enough when it comes to dismemberment, but how would you approach creating hit reactions? Just stagger animation up until it reaches dismemberment threshold? It has to be seamless.

Hit reactions? I believe most games do either:

• Motion captured animation (it is by far most realistic), they do it separately for dismemberment of hand/leg/...
• Rag-doll (if you kill the enemy, it has to fly around), same goes for dismembered part of his body

Being seamless is often achieved with as simple trick as animation blending and mixing the mentioned above. Also, adding particles and other effects just look good, and tends to hide imperfections.

If you would want something complex, Inverse Kinematics might be the topic you want to look into. I'm not sure of some ready-made solutions for this (they probably exist though), like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTBMnP6oCM

I have no idea whether such ready-made system exists for Unreal Engine. Writing it from scratch is not going to be easy (or cheap) in general - so I'd assume if it exists, it's going to be proprietary and quite pricey.

EDIT: The video is accompanying the paper - http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/tkomura/casa05.pdf - which is probably something what you're looking for.

Thanks, integrating rag-dolls would be sufficient then.

I don't currently have the means to introduce greater complexity, and certainly not motion-capture.

14 minutes ago, Armantium said:

Thanks, integrating rag-dolls would be sufficient then.

Rag dolls are perfect.

Just turn off the animations for the part that is hit and it's child and parent. Set there physics to control them and apply a force to it.

After the model "Shakes" turn on the animation for the model and let Lerp back to the standing animation.

The trick is to only use ragdoll on part of the body, this is easy to do in Unreal.