Animating capsule question ...

[Etienne Andlau]

Hi everyone,

I am designing a new state machine for my third person game character.

I am thinking of including crawling and crouching.
I know this is a lot to chew on :-)

What I need to know are there nodes in BP that specifically animates the capsule (root) component?
I know about root motion.
Just wondering if I can for example not only offset the position of the capsule, scale it but also rotate it 90 degrees.
So that when the character lies down on the ground the capsule is lying down with him stretching the length of his body.
The idea is that the capsule would provide enough collision "coverage" so that the torso or feet wont go through walls if that makes sense.
If its only half height or smaller the capsule would be just a little ball size and wont really do anything more than prevent the character from falling through the ground.

Any pointers here would be greatly appreciated thank you.

[Etienne Andlau]

Well I found a few nodes that looks like they can basically make the capsule do anything. Pitch, yaw, etc.
Then I guess you have to follow along with the spring arm and follow camera too.

[Etienne Andlau]

Found a great demo someone did here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk2c...ature=youtu.be

[Adeptus]

I have also been experimenting with prone/crawl movement. Havent yet tried rotating the capsule component. Tho I think a few issues arise if you do that: Since movement component is a child object of capsue, all its vectors for whatever you are measuring will also be rotated 90 degrees and may no longer work as expected. Not sure that will really happen, but in my head, that seems like a plausible consequence.

Ive been trying to do this kind of stuff on and off every once in a while and still havent really found much useful stuff. Other than doing a custom collision for the character.
Heres what I can think of could work:

-Set the collision capsule to the correct height and position it around the pelvis area (where we will rotate from if we need to adjust to a wall)
-Create two line traces. One pointing back to the end of the charcter where his feets at. And one pointing to the front where his heads at.
-When the trace hits a wall, we do some trigonometric maths to adjust its rotation so that the line trace end point never stays inside a wall. (im sure there is a way to maybe use physics, or using something like an interpolator to soften iterator steps when it adjusts rotation.)
Problems I can think of:
-if both front and back traces hit something, we might need to introduce some sort of exception or priority to account for both walls.
-We would need some range at the start of the hit for the user to override adjustment direction. This is important when you crawl towards a wall at a perpendicular angle. Then the user might want to adjust in which direction the character is going to rotate into over what the collision angle is about to dictate.

Thats just an idea ive pulled out of my mind, not sure if it would be an efficient way of solving this, or if it would even work at all... will need testing.

In addition to that, using the physical animation component or some sort of full body IK system would also add to the realism, then you could make the collision traces and capsule a bit smaller even and have the Ik or physics deal with body part intersection with walls.

[Etienne Andlau]

O.k. great some great ideas there.
I was playing around with sockets and attaching "invisible" meshes to his body
to act as "bumpers" with their collision working but the attached meshes not seen by player.
I was wondering if this could also work.
But I don't know if you can attach invisible meshes with their collisions still working.
Then there are blocking volumes but I don't know if you can attach them to pawn with sockets.
Mmm ... a few things to play around with and figure out )