Opening door animation

This seems like a real noob question considering how far along my project is, but I’m wondering what most people use for animating a door swinging open and close.

Currently I’m just using a static mesh actor, and just updating it’s rotation when the player interacts with it. This was just placeholder, and looks like the door just instantly opens.

Do people tend to use matinee for things like this, or some other method?

Matinee if I needed it

A while back I wrote an Actor derived class with a SkeletalMeshComponent, Open/Close states and then simply playing animations. This is pretty similar to your placeholder approach. Instead of opening instantly you could slowly rotate the door (interpolate between closed and opened rotations) over some time span.
Kismet/Matinee could be problematic if you need many doors and possibly with multiplayer or dynamically spawned instances (but if that doesn’t apply for you, could be the quickest way to get results).

The easiest node to use is MoveComponentTo

Create an Open and Close custom event.

On Open, rotate the static mesh some degree and then on Close rotate it back to 0.

You could also use a timeline instead and attach it to setActorRotation. Using the reverse feature of the timeline allows a more fluid movement from the door’s current position.

Sorry! My post won’t work for you. I didn’t realize this was Unreal Engine 3/UDK area, I got here from searching the forums and noticed the question. Thought it was UE4.

You can use Matinee and Kismet though. This should be helpful: UDK | KismetExamples

Thanks for the help guys.

I’m sure you’ve already figured this out, but just in case, you need to change your static mesh to an InterpActor before Matinee will move it.

Thanks for the heads up @Nathaniel3W. I actually hadn’t figured that out :slight_smile:

You can also use a physics constraint

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Above setup swings the door on approach. You only need a Physics Constraint and the Door (ignore the boolean variables).

HEy unit23. I cannot understand what is frame object. I just have my doors and physics contraint. Have no clue how to set it and what about that FRAME entry there?

Come on guys, I consider to be prop/environment artist and gameplay is not of my concern. Is there any link to setting blueprint class door that will open on key press and close, so that I dont spend half of my lifetime reading through all the google results, and entire unreal documentation. Just to copy pasta bloody door functioning and done

My plan (not done yet):

Using a simple staticmesh, because the map is big and there are a lot of doors. So, no tick event, just a static actor with a maxdradistance.

Detect when the player or bots touch the door using the hitwall event (the door has a tag to identify).

Passing the control to a gameinfo function that rotates the door in every tick until the rotation desired. Perhaps using physics instead.

I’m using skeletal mesh components that play animations synchronously with the player’s pawn.

I’ve tried using a skeletal mesh for doors, but i can’t seem to get them to collide with the player (allowing players to walk straight through them).

i Know thats old but i tried the same as and i i have the same problem