How would I go about making a vehicle ride cinematic?

In this, you would be the PASSENGER in the seat, while in the other seat would be the driver, an NPC.

How would I go about making the vehicle go along a certain path and matching up animations for turns to the npc character?

Any good way to make a looping background so I wouldn’t have to have the drive go through the entire map? Just giving the illusion of far-traveling?

Do you know how to animate a cinematic in general, using Matinee or Sequencer?

If so, what is the specific thing you’re having problems with?

I know how to set up and animate skeletal meshes/ complex cutscenes with sequencer

I just wanna know how I should go about making sure the car wobbles realistically, or the npc turns his wheel with the turning of the car?

Depends a bit on how extreme you are. And how long the scene is. For a short scene the cheap and quick solution is to just animate the steering wheel manually and making a custom “Camera shake” instead of letting the car wobble. If you are extreme you could make custom functions to simulate the car wobbling and steering wheel turning - but imho it’s only worth spending the time if you can re-use tehse functions A LOT.

One way of doing this is to build NPC / AI behaviors that know how to “move a car along a navigation path” and “turn the wheel with the hands based on the car steering.”
Then, what you animate, is not the exact movement of the hands and wheels and car, but the AI destination parameters used for pathfinding/movement.
This will generally make it much easier to build longer cut scenes, but it requires that you make your AI behaviors and AI animations look realistic. (Which is generally useful even for non-cutscene AI :slight_smile:

How would this be done? This seems incredibly difficult.

My vehicle ride cinematic is only 1 part of the entire game, though.

Question, how should I go about simulating long distance travel? My map is not big enough for a 10 minute car riding scene, but I need it to be 10 minutes long, how would I make a believeable looping path?

Does your game feature AI actors at all?
Does your game feature vehicles on streets during gameplay?
Do the vehicles have people driving them?
If so, you need to build this anyway. If not, then you have to make a determination for how much you want the character to realistically drive the vehicle, versus how much development effort you want to spend.

Compared to producing a 10 minute cinematic that people will want to sit through, building some game AI to follow a path and turn a steering wheel is a fairly straightforward game development task.
10 minutes is forever in gameplay time. Presumably there is some affordance to stop and save every 30 seconds or so, so that the player can resume without having to sit through another 10 minute car ride, if they are interrupted because someone rings the doorbell or the power goes out or the baby needs changing or it’s curfew time or whatever other real-live reason imposes.

To build a level that lasts for a 10 minute cut scene, you can add traffic lights with long wait times. You can also drive a circuitous route among existing blocks, making sure long sight lines are blocked (offset blocks in one direction so there aren’t long sight lines in the other direction.) You can build a mountain with a winding path that goes upwards (or downwards) that doesn’t use a lot of area, but is long and slow because of the road conditions.