Advice several aspects of Level Design - Record Player

Development World Creation
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UPDATE: 4/5

Still coming along. Added two records with matinee movements for the turntable arms. Cameras are positions and I’m slowly getting used to the cinematic. I don’t like the scrolling of the app. It need standard scroll bars. a bit confusing being used to Blender as well.

I did add a new DJ booth as a shell and plan on expanding it to include a lighting console. An lift platform was added today using the lift tutorial and I had major trouble with it. Got it running. By next week, At this time I hope to add more audio options, help text and solidify each record as a unique item. A fader will be positioned too. The pitch slider will take a bit of research.

(Deleted old video of the prototype tables)

Okay, as you can visualize from the You tube video. I am need of workflow advice for UDK4. Yesterday, I found the following
advice for rotating an object in place helpful:

(Still needs speed adjustment and AI applied). I got rid of the slipmat because it increased wobbling. Don’t know why? Physics setting? I solved the pivot problems
by reimporting with geometry set to origin from blender. Worked well but the more components added in Blueprints the less stable the rotation. Any ideas?

Seeing Blueprint is very powerful, I was too eager to set up Visual Studio 2013 for Windows with Unreal Engine Source. I want to field the community as too the proper
way of approaching this level design. Should I have started by configuring the Engine with Visual Studio? I’ve done so with CryEngine and ran in to a few problems.

Other things in the past I’ve either used a 3-d program like Blender extensively or UDK3 for world building but ran into blockages with file importing. For this project,
I am heavily reliant on FBX with a bit of success. What is registering is why retopology is necessary and this Turntable model I bought for $10 from TurboSquid has
a few triangles in it so I may simplify the mesh or re-edit it.

Certain textures are not power of 2 and I’m unsure how to get the pitch slider compatible with a perfect
square or can I do texture that is uneven like 64x128 ? Of course, I’d need to scale it. (I should have avoided textures and materials until the parts and functional.)

Any thoughts on the turntable arm as far as limiting the rotation and also being accurate about the collision with the record. I’m noticing many settings for collision and am preparing for an evening of reading documentation. Any recommendations? I’d rather learn than have an answer that is cut copy and paste.

Thanks.

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UPDATE: 4/7

Abandoning the Matinee approach now that I am digging into the example content. I added cursors on mouseOver of the pitchslider and started to add physics Constraints to the turntable arm. I also found another user in the forums with an interesting blueprint for audio pitch control. We shall see if it applicable.
Finding a pathway to understanding collision at the following.

I’ll have to experiment after digesting the documentation. Have not found a proper collision tutorial that is applicable to what I am trying to do.

If I set up the collision for the record and the needle properly, I’ll need a sound event to trigger. If a track is say 2 minutes long the turntable arm travel path to the next groove will need
a type of time variable in blueprint. Just thinking out loud. Having a mind fart. Pondering in Blueprint how to limit the arms range and what kind of input is also troubling. For ease of use, a game controller but for user friendliness I think a Kinect or a PlayStation move controller might be fun.

UPDATE: I ran into other information about using Matinee and it appears I can do most of what I need with that. It is very close to the dope sheet, NLA Editor and Graph Editor in Blender 2.69.

Animation of the turntable arm is happening right now. 4/2 - 11:59 EST. Easy peasy. For starters, I’ll try a trigger that places the arm if a button is pressed or the start stop with text as a happy learning experience. :frowning:

I’d rather have it as a Physics Constraint. For now, I think after a few dozen cups of coffee I should be able to procrastinate into using hotkeys to simply play an mp3 on the turntable

Update 4/4:

Got it all running with Matinee for the time being. The arm triggers sound once the needle makes contact with the record. Found pitch parameters for the slider too. I built a table for the turntables and added another record to mix with. So the DJ both is enclosed and a lift elevator is working but not in reverse.