I am trying to find an effective way to drive the Curiosity Rover, using an xbox controller.
I already modeled the Rover and rigged, with all the joints needed, but somehow I feel that the vehicle based BP is not the best way, as it moves in very peculiar way.
The Rover turn by streer four wheel in a radial fashion, so I guess it can’t go forward while it turn.
Also it have those very long joints that works as springs for the wheels.
I am trying to figured out what is the best way. What about make keyframed animations of the different status and mix it with physics? Is it possible?
In my opinion for any rover or vehicle that has a turn in place function the best way to go is to ditch the defaults and create a custom blueprint or even a specific extended class.
you can still base it off of vehicle movement, but I would reccomend just doing everything manually so that you can control every aspect of every bone, maybe even creating custom nodes so that you don’t have to fiddle too much with uneven terrain and IK on each tire.
another consideration is to limit the rotation speeds to be well below the motion blur spin limits that cause distortion - a pitfall of any vehicle blueprint.
Because your rover tires need to counter rotate, you really can’t relay on the default vehicle or the advanced vehicle set up where the tires only rotate in one direction at a time by default.
you can try and look up the Tank tutorial that was shared on this forum sometime ago for a few ideas as well. Tanks do tend to turn in place though in a completely different way.