So i have been looking around for information on this but i have not been able to find it, if this is the wrong place to ask would someone be so kind as to send be in the correct direction.
I have been learning both Unreal engine 5 and blender and have made some assets in blender but so far all have been static objects, i wanted to make a vehicle but don’t really know how to do the interactable parts of it.
For example if i was making a car that could be driven by a player character and i want to have an interaction and animation setup for the character to open the door and get into the car, does the door have to be a seperate object to the rest of the car so it can move independantly, and should the animation be done in blender or in unreal engine?
I haven’t made a car in blender or animated one, but I know you want it to be a skeletal mesh, and have the door be on the skeletal hierarchy. Then when it animates the “Get in the car” it just plays the animation that opens the door by rotating that bone, which should be the door’s hinge.
If it is made in Blender, I would suggest animating it in Blender as well, BUT you should learn how to do both I suggest animating it in Blender only because if you need to update the model in blender and reimport, it might behave strangely if it was animated in Unreal vs Blender because Unreal doesn’t have the new anim info, only the new model.
To create animations you should use blender. Unreal engine is used to blend animations or dynamically modify them, this is done in animation blueprints.
For something like rotating a steering wheel in a vehicle I’d not use animation assets. I’d make a steering wheel component which rotates given an input such as a key press. The rotation logic is handled by code alone.
For something like the hands of a character sticking to the steering wheel, I’d use a technique called IK (Inverse Kinematics) which is done in the animation blueprint.
When you need to, use a mix of the above. (base door animation in blender, door blend between original animation + target animation in animation blueprint, IK for the hands on the door)
I suggest animating it in Blender only because if you need to update the model in blender and reimport, it might behave strangely if it was animated in Unreal vs Blender because Unreal doesn’t have the new anim info, only the new model.