Character "Clamber"... How to?

Development Character & Animation
1

Hey everybody!

So I’ve been working with the 3rd person tutorial on the UE4 Youtube page (3rd Person Game with Blueprints (pre. v4.8) - YouTube), and I was wondering if anyone knew how to make a setup where the player character will clamber onto ledges when the player reaches them. It could either be automatic or require a button press, I’m just looking for a way to get this going. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

2

The main obstacle for this feature are the proper animations, integrating them and then adding the required code, which seems rather easy once you have the first steps completed (moving the character on the Z axis, while playing the right animation). If i would approach this, i would start with animating in Blender. However getting started with Blender and animation export-import into Unreal can take 1-2 weeks depending on your pace. Also if you have a budget you might find animations to buy, but those should be compatible with your current skeleton, so beware.

3

What I’m more concerned with at the moment is the blueprint logic. Basically, I want it to work like this:

  • Player enters trigger volume (which is inside a blueprint placed in numerous spots on the map).
  • If Player hits the jump button (in this case, the SPACE bar) while in said trigger, the clamber animation is played. This needs to work while the player is in the air, if that matters.

Currently, I have a boolean that gets set to true when my player character overlaps with the blueprint. However, my character animation blueprint won’t see any booleans from outside itself. I have the boolean set to public, as well.

So is this the right way to do it? Should I make it part of the character animation blueprint’s locomotion, or do I make it a function somewhere (and if so, where)? I am pretty lost at this point.