I got this:
By messing around with navmesh. In a nutshell:
- hold forward only
- project a point (the yellow bit) in the direction we want to go
- have the navmesh take us there
- trace on a separate channel the obstacles ignore
Would that work for you? Seems like it could work.
And to make it work better, you could take the path points (green) and and turn them into a spline. Then, instead of walking towards a Trace End (yellow), drive a dummy along the spline and have the character AI play catch-up with that dummy. That would give you much smoother result, especially turning. The above is merely the CMC’s interpolation via the Rotation Rate.