How do people make interactive rotatable models?

In many games, you can spin around different models, usually the characters to preview them. I’m completely lost as to how this can be made.

Here is an example:

For something like this, you could easily get away with a nicely lit room and slap an interface on top. Camera and some FoV tweaking will be needed. It’s a bit more involved if you want to display 3d mesh in the interface but it seems to be redundant here.

The whole browser is, of course, an entire complex system so you may want to break it into smaller pieces and work on those. I’d start with a nicely lit room and a character model inside.

@Everynone I have a character select system all set up already, with a few prototyped models:

@Everynone, it worked! Thank you so much! I have another question if you don’t mind: Do you know how to check for mouse scroll wheel input? I want to make it so that the character spawns into the game with two select weapons and can switch in between them. Would I spawn them both in the level and set them active at different times?

I do not feel I know enough about your game to advise precisely. But weapon switching could be as simple as this:

Would I spawn them both in the level
and set them active at different
times?

Have the character spawn them and keep the references as Weapon 1 & 2. The whole setup would depend on dozens of factors, just to name a few:

  • can I have more than 2 weapons
  • are both showing
  • can I drop 1 and run with the other only
  • can I pick up new guns
  • can I store the guns I don’t use in my backpack

And so on…

@Everynone, okay, I’ll try these things out. I do stuff in C++, but I’ll prototype with bp. I wish I could ask you more questions here, but I’ve already used up lots of your time. Thank you so much!

You keep asking, there’s more folks around here that are willing to chip in.

I’ll just add that it generally makes more sense to ask separate questions if they’re not directly related to the original topic.

I’m going to convert the comment I believe you found satisfactory into an answer and then it’s up to you to either continue here or ask new questions.

Looks good, so what’s the next feature you’re after? The most basic rotation could look like this:

Image from Gyazo

The springarm’s rotation is set to absolute here, we can rotate the mesh but the camera stays in place.