I recently finished setting up my vehicle - based off Chaos Vehicles, and also I managed to bring in all the destructible vehicles setup from City Sample.
Even when you look at City Sample itself, when the driver drives the car, the steering wheel doesn’t rotate.
The solution seems pretty simple - just get a “transform bone” in Animation Blueprint. But the main issue is, City Sample actually starts the vehicle as a much more simplified Skeletal Mesh which does NOT have any steering wheel bone. Once you do collision, the system switches to the much more detailed skeletal mesh which has the steering wheel bone.
I know this seems very particular issue - but I wonder if anyone can think of anything or has dealt with this situation before?
Do I need to re-setup this skeletal mesh and potentially add an additional bone for steering wheel? (and then “attach component to component” the Steering wheel mesh to the bone in this updated simplified skeleton?
Might be easiest to just remove the mesh (topology) for the steering wheel and add a separate component (with attached mesh) as a stand-in, sort of like what is done for swapping body parts (clothing) or dismemberment. Probably not the best method but you wouldn’t need to change the skeleton, just cut away that one section of the mesh.
Using skeletal meshes for anything that doesn’t strictly require it (by being some kind of a soft body) is just downright retarded. As much as Chaos if not more.
And sure, yea, you have to use an SKM for an advanced vehicle because “they” (engine stooges) implemented it that way even they should never have.
But that doesn’t mean your car interior has to be a skeletal mesh.
Here is a very basic example for what you should do (made ages immemorable ago).
There is a proportion to steering that takes the user input to derive the steering column rotation you can look up. It’s like 12 to 1 so you divide what the chaos vehicle uses by 12 and test on a cube to see what it does.
Since the car is a (really messy and with far too many bones already) skeletal mesh do not use animations for it or half-■■■■■ code on the animation blueprint.
Just add an interior as a separate mesh with a separate steering wheel and specifically apply the rotation from player input directly to the steering wheel, before chaos even attempts to do anything.
Also, instead of rotating a mesh, if you have no use for collision on it rotate the material. Pass the value to an MPC and animate the steering wheel material with it.
