How to return and use the normal direction of a polygon?

[JJChalupnik]

Hi,

The ultimate goal of this idea would be to calculate the orientation of Gravity on the whole scene, on every tick, checking to see if the direction has changed, and using the polygon normal of a ground object (that can deform) as the guide to re-orienting the gravity direction.

I’d like a character to run around on a giant animated charactor, with deforming geo. This will obviously affect navmeshes as well, but I gotta start somewhere, and most references I can find, point to gravity volumes or fixed directions… Any help would be greatly appreciated. I’m not sure what to look for in Blueprints to execute this.

[Everynone]

using the polygon normal of a ground
object (that can deform) as the guide
to re-orienting the gravity direction

You can get a Normal from a Trace:

So a character could trace along the negative Up Vector to check the surface’s direction:

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When it comes to translating this into actual character gravity, I’m not so sure - never attempted it seriously enough but there are plugins on Marketplace that do just that.

[JJChalupnik]

Thank you so much for your reply! This is a lot to chew on. I will give this a try and look into these functions. Many many thanks!