Make a mesh "Fly" in a circle

Hello;

I am trying to make an aircraft fly around in a circle in my Unreal game. I cant find anything in the tutorials and the FlyAi template thats being developed is a bit advanced for what I need (I dont need collision avoidance as the airspace the object is flying in has nothing but sky in it).

I have tried placing a navmesh at ground level, then editing the Pawn to place the aircraft static mesh way above the ground level but it feels like a hack and not a tidy way of implementing the flying aircraft. I have tried playing with gravity as well but dont really know what im doing and seem to fail!

End state I would like the aircraft flying in a fixed circle over and over that started when the player overlaps a trigger box.

Thanks for any help that can be offered on this (hopefully) simple AI implementation.

-either do it with matinee
-or like in this video with waypoints -> :slight_smile:

Ok so I have followed the video but my character doesnt fly anywhere. Initially when I started the game it just fell to earth, I have disabled gravity and that issue is now resolved. I can see the key press is triggering the blueprint “Simple move to Location”. I have placed the target point in free space mid air and ensured the nav_mesh is covering that piece of airspace. (I dont get the green or red highlights like the video from my navmesh but I do get the popup “building navigation” each time I make a change.

Any thoughts?

You cannot use the navmesh because is only for ground units you need make a custom system to move the mesh over the air following a points.

Ok that sounds beyond my knowledge right now - I guess I will have to come up with another solution.

Rather than doing it with AI, you might make the plane a child of a dummy object which is a child of the sphere itself and rotate the dummy object. This will give the plane the appearance of flying around the sphere.

, this sounds interesting but I dont fully understand your idea (and how to implement it…). Could you expand when you get chance please?

@Epic If anyone from Epic reads this it would be nice if the navmesh worked in free space to allow objects to fly to waypoints.

Sure. You have a blueprint with this hierarchy:
-Sphere (circle) mesh (root)
-SceneComponent (empty component as a child of the Sphere)
-Plane Mesh (child of empty SceneComponent)

The SceneComponent is in the same location as the Sphere and the plane is offset from the SceneComponent to look as if it’s flying above the sphere. Since the plane is a child of the SceneComponent, whenever you rotate the SceneComponent, the plane will inherit the rotation plus its own rotation, so you can make it appear as if the plane is flying over a planet with this method.