Greetings all.
My company is starting to look at Unreal as a Real Time engine for our product line. However, we don’t make games, we make basically interactive presentations and thus many of the tutorials & walkthroughs come from a perspective that isn’t what we’d be doing. In fact, 90% of Unreal will be unused in what we’re doing.
I am trying for a proof of concept but keep running into mental blocks and am hoping someone here can point me to the best tutorial or some video that might help with what I’m trying to do.
The basic concept is this.
When the presentation starts, the main camera is placed above a plane. On the plane are objects that when I click on, the camera should rotate to face the object’s forward vector and move to a point where the object takes up most of the screen. Hitting a key will take the camera home, or if another object is nearby & it is clicked on, the camera simply moves to look at it’s forward vector & fill the screen (mostly, not all the way).
Imagine a neighborhood of houses, and clicking on a house makes the camera fly over to look at its front door, regardless of how the house is facing. If you clicked on the house next to it (which would be partially visible), the camera would slide over and orient toward the front door. Hitting ESC would fly the camera to look at the entire neighborhood again.
For the life of me, I can’t seem to get the camera to move correctly (or generally at all). What keywords should I be looking for, or what tutorials would help me with this? I thought I should use blueprints for the clickable items, but I can’t seem to understand how to get that items’ “front” to be available to my [character player? camera actor?] and then get that to move.
I’m new to Unreal, but have been developing apps for >20 years, so the technical doesn’t scare me, I just need to get a better grip on what I should be studying to move me toward my goal.
Thanks,
Robb