So for starters, I’m primarily a 3D artist / animator, I’ve only just started dipping my toes into blueprints. I’ve got a very rudimentary setup for a character who has a segway-like lower torso. His upper torso has various animations plugged into a state machine so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make use of the vehicle type animation class.
Currently for his Cruise/Walk animation I’ve kept the wheels still, as I understand that having him transition from that to an Idle animation causes his wheels to suddenly pop back to a rotation of 0.
So I have been trying to tackle this in a manner similar to what I do in Maya, but it’s obviously not that simple. I used a Get Player Controller > Get Controller Pawn > Get Actor Location setup to set the RVR_Pos variable and went from there.
So of course when I move foward in X+, all is well. When I move in X-, not so much. And of course if I move in a manner where X is going up and Y is going down or vice versa, the tires basically don’t rotate at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a super easy way to do this that I’m just missing, but I’ve spent most of the day trying to find something that would do the trick with no luck. Any help would be super appreciated.
What?
if upper body and Lower body need to be decoupled cant you just use a Blend By Bone node - like we do for montages?
You don’t need to have your lower legs go back to idle ever…
As far as making a bone continuously rotate you can use the modify bone node.
Feed it a world space replace value for yaw.
You make the value by just taking the current yaw, adding an increment to it, saving the value and using the new value.
if you do this on something like the root bone, the rotation data is passed to the player controller that changes the controller rotation. There is a specific rotate root bone for that.
Still think continuously rotating a bone is not what you want.
Yeah sorry I didn’t describe that too well. What I mean is basically when the character moves forward, the tire rotates appropriately that’s all. I’m like day #2 into learning blueprints so that’s why I’m fumbling for basic stuff here. The tutorials I’ve been looking at have been either for setting up a vehicle, which doesn’t seem to be what I’m lookin for; or for setting up an animated character with a walk cycle, which doesn’t have the same issue I’m running into.
I just don’t know what nodes I even need to pull off adding an increment to the yaw, saving it, etc. like you say, but yeah that does sound like what I need.
Thanks for the reply man, I know I’m a total noob at this and I hate being the guy who seems like he instantly went to the forums for someone else to help him.
All good.
Setting up a custom wheeled vehicle would actually solve your problem too.
it’s a bit more complex, but the wheel component simulate physics and spin as needed based on actual math. Speed over diameter for the surface area they cover.
animating that your self if you need accuracy is problematic.
Otherwise, I would suggest just animating the wheel spinning for the walking cycle.
it won’t be accurate, but if you don’t need that kind of detail it will look better then the wheel not turning.
Another quicker and blueprint less alternative could be to create the wheels as separate assets.
you need 2 bones on it. A root, and a wheel pivot.
you create the phat with the root as kinematic, and the wheel as simulated.
Attach the asset to a bone or socket and simulate physics on it. Theoretically, this should result in a wheel that can spin around based on physics much like the vehicle, without needing to build a vehicle.
