Occulas Rift Theme Park Ride Experience in Vehicle with Baked Animation from Maya

Development Platform & Builds XR Development
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Hello Everyone!

I work at a themed entertainment company in Orlando, FL. I have been working on learning UNREAL ENGINE to expand our product base to include interactive VR experiences for our clients.

I have a vehicle that has already been animated for a video in Maya. I have baked the animation to the vehicle in Maya and imported the FBX into UNREAL. I want to be able to place a first-person player camera within the ride vehicle, and have the camera follow the orientation of the ride vehicle as it travels along its animated path from Maya, while simultaneously being able to look around either with a mouse or with the Occulas Rift.

I have gotten so far as to having the camera follow the animation of the ride vehicle by starting with a First Person Template, and editing the FirstPersonCharacter pawn by removing all of the nodes that control movement accept for that of the camera, then attaching the FirstPersonCharacter pawn to the skeletal mesh of the ride vehicle.

This allows the pov of the player to travel along the animated path of the ride vehicle, but the camera’s orientation does not change to match the rotation, pitch, and yaw of the ride vehicle as it travels.

I have tried to use the rollercoaster plugin, but it seems that it no longer works for the current version of UNREAL ENGINE.

I’m looking for a solution that does not involve a lot of coding, and hopefully not resorting to re-animating the ride vehicle within UNREAL ENGINE along it’s path using the matinee.

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I’ve done the exact thing you are looking to do in a different way. I imported my ride vehicle animation from Max via a Camera into Matinee and used that to control the Rift’s motion. You can see the solution the community helped me with at my thread Camera control during matinee sequence? - Cinematics & Media - Unreal Engine Forums

It’s pretty limited but it works. I’ve successfully built a few on ride Rift pre-vis’ with this method. I’m honestly looking to streamline the process and make the blueprint more user friendly, but i’m just not experienced in code enough to figure it out alone.

By the way, I also work for a “themed entertainment company in Orlando, FL”. Are you with one of the two big companies or with a smaller firm?