So I set up a kick animation to strike a mesh (vent), and I have been trying to make it work properly with physics for a few days now. The results are not going as planned.
Unless the player is in an absolute exact position when hitting the trigger box, the vent will not fall open at the correct angle. And even then as you can see in the video it just doesn’t look right.
I also have two constraints set like hinges on the bottom axis of the vent.
I suppose my question is: Is using physics the best way to go about this?
Do I just keep messing with the settings until it looks right> Because I’m really starting to think I am going about doing this the wrong way and over complicating things.
Thank you for any and all advice/help.
Hey there @Tomhikon! Welcome to the community! I don’t think your approach is bad per se, especially if you want it to be effected by physics later. Say a grenade lands next to the character after this? Would be nice for it to go flying too! That said, if the vent is really only meant to come open like this most would usually just recommend a simple animation or timeline.
If you want, you could keep your current implementation and just ignore the vent’s collision with the player after it’s been kicked. Then it will fall down regardless of where the player’s feet are (with some clipping). Then it would also not be pushed into the ground when the player changes a bit.
Hey thanks for responding!
Grenade would be cool yea,this is just a sneaking around the enemy scene however here.
I thought about the animation route,however i was unsure how to implement the vent with the animations i patched together to make the kick to prone motion play.
I’d be interested in learning more about that method as it would come in very handy for other scenarios.
And the stop collision before the vent hits the feet may also work,though i am unsure how to stop collision after the animation plays. I suppose a notify in the animation field?
One big issue with what i have is it’s not consistent. Sometimes the kick doesn’t even pop the vent open, in the vid i added i guess i got lucky lol
How are you triggering the vent movement? Purely on the physical interaction? I’d probably make a collider that checks for the player and interface to “interact” with it and let that trigger an impulse that always knocks it open, if you were to remain physical.
So if you were to go the level sequence path you’d have to set the vent up a bit like this
Note the root is the pivot in this case.
That said if this is going to be a reoccurring thing throughout levels that would be cumbersome to work with, and to make it look good you’d need to work with the curves.
A timeline would be more effective and it’d be plug and play, but you’d still need to adjust the curves to make it look natural. (I did not here)
Lastly if you’d like to keep your current setup, you’d probably be best to remove the player collision with the vent itself and have the player activate it much like they’d activate a door when the animation gets to the kick point with an animation notify.
Yea it was just physics.
Thank you for the suggestions and detailed descriptions, it definitely helped me out.
It may still need some tweaking, but I tried out the timeline method you suggested.
I added a rotation and slight location shift
to add a bit more movement.
Having learned how to do this now I know it will be helpful later thank you!
