Alright. First of all, my previous question was about modelling and texturing a city. Since then, I’ve been learning Blender and can easily say that I’m able to model half-decent buildings and street lamps in Blender for my city, so that’s not really a problem for me.
My new problem, is creating a system for which I can enter/exit a car, drive it around my world, and run over pedestrians on the street if I so choose, though the pedestrian murdering part isn’t really of my concern right now…
What I want, is something like Grand Theft Auto 5, or even GTA III where I can walk up to a random car on the street, grab open the door, pull any driver out if there is any inside, and get in and drive. Then, get to my destination, and exit the car.
I do know that this is possible using animations, and blueprints, I’m just at a loss as to how I would go about creating the blueprints and animations as I am no animator…
So, if anyone can help me, that’d be greatly appreciated!
a vehicle would contain an arbitrary amount of wheels, doors, and seats, which could all be actor components and your player would have both an AI controller and a player controller.
when the player approaches a vehicle, they would overlap a box around the vehicle that allows them to press a button
to take the vehicle. the doors on the vehicle would have a socket for where the player would stand, and another socket for the door handle.
if the player presses the take vehicle button, you can use the AI controller’s MoveTo command to walk to the door Socket, play a door grab animation, while using IK to grab the door handle, and playing a door open animation on the door. if there is a driver already in the car, play a grab animation on your character, and a thrown animation on the driver.
then play a sit down animation while interpolating between the door socket and the seat socket. each door object will probably need a reference to a seat object, and each passenger seat will need a reference to a driver seat, and the driver seat will need a steering wheel with hand placement sockets. if your character is in a passenger seat and the driver seat is empty, they should interpolate towards the driver seat socket.
once inside the driver seat, you can have the player controller possess the vehicle pawn, and start driving. shooting out the window would require an aim offset node in the anim tree, and an aiming state. destructible vehicle parts could be done with morph targets, and hiding + spawning any parts that fall off.
Omnicypher laid it out for you pretty good. Any deeper and he would write the scripts for you. I would like to add, as I’m sure the OP’s followup question will be with regards to animation. Animation is easy. Good animation is difficult and time consuming. If you are already comfortable with Blender then keep using that. There are many videos and community areas for Blender, more so than Unreal. I would suggest going to those areas for proper animation techniques. Here are a couple places I go to for Blender stuff: Blender Artists and here is a slew of results when I searched “Blender Character Animation” into YouTube
Thanks, now I know how I’m going to do this. Since I’ve been watching the official tutorials from Epic Games, I should be able to get the keypress to enter the car to work.
Animations, well, that’ll take a while, but my primary focus is functionality, not prettiness, so I’m not going to stress over that just yet.
Anyways, thanks for the answer! Greatly appreciated!