I was trying to make a rollercoaster track generator using the spline/spline mesh but is seems impossible to do in UE4 or it is hard as hell. First I was trying to make it from the Parrish “tutorial” from Epic Youtube channel. Then I was making it from this tut: Unreal Engine 4 Road Tool in Blueprints with Spline and SplineMesh - Part 1 Spline Components - YouTube but there is one “little” problem - I can`t make the bending. When I try to make loop like 180 degrees the mesh starts to twist in unwanted way. I know that this is due to the up vector of the spline. The Zaks tutorial has a bank attribute but it is not working as I want (cant make a barrel roll etc.
In the newest version of UE4 we have access to the Spline Up Dir but the thing is that it is applied to the whole spline not to a particular segment/point of it.
Any idea if it is possible to make a rollercoaster track?
Don’t know how deep you want to go on the idea of a “generator” but a good starting point is to introduce the mechanics using any 3d application that supports FBX.
First premise is UE4 supports baked keyframe animations so since I use 3ds I would first proxy the track using spline shapes and link constraint a dolly to it. Easy to make the dolly follow the track and one could link any they wish to the dolly. This gets the animation you want using scripting and the spline can be converted to a mesh .
If you want to do it UE4 side the “general” problem would be to get the dolly rigged using a gimble that always knows it’s orientation as to local translation using the dolly as the reference as to location in world space.
I have some pipeline for animating something on the track but I want to make just the statcimesh of the rollercoaster. Look at the image below to see the problems that UE has:
this is sort of a known issue with splines, unfortunately. Because their “up direction” is specified as a constant, they ALWAYS point up that way. They cannot pitch or roll upside down.
I’m not sure if anything is being done about it; meanwhile you should be able to work around it using multiple spline mesh pieces with separate up direction vectors.
