Hi everyone,
I am trying to create a character in 3rd person that can reach out and actually touch something like a door
knob, book, note or lever on the map.
I dont want to simply play a “reaching animation” and the hand is way up there in the air somewhere.
I see that too often in games.
I want the hand to “find” the target if the character is standing close enough to the target of course.
I have a feeling I can do this with IK.
I have seen video tutorials on foot placement done this way.
The actual pick up into the hand I can probably just do a kill actor (on the ground) and spawn actor into the
hand of the character. I guess …
But what is the best way to have the character “know where the object is” in front of him he needs to interact with?
A penny for your thoughts 
Maybe get little fancier and have the character adjust his posture or position, or shift its balance so it can reach
and touch target …
I want to expand on this concept and have the character pull out a chair and sit in it.
With the pulling out of chair and sitting in it I might cheat and do a character mesh swap and add the chair
and just play a pre-animated sequence and then as soon as the character is seated swap back the the actual
player character mesh and chair we had in the world … but those are just my thoughts … not sure about what I am saying there
I"ve been doing landscape and mesh generation for months in prep for bigger things hence I"ve not delved very far into the engine, but animation with char/chair, I guess the idea would be, though I don’t know if the engine can do that, to make an animation with char, where the arm reaches out to point ‘top of chair’ and pulls it back a given distance, then goes around chair and sits down. The idea would be to possibly use a empty to represent the chair at a given distance in animation, and the act of sitting would just be distanced based with the target as the seat ( model). I’ve no idea if the engine has those features, but I would imagine that’s how it is done. I chimed in seeing no other replies, so I could be WAY off.
To your first point another area of game dev I’ve never gone into, but a ‘door’ knob is just a mesh in space, or a point in space if its not its own object, which you would find via game code ( forget what you call it at the moment sorry), and tell the ‘hand’ to reach out and touch that object. Seems simple to me, therefore I can’t imagine the engine designers wouldn’t have thought of it. Its a simple Mesh > target I imagine ?
Searching docs for target animation or target or mesh target animation and I get nothing, I can see why as those topics are relevant to animation . I’m not sure what search parameter to use, therefore skeptical if my advice has any merit at all. Food for thought I guess ?
GL Let us know how it goes, I’ll need similar things once I’m ready 
Cheers
nl
Support Stream – Behavior Trees – March 10th, 2015 - Events - Unreal Engine Forums < Maybe AI can also give a glimpse into how it could be achieved with animation ?
Just throwing out ideas, not finding anything else relevant searching docs.
Someone else may chime in that knows precisely.
Cheers
nl
So I posted this same question below a You Tube video tutorial on IK bones and foot placement and I got this
response from someone who were actually doing this a while ago. This seems like a good lead:
>> I was actually working on doing this a few months back. It wasn’t too
difficult. I was using the 2 bone ik node in the animBP. Just get the world space location of the
object to be picked up and set that as your end effector location with some nice
interp and you’re good to go. <<