Searching the forum, I’ve seen several threads about the same topic, but not a clear answer of how to learn this or if I’m even searching for the correct terminology.
Quick Background:
I’m the graphic design/video editing/modeling/animation/rendering guy for my company. Years ago, I had built a few presentations with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite that were essentially interactive PDFs with some animation and video content. The presentations would run on iPads in the dedicated DPS app at various tradeshows. Adobe discontinued that suite of tools, so for a number of years, we’ve used outside vendors to create touchscreen content with a similar look.
Recently, I’ve been asked if we would be able to bring that work back in-house and I know that it’s possible to do something similar with UE4, but I don’t know how to learn that. Basically, I’d want to be able to create a walk-up touchscreen experience, click through some buttons to feature pop-up displays, play videos, probably pull up 3D models, and click on specific areas to pull up more information.
At trade shows, this would run on a dedicated laptop connected to a touchscreen, but in a perfect world, we’d like to be able to host it online for it to be useable in a browser as well.
Can anyone point me in the right direction as to what parts of UE4 I should be diving into more?
Edit:
Here’s an example of a similar sort of interactive touchscreen that I’m talking about:
https://youtu.be/jDTROjmDEe4
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I couldn’t figure out to edit the original post a second time.
It seems like I might be able to create the text overlays by thinking about it as a HUD?
But for the 3D elements, is there a way to lock that camera in a single position, so that touch commands could be used to rotate an object on screen? Or am I thinking of that backward and I should be using the camera to orbit around an object on screen? For instance, if I had an earth sphere and wanted to spin it around, should the commands move the sphere or the camera?
Unreal supports touchscreen input but it might not be the best option though if your 3D needs are very simple.
We’ve done many projects like that where I work; since you’re working in a 3D software you always have a 3D scene with a camera and the 2D UI gets overlayed on top of the 3D camera. To control the 3D camera if you have something you want to show in 3D you can use a math formula to figure out coordinates for a point on a sphere using the radius and angles, you then use the touch input values to determine how to adjust the angles based on how you move your finger around. For zoom you can use the distance between two touch points to adjust the camera field of view.
You can do the 3D interaction using Blueprints and there’s also examples of code out there that you can study, even if it’s not an example for Unreal the code is usually something you can translate to how you would do it in Unreal.
If you want to do something in a browser note that Unreal is not a good tool for that, it’s dropped support for HTML5 a while ago. Unity still has support for browser though that has some limitations. The best 3D tool we’ve found for browser is PlayCanvas but it’s not nearly as advanced as Unreal/Unity
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