Unable to find remote CAD work as I’m stuck overseas for the moment, I am trying to teach myself 3d assett creation , animation, and game making skills for which I see offshore opportunity.
I chose UE5 because beyond gaming and animation, they are trying to poise themselves as an engineering and architectural tool in their own right, so it can potentially be another tool in my existing engineering and design skillset.
The short I’m trying to create, a teaser for a story in my head, features a steam locomotive. I’m trying to get the linkage, not just for the drive, but the steam valving that controls the drive, to work.
I made a couple posts on here trying to get input on how to rig it, crickets. Searching posts of others trying to get complex things working, many suggest still doing the rigging in 3rd party.
I ended up rigging it in Blender and it works, but won’t import into UE5 in a controllable form, the best I can do is bake the animation. I could still do the main animation in UE5.
I did end up rigging it as a Blueprint in UE5, but while it works in Blender, and in Solidworks for that matter, there is too much slop at pinned joints in the Blueprint UE5 version, leaving me with animating the train in Blender and compositing that into a UE5 scene.
If the somewhat complex locomotive cannot be rigged to work in UE5…at least not yet, it leaves me questioning if it is quite ready as the engineering simulator it wants to be. In which case maybe I just do the whole thing in Blender at this point and put a pin in UE5 until a later date when it matures more.
OR am I still missing something? Maybe UE5 can do this train up right, but it seems to require some IK constraints, which apparently don’t work with blueprints at least not as I’ve constructed it.
Can anyone suggest a workflow, techniques, features, etc. within UE5 that might leave me with a sufficiently error free cycle that I can fully control from within the UE5 scene?
Any video I try to post of this in motion comes out too big to include in my posts, but here is a static image of the linkage system I’m trying to work out. It is apparently too recursive for UE5, but works in blender with a bunch of IK constraints, and within SolidWorks with more real-world mate options.
I can provide more information on what I’ve tried and where it stands to help refine answers, but unless someone takes an interest in what I’m trying to do, I’m at an impasse on what I can do without input from someone more knowledgeable.
