How can I base the movement of my character solely on physics?

Hey guys!

I’m trying to make a tunnel racer. So the basics are, there is a tunnel which is filled with a liquid and the liquid has a current that pushes everything in the tunnel forward. Every objects movement inside the tunnel is influenced by these rules. So normal objects in the tunnel are rigid bodies (spheres), which we call photons. These photons are moved by flow nodes, which are positioned in the center of the tunnel. These flow nodes apply 3 forces to each photon.

First, they push a photon towards the flow direction (which is along the tunnel)

Second, they push a photon outward towards the edge of the tunnel

Third, they pull a photon towards their own center. So as to avoid collision with the tunnel wall (which is turned off for performance purposes)

The balance of these 3 forces create the flow forward while keeping all photons at the edge of the tunnel rather than in the center. The basic idea is, you have a plane which is wrapped around a spline and gravity pulls objects towards the edges.

Now this works perfectly fine with our photon blueprints. However I can’t get these forces to apply on a player character. This is what the blueprint looks like. The aim is to have these forces apply to the player character and have the player input applied to the movement within the same context.

There is actually a lot more that confuses me. As I need to set up this character from scratch and I still haven’t found a good tutorial for that.

have you checked out the ball movement and control in the Project templates?
start a new project and select Rolling