VR Matinee - Pawn Vs Character - Ability to Look Around

Howdy!

I am trying to make a VR experience - that essentially is a slow rollercoaster through the thicket of the woods. The idea was to have a properly timed Matinee - that will guide the player through various places of the map - have them stay there for a while - things happen - characters talk - story unfolds - and then move on.

I have been able to set up a basic camera movement via the Matinee - but I am curious how to combine this with VR - I watched a video on Pluralsight - about doing such - and they suggest using a Pawn.

Yet - my problem is - I find that Matinee to only work with skeletal meshes - and my guy is boneless. Should I instead make a “character actor” with the same properties as the Pawn?

Once again - the goal is - to have the Matinee be the main driver throughout the experience - no player movement - only the ability to look around? And have things happen - depending on where they are looking (though that is a separate question - but a feature I’d like to have - ((real quick)) - the idea with that - is to essentially have an invisible pole sticking out of my head (camera) - that will collide with objects - it actually works!!!) -

any guidance or hints would be more than appreciated!

Thank you!

You can make a PlayerCharacter without have a skeletalmesh. You can even assign a skeletal mesh and hide it so it cannot be seen.
Please note that you can also just assign a skeletalmeshcomponent to the Pawn and use it then in matinee (Though its new for me that matinee works only with skeletal meshes? you should be able to control any actor, no matter if just a blueprint, a static or skeletalmesh).

And you wont be able to really stop the player from running around; You want at least slight changes in the orientation and movement of the head translated to the engine so the player can look around freely. But you can detect if the offset from the original position is too far and do something like darkening the screen or paint it red or whatever then.

Please note that it wont be enough to just set the position of the player pawn/character to your “ingame rollercoaster seat”, since you still have the offset from the player pawn to his current position in his room, so you would need to calculate it using the PlayerPawn->GetActorLocation and the relative position of the hmd.

Hope that helps a bit; I would submit a few screenshots, but i am not on my UE PC right now :slight_smile:

Thank you so much Indygoof for some great advice! I am an experienced After Effects man - but still new with matinee - I was so so so excited to find out how to control any actors! Woof! The possibilities are endless.

I am happy to report that I was successfully able to accomplish the “slow-roller-coaster” with the ability to look around. Once I clean up the code - I plan on creating a small tutorial video as I think it could help some folk. Thank you for your help! Will keep you posted

If i could help you it would be nice if you could “accept” my answer (click the checkmark on the side of the answer), so it shows up as answered for future reference.

Cheers!