Character arms touch obstacles

Development World Creation
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1

I am looking for a way to make my 3rd person character interact with walls and obstacles.
When my character is moving through a level, I want him to place his hand on a wall or crate when it gets within reach. I then want my character to place his hand on the wall or crate, and keep it there until my character gets out of range.

Think: moving through a crowd in assassins creed or hitman.

I have tried to have a montage overlap arm slots to play an animation that has a stretched out arm. And let that animation play whenever a raycast placed on the shoulder gets below a certain length. Then add IK to keep the arm from going through the wall.
This kinda works but the hand spazzes out when touching the wall. Also the hand just stays with the character and does not “stick” to the wall.

I am not sure for what I am looking. As an animator I don’t know all the inns and outs of Blueprints.
So basics and search terms are appreciated.

2

You may wanna look into a FullBody IK solution to get a more predictable IK behavior other than the two-bone IK node or the FABRIK node which both can be hard to get to behave naturally. Could maybe look into Physical Animation and see if that will provide some of the behavior you look for. Hope this gets you started… It’s a pretty complex task you set out to solve i’d say. Especially if you want it to look really good. Best of luck and hope you can solve it.