Level UI displays on button held? (Blueprint)

Development Programming & Scripting
1

I am trying to create a UI system for an archviz VR project.

Basically, I need for a laser pointer to appear when I hold the trigger button. While the laser is on, I want my intractable objects (as well as transport locations) to become highlighted. A few questions about setting this up:

Is a gate node the best way to set up a ‘hold down’ system in BPs. I’m thinking I’d do an event tick into the enter, with a boolean opening and closing the gate? Is there a more efficient way to achieve this? Or is the event tick ok in this case is it will only be executing things while gate is open?

BP communication. Ugh, make my head hurt. Have to watch the official tutorials for the 11th time. Very basically, how would I best let all those intractable objects ‘know’ to highlight.

Where’s the best place to put this BP code? The pawn? The level blueprint?

Thanks!

2

I guess line tracing would work in this case. So whatever comes in to contact with the line trace will be the object that hits the line trace and from there you can get what hit the line trace and apply the highlight material to that object. This would all happen in the pawn actor.
Here’s a tutorial on different kinds of line tracing from the unreal website: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Gameplay/HowTo/UseRaycasts/Blueprints/