Attach actor to another actor and move around on it

Hi, I’m looking into making a climbing system. But as I am a beginner at using UE4 I’m not making much progress, I’ve created something to attach my actor to my ‘target’ but have very little idea of how to continue from here.
To give you a better understanding of what I want to be able to do - I want to be able to grab onto an NPC (I guess even certain areas) and be able to climb around them as they move(if they do). Something like Dragon’s Dogma or anything else that is similar.

So the crux of the problem is I don’t know what I’d need to use to add movement to an attached actor(your player) around target(not sure if type will make any difference).

I appreciate any advice you could give me.

Hi Myscelus,

Haven’t tried it before . . . but you would probably want to use Sockets attached to the target Characters skeleton at the appropriate ‘grab’ points. You would probably want to look into using a combo of animation and IK for locking onto the sockets during animation. And possibly some physical animation and added physics impulses to sell the inertia. For some of that a good source are the Unreal Livestreams on Animation and animation system updates in recent engine versions, usually with Lina Halper, I think there is also one on Physical animation techques with Ian Shadden.

I’d comb through a couple of the Ledge climbing tutorials around and see if they had any additional pointers.

Anyway that is where i would start. Let me know if that helps.

Thank you for your reply, I’ll have a look into it. But from my limited knowledge using sockets would limit me to only those points on the actor as far as I know, I would like to be able to move around on it entirely.
Regardless I will have a look as It’ll probably help regardless.
I’ll definitely have a look into ledge climbing tutorials to see how they handle attaching to surfaces as it will give me a clearer idea of how to do these things.

I’ll look into animation/IK when I have something even close to working heh.

Again thanks.

Yeah, i just suggested the socket approach, as it will be quite difficult to calculate the movement of your mesh animation and the movement of the host mesh animation with any accuracy to reach the ‘grab’ points. as far as i know, you can drive a skeletons bones through code, but you can’t preemptively get the anticipated location of a mesh point at any given position within its animation. Something to consider, unless there is a way to access that information, it would be useful for one of my projects.

Seems like it’ll be considerably more complicated than I was expecting at least. Things would probably be a lot simpler just using sockets and it’s not like it doesn’t have it’s advantages for my purposes. Perhaps I can do both via abusing skeletons. I’ll have to research some into that line of thinking as I know even less on creating/modifying them.
Regardless, Going through a ledge tutorial has helped me anyway, Solved a previous problem I had due to how traces were done.