$30,000 of Pro Assets (Or Game Credit) to trade for Rift VR Blueprint help/info

What I offer:
I am a Character Animator (and 3D Generalist) and have worked in game companies and Hollywood for 24 years. (Activision, Warner Bros, Praxis Filmworks +++) I have an ENORMOUS Asset Library. 6,000 Motion Capture files, Millions of 3D Models, Characters, Nearly every Evermotion library, DeEspona library, VIEWPOINT Libraries,
I could even make you a custom character fully rigged with facial bones / ready for animation. .
I have developed a method of creating complex facial animation using bones in 3ds Max for export, but with no Morph targets. Animating the WEIGHTED ‘relative positions’ of bones LIKE a morph target, using an animatable SLIDER! (One slider for a Smile, one for each Viseme / Phoneme, Blink, etc. making characters intended for games, exponentially lighter without a bunch of morph targets!!).
Or music, I can create fully realistic Scores and Orchestral compositions, I have millions of sounds, samples, libraries for Digital Music generation, endless Kontakt Instrument Libraries, 6,000 preset library for MASSIVE VST, Or a Copy of OMNISPHERE? 3ds Max? I could never list everything I have I could trade. Not to mention custom Graphics, sound, Music, Characters. etc.

What I need in trade:
For one of our Unreal VR Projects, we want to be able to Zero G fly like Lone Echo, ISS etc. Grab objects to hold on and push off to move,… I found it a real good user starter template here: Zero-G hand-based movement, locomotion mechanics similar to Lone Echo/Echo VR (Updated 1/23/19) - XR Development - Unreal Engine Forums
I would like someone to , maybe ANNOTATE the Blueprints, say what does what,. how/where to edit the BP entries, maybe even make a quick video explaining what each of the nodes of the templates blueprints does, I have been unable to even find the Rift Motion Controller entry to change ‘Grab’ from Trigger to ‘Grab’ Switch!

I learn best from reverse engineering and understanding WHY things work, much better than simply learning ‘how’ from a book.
Specifically I would like to figure out where to choose What Rift Motion Controller Button Does What in this Blueprint and project template…,. I have been through the entire thing, every blueprint, I see nothing that says ‘Trigger’ or Motion Controller, THOUGH IT DOES ALL WORK! I want to be able to change things like:

  1. switch the Trigger (hold wall, pickup object) to the palm GRAB switch, and the the Y / B button ‘thrust’ to Trigger

  2. Also, how to get the ‘actor’ character to ‘slide’ with friction after hitting a wall, instead of stopping stock still, the second you hit an object, the way it is now…

We (nextWorldVR are a new, small VR Development company, we have 6 unique varied apps in production, 3 are games, 2 are high end-industry training and one is a VR Episodic Ancient Mystery Series,
I can give Real Credit on our projects you help us with Blueprint familiarization as well…
I have worked on 3D Films such as Life of Pi as character animator (Visual FX) , I had my own (animated) TV Show on Playboy TV in the 90’s serving as Animation Supervisor and lead motion capture actor (and one of the voices of a character on the show) … I have worked on many games, (I can share my IMDB page etc if we start to move ahead,…).

Or if you just want to help to b kind, I would still be happy to give you real credit as a team member in our completed projects (2 of which are already getting much attention the industry they are in)

Thank you for your time!

Woody from NextWorldVR

Some info that might help:

  1. The Flying Example supports HMD, and is related with your project. More specifically check:
  • The key bindings in “Project Settings/Engine/Input”.
  • The FlyingPawn Blueprint.
  1. Check:

Matthew Wadstein’s Youtube tutorial series on blueprint nodes (WTF is… and HTF Do I… in the titles) dont cover every blueprint node but it covers quite a few and gives very good explanations of why they do what they do the way they do it.

THANK YOU! It’s so nice to have some clues! I will check that out tonight :slight_smile: I have seen the Blueprints extensively, but even though I have taken UDEMY and Digital-Tutors Blueprint course(s), it still looks very foreign to me. I have learned by reverse engineering so long, tutorials seem almost like a backwards way of learning now LOL :slight_smile: But that doesn’t mean I skip them!!! :slight_smile: Thanks again!

7Those sound great! (and funny, like they have some humor! Perfect) I appreciate that! I will KeepVid.com them and put on my tablet for obsessive re-watching! ;") I have learned to keep a folder called ‘technique reminders’ and will save web pages, or make text notes of where in specific videos-specific techniques are laid out, so I can go back later and ‘remember’. I am certain these vids will be annotated in that folder real quick! THANKS!!

WOW!
You said: "(check) The key bindings in “Project Settings/Engine/Input”. I see an entry called:
Action Mappings,
under that ‘Grab Left’,
under that
MotionController (L) Trigger… and
MotionController (L) Grip

I thought, ‘if I delete the ‘trigger’ entry it might default to GRIP’ IT WORKED!!! :slight_smile: HEY! I made a change!!!

For the next one ‘Thrust Left (and right)’ it was harder because it only had one control listed: MotionController (L) Face Button 2 (or something), I went to ‘change it’ (to Trigger) BUT the drop down under Touch only listed, ‘Touch1, Touch3, Touch4 etc. So I tried the search box, typed ‘Motion’ and Voila’ there are all the Motion controller options! I selected MotionController (L) Trigger and tried it and they all work! AMAZING. THANK YOU!!!

I don’t see any ‘FlyingPawn’ blueprint; The Blueprints are:

BP_MotionController (No clue. I thought INPUT Panel did this)

BP_Pickup (I thought I knew what this was until I was PickupActorInterfce below.?)

GripEnum (No clue… Enumeration? Like creating a # Float variable or? )

MotionControllerPawn (again, this seems redundant to me, I’m clueless)

PickupActorInterface (redundant or misunderstood by me…)

thrustflame (This one I get! THOUGH I was unable to even apply a linear gradient to opacity)

VirtualRealityPawn (I think this is my 'actor, like the HMD portion maybe?)

VRGameMode (Seems like this tells Unreal that is is a HMD enabled app and to make it available?)

Amazing progress, I feel bteer. I was going crazy.

Now if only I could tell it to ‘stop stopping’ when the Actor collision ‘overlaps’ a object or wall… In Lone Echo, when you hit a wall, you kinda slide along the wall with a bit of friction, but you don’t STOP unless you grab the wall and hold on… I would like to turn off the ‘stopping’, I am hoping it is a ramped- up ‘friction’ setting or something, that I can simply turn down to 20% or something like that,.
THANK YOU!

There are physics settings on the right side details panel for actor BPs. They have a friction setting you can play around with. Also make sure you are “simulating physics” this is a box you can tick, also in the details panel on the right hand side. If you don’t have that ticked, the “mass”, “friction” and other physics related options won’t work.

I talk about an other template project called Flying (you have to create a new project based on that template to see FlyingPawn Blueprint). You are probably inside a project based on “Virtual Reality template”. Keep in mind that other templates have some HMD/VR support too and might be useful to learn.

I think the best way is to handle the “Hit Event”. For example get the velocity, project it into the plane of the hit normal (so it will zero out other directions), and set the velocity to the result of the projection. Or rotate the Actor etc.

Do you mean in the Blueprint’s detail panel right? I checked them all, there’s nothing about ‘physics’ in any of the 7 BP’s Detail panels.
If I send a rar file, maybe you could take a look to see how it is setup? I’m sorry if I seem impatient, but, I am a cancer survivor trying to rebuild my career & bring my 2 decades of Hollywood CGI FX / Character Animation skills to VR. (after almost 3 years dying at hospital, including 7 months in intensive care)

Rar file is here: https://ufile.io/htqc3 :slight_smile:

Are you sure you don’t need a million 3D Models, Sounds? I’m dying to move past this BP stuff and BUILD MY WORLD in VR Editor :slight_smile: THE DREAM! Impatience is because I came as close to dying as anyone can and still survive, I am chomping at the bit to get these few ‘Actor’ changes out of the way, and get back to building and animating.
What is your name? I am Robert, (my nickname is Woody)

HEY! Do you like Star Trek TOS? I am creating a 19 full length episodes of a Star Trek CGI Fan series (w/ all the original actor’s voices in NEW STORIES) as VR Holodeck Episodes! (Here’s more info on the series in Part 2 of this article about my work:

(part one’s just boring stuff about me & how I made magic w/ New Real TOS voices, how I was animating in my hospital bed etc.)
In the VR Series, I could offer you a recurring Speaking Role? Your, or a friend’s likeness as a doomed Red Shirt? :wink: :open_mouth:
Here is a 2D Test of Episode One: ‘Beyond Antares’:

STAR TREK MIRACLES: Episode 1 of 19: "BEYOND ANTARES" Parts 1 & 2 (of 3) A TOS CGI Fan Episode - YouTube

This is a Proof Of Concept I started years ago, (I’m a far better character animator now!) I wrote a book called: ‘LIVE TAKE!: Artistic Performance Capture in 3ds Max’. I even invented a way to use Facial bones with Morpher-like weighted sliders=light game characters!

THANK YOU!

Well, like 3ds Max, I plan to learn it all eventually, I appreciate it, but unless starting over in some other ‘template’ is strictly necessary, is the only way to get the 'character ’ to slide instead of just Stop, when hitting walls, then I want to keep learning this for now, 99% of my Zero-G flying is perfect, I just want to be able to ‘slide against walls’ not STOP instantly, (and then eventually learn to stop the hands, head, objects held in hand, from going through other objects)
Heck I’m just glad I finally got someone to answer me, give me some clues that helped me move forward. I’m happy to have been able to switch to the ‘GRIP’ for Gripping…
`
Your name looks different, are you the same person from the Game Company above? I left a
new message to you above this one, with better info, an offer, one of my Pre-VR proof-of-concept CGI animated episodes, and a link to my fledgling game project to see why (or if?) Physics is seemingly missing from every BP details panel… :slight_smile: THANKS!.

Hey Woody, my name is Alex. That is quite the story! Happy to hear you are still pursuing your dreams after such and ordeal and I wish you the best! As for the blueprint stuff, I tried downloading but the file was quite large and then I realized I would need to download 4.19 as well so I didn’t have time to do all that. I did screen shot the physics parameters on BPs though and be sure you are selecting the correct component. Not all components of an actor have physics properties, meshes do but things like a billboard will not. Here are some things I found. Also the “friction” is linear dampening I highlighted that in one image. “Friction” is only present on the “projectile movement” component of an actor.

After doing my first Lighting Build, (then making them static and doing it again, LOL
I got: "“no importance volume found and the scene is so large that the automatically synthesized volume will not yield good results. Please add a tightly bounding lightmass importance volume to optimize your scene’s quality and lighting build times” WHEW! LOL
So, I was out there looking and you are right! I found: “no importance volume found and the scene is so large that the automatically synthesized volume will not yield good results. Please add a tightly bounding lightmass importance volume to optimize your scene’s quality and lighting build times”

I was just looking for some info and found:
“WTF Is? Volume - Lightmass Importance in Unreal Engine 4”

Imagine me with steeple’d fingers saying: "Ex-el-lent! (like Mr. Burns LOL) THANKS! All this great info, it’s out there when you need it! it’s amazing, THANKS AGAIN!

Wow, I sure appreciate you doing all that,
Before replying, I have spent all day looking at them, trying to find commonalities, coming back and back,. It is so different,. I have no way to know what one of THESE BP’s … are,… the ‘same’ as those,… I see nothing in my editor either, no camera, no controllers, no Pawn Nothing but a Character Start and I put that in myself,… I wish you could see how complex and strange these BP’s are, the strange scene with no Pawn or controllers in editor/outliner…

In the 4th image I see Friction, but there is nothing in that BP, Hard to figure out what I would be testing friction settings on. Whew BP’s look to me like combining a Pollack and a Picasso and saying “now find the logic”. I think the colors and stuff are distracting my ‘visual brain’ and obscuring the ‘visceral’ feel of what they stand for, I am getting no,… ‘emergent’ understanding…

I just need to remember to be patient and not try to solve every problem all at the same time… I NEVER ask for help, I learned UNITY in weeks by myself just by examining many .unitypackages,.Seeing what did what and why, When I try to do that with Unreal and the color blobs, I feel like I am looking at some alien language,. Maybe animators are not meant to be developers. I need more techs on our crew. I just want to be building worlds & people, lighting and most of all animating.

HEY!!! :slight_smile: !!! I KNOW! I have made very few changes to the blueprints, (none actually, I only changed Motion Controller Button Assignments Settings/Input panel you showed me, the Original ‘locomotion’ project i’m building on is VERY LIGHT!!!
I will find the Google drive link!

ZeroGbyNik.zip - Google Drive

I appreciate your time and help greatly! If I can just get past this locomoion friction/stopping problem, everything else is easily learned in Tutorials. But I don’t even know what to call this: “Non Wall Stopping Behaviour” ? LOL… :~)

addendum to message above: Some tiny VR gifts I made:

**Be sure to enter settings gear, and pick the best quality your bandwidth can handle, like 2160p
**

Star Trek TOS Enterprise Turbolift and Bridge (VR Video) rendered in 360° 3D VR 4K:


Corridor, and Dr. McCoy’s Sickbay: (Lab, Office, exam room and Ward):

This below is only Stereoscopic 3D not VR but VERY COOL…:

I used Elevation Data, combined with Ultra high quality visual imagery from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Satellite, and turned it all into a gigantic 3D Model, which I then colorized, and animated a 3ds Max camera over the surface, outputting a stream of Stereoscopic 3D Footage, representing what it would feel like to FLY just a about a 100 yards to a mile over the surface of MARS:
DRONES ON MARS! NASA DIRECT- BEST MARS 3D Footage in 4K! Clear Evidence of Water! - YouTube (this too I output in 4k Be sure to select 2160p! :slight_smile:

This last MARS one, seen with NVIDIA 3D Vision will make you drop to your knees in awe of the dynamic variation, depth and beauty! ;~) I love combining Art and Science!!! I had intended to release 2 hours of this as a 3D Bluray before VR came along :slight_smile:

No I am not the same person :).

I do not have the VR Hardware nor the time to test and help you more, so the only thing I can currently do is provide a starting point, based on what I would try, if I wanted to change the velocity of on a component that uses physics simulation and hits something. I hope this helps.

Btw try the forums too for offers etc.

5 am, another 8 hours trying everything, Googling, (i’ve been awake for well over 48 hours.

I think i’m done. I have opened every single one of the 7 blueprints, I have selected every single one of the hundreds of disordered BP nodes individually again, looked at the BP Details panel for ‘Physics’, But not one had ‘Physics’ entry, or anything like the sample images you sent. Not in drop-downs either,. :frowning:

Life is pointless pain and frustration.

Yeah I’m done, it’s not good for my health to get this frustrated,. .I’m nearly tearing my hair out, pacing and swearing :\ There’s no physics, so there’s no way I can adjust the thing to even begin to TRY to make it usable, I can’t release even an ‘early access’ that has a fast moving person brush against a wall at a ~10° angle and STOP instantly in place,… .

I wish there was a good ‘pay tutor’ site, I wish I could afford to just HIRE a BP guy, I was an idiot to even try something so complex.

There is also definitely no ‘simulating physics’ check box in any of the hundreds of ‘BP blob-nodes’ details panel (either details panel) …

When I have a tutorial about ActorOverlapStart etc, everything works, but I can’t get around this, when nothing is where it’s supposed to be. Unless, you were maybe Trolling me? I didn’t get that vibe at all though. At any rate I now think BP’s are bizarre, unpredictable & completely unusable. If someone like you who knows them, can’t count on their predictability, they’re just no good.

If you want to see: (small file)

Well, Thanks a lot for trying and for your time,. I guess there’s some sort of disconnect happening with what you expect these BP’s to look like but they just don’t. I should never have tried this, I wasted everyone’s time. Now before I get TOO depressed, I have to stop. I’m just too old and no longer capable of new things. Liquor cabinet here I come!

The forums?!! I thought this was the forums !!! … Well, I appreciate it. But after all this time i’m clearly just wasting time, I will never get it or be able to use Unreal… It’s just too different from everything else I have ever known (except Digital Fusion from the early 90’s, had this same hierarchical node system, but only for compositing and visual FX etc… ), Whe I try a tutorial like to use ActorOverlapStart it woks perfectly, I wish there was a tutorial to make Echo Arena locomotion! All I needed was the ONE CHANGE (to have a fast moving character NOT stop instantly in place upon even brushing against a wall at an oblique 1° angle, LOL),. and I would have been able to move on to finalizing world creation, setting up goal pickups etc. but, oh well, cookies do crumble… One less VR game in an overcrowded market,. right?

one little question, the last panel in your image says ‘Set Physics Linear Velocity’ I see thse everywhere in the ‘Motion Controlleer Pawn’ BP… But there is never any way to do anything with it, or to change any variables, if it doesn’t allow one to CHOOSE anything or SET ANY NUMBERS??? It makes no sense to me, what is panel?? Even when I CLICK ON A ‘Set Physics Linear Velocity’ Node in a blueprint, the DETAILS Panel stays PERFECTLY EMPTY, !!! So ,… WHAT??? I feel like i’m gong insane… I can’t understand this, it has no logic, how can you set something, without being able to give any info??? No numbers?? It seems absolutely bizarre, unpredictable and illogical to me, More so every hour… THANKS!

I’m really confused now. I’ve never done a VR project but I’ve helped other people who were working on VR and when I told them about things in BPs they had the nodes and options I referred to. Could you possibly post a screenshot of one of your VR blueprints so I can see what exactly you’re working with? That would be immensely helpful. I will see if I can open one of your smaller projects later if they aren’t built with 4.19 I should be able to. In the mean time put some screen shots up for us.

It probably stops because of sweep in your Pawn Blueprint. Take a look at this please to understand sweep Moving Physical Objects. When sweep is enabled on a move node it will stop if the target object collides. I saw your Pawn Blueprint and has nodes with sweep enabled. In one case it also manually zeros out velocity right after sweep usage.

UE Forums Link