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Luis Zeno Jr
Rotten Apples
The last task I took on is making the vehicle move around the city. It's another difficult task to tackle as the vehicle in use didn't have a skeletal mesh, just a regular mesh, meaning I needed to do some quick research about how to create a skeletal mesh and how I can simulate it as a vehicle moving. What's more difficult is animating it.
The first thought I had in my mind was, do the same thing I did with the helicopter. At first it seemed like a good idea, but there were several issues with it. First, I added a static mesh component and the truck as a static mesh, but it didn't move at all. I learn that in order to use the spline component, I needed a skeletal mesh, which I did a quick research and understood how to convert a static mesh into skeletal mesh. Result was partial. While it did work, the truck started to sink like a ship, going down into the ground over time.
Ironically, I needed to do the inverse of what I attempted with the helicopter. Instead of a spline component, I done the waypoint method. I created a waypoint actor for the vehicle to follow and redo the blueprint for the vehicle to follow. It worked like a charm.
The most difficult task to complete actually came with animating this truck. The project lead like to see the wheels move, but the major concern is that this truck, despite having a skeletal mesh, didn't have any "bones" attached to it. It took me several days to understand how I could manipulate these wheels to rotate. I finally came across a reference video that instruct viewers a method of creating a skeleton without needing a plug-in to assist with it. I first created a skeletal points attached to the wheels of the truck before adding in weights. Adding in the weights was a difficult task as it requires selecting the proper meshes, and with this truck having so much attached to it, I selected the body on multiple occasions as well as the axel. To make things more difficult, this caused my program to crash on several occasions. I manage to fix the issue by simplifying the mesh and separate the wheels and the axel while I am adding in the weights.
After a few test runs and animation blueprinting similar to the helicopter, I manage to have the wheels simulate movement and adjusted the audio of the truck from there. I also added in a collision detection to trigger a game over similar to the guard to encourage players to avoid the truck when spotted.
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