The arrow represents the direction I want the barrier to open in. I want the barrier to be able to open and close whilst maintaining its curved shape. Think of it as if it were a conveyer belt.
I’m not sure how to go about animating this barrier. It does, however, need to be rigged in order for animations to work in Unreal Engine 4. So I want to rig it and then make an opening animation for it. Then export it to UE4.
If anyone has any ideas on how I could do this, they would be greatly appreciated.
If it were all Blender I would recommend a curve constraint.
I know armature animation will export to Unreal OK, so you could set up a spine IK… I’ve not use spine IK that much, but I think you could have your spinelike armature follow the curve, and slide it along the curve by moving it’s origin.
The other thing that may be worth looking at is whether you can animate the UV coordinates of the door’s texture within Unreal… can that be done?
The thing is - both of these sound a little heavy. One uses an armature to animate a simple slide, whereas the other uses a transparent object for a hole. Neither of these is ideal, but I think the armature method may be better… after all, when the door isn’t animating, this is basically a static object.
So I’m trying out the spline IK thing right now. I’m using the same curve I used for the curved glass I made in the corridor earlier since its virtually the same shape as the barrier. I’ve also rigged the barrier to an armature, so that should be fine but now I’m not entirely sure how to make the mesh move along the spline. Could you give me some more information about that please?
