Friday 7th October

As I am very much a beginner to Unreal Engine 4, I have mostly spent this week learning the basics. This involved watching tutorials online and learning about all the different tabs and features within the engine as well as how to navigate inside the viewport and arrange objects in a space. Once I felt comfortable inside the engine, I began to experiment with how a door might be created. I started by placing a door and its frame into the world and then assigning a trigger box in front of it which would open the door with an animation when the player enters the box, this was a very basic implementation and so I began to work out a more immersive and interesting way to create it. The next step was to give the door physics so that it can be pushed and pulled in the future, this is important as it will be much more interactive and immersive as opposed to using a pre-programmed animation. Through the use of a physics constraint I created a hinge point in which connected the door to the frame and allowed one to pivot around the other. Unfortunately this proved more complex than I had anticipated and resulted in numerous failures including an instance in which the door frame pivoted around the stationary door. My goal for next week is to have worked out how to apply physics to the door itself and have it properly open and then restricting its movement to prevent it from rotating more than 180 degrees.