Week 5 - Diegetic Height Calibration

This week I'm implementing the height calibration aspect of the main menu by having the player interact with a machine that asks them to put their arms out in a T shape. The machine will scan them by playing an animation, then the game will adjust the players height accordingly.

I encountered an issue where the player couldn't stand on the machine platform. I looked at the VR Pawn and saw that it only allows the player to teleport onto surfaces that are a part of the navigation mesh, so static meshes were ignored, allowing the player to teleport around, but no into, convex meshes. I attempted to add the static mesh to the navmesh, but editing the bound volume didn't do anything.

I edited the VR pawn to allow the player to teleport onto any valid geometry. Originally, the blueprint only projected the cursor to the navmesh, but this change makes it so that the cursor projects to anything it can impact within the range of the arc. This makes the mesh collision a valid teleport location.

I then encountered a problem where the player clipped into the floor of the machine. This was because the collision preset wasn't set to the default in the static mesh's collision properties. I determined this by looking at the settings of a standard cube and seeing where they differed. The machine's mesh collision was set to ignore all dynamic objects, and since the VR pawn moves dynamically, it wasn't allowed to collide with any aspect of the machine.

I next had a problem where the door wouldnt close when the player overlapped the capsule collision trigger in the machine. This was because the hands for the VRPawn lacked any collision. I added a sphere collision to each hand, which overlapped the capsule as a result, allowing the door to shut.