Following on from the previous week, I still had to light up the carousel and all the other lights around the level. There was 2 parts to the problem, the UE4 light objects needed to start turned off and then when the lever was pulled, they should all turn on, the other part was to change the material on the emissive models from a 0 emissive strength to a higher value whilst the level was running.
The spotlights and point lights were actually pretty easy, all I had to do was tick the box in the editor that was labelled as Hidden, then in the level blueprint where the lever actions are controlled, change the values of the hidden property to false.
Now the next part, about the emissive strength, was actually really difficult. This was because I had to learn about Material Instance Dynamics, but after spending a while trying to understand them, it got a little easier.
After sorting out the lights, I moved on to making the ferris wheel rotate, this was yet another challenging UE4 related task and much more difficult than the carousel rotation. It was more difficult because I had to separate out the model into 3 pieces, the stand, the wheel and one seat and make sure the pivot point was in the dead center of the stand and the wheel. Now the real difficulty was not making the wheel rotate, but making the duplicated chairs follow the wheel around but also swing freely so they didn’t go upside down and acted realistically. I did this by giving the seats physics constraints and attached it to the wheel, by the pivot point making the seat get affected by gravity.
