Office hours · All levels · 2 hours · Past session
Office Hours — Cables
with Alex Coulombe
Fri, Sep 4 · 1pm–3pm ET
Taught live on Zoom and recorded.
About this session
A Friday office hours spent building something fun: cables and vines you can grab and swing on in VR, prototyped in Blueprints and tuned live in a headset for comfort.
What we covered
In this office hours session, Alex Coulombe explored techniques for creating interactive swinging cables and vines in Unreal Engine for VR experiences. The discussion covered collision filtering, procedural segment colliders, and player attachment logic using Blueprints. Coulombe tested the cable physics implementation directly in a VR headset to evaluate motion smoothness and comfort.
- 01Setting up the default Cable Actor and exploring native physics parameters and elasticity.
- 02Attaching cable ends dynamically to reference actors and skeletal mesh components using sockets.
- 03Enabling cable collision and adjusting segment count and solver iterations for visual fidelity.
- 04Prototyping Blueprint overlap logic to detect proximity and bind cable attachment to player hands.
- 05Generating dynamic sphere colliders across cable segments using particle locations for grabbing along the length.
- 06Configuring custom collision channels and presets to prevent cables from self-colliding or triggering unwanted overlaps.
- 07Migrating test logic into the VR template and setting up hand collision spheres on the pawn.
- 08Parenting and updating player pawn position to cable endpoints using event tick and particle locations.
- 09Smoothing player swinging movement and reducing motion sickness using VInterp To and delta seconds.
AI summary of the session recording's transcript — the recording itself is the source of truth.
