Vehicle Assets
It is better if you read a little of how Vehicle are managed in Unreal Engine from Epic documentation, so you know what to expect.
You need to have the 3D model of a Vehicle correctly rigged to import it. At that point you can import it as Skeletal Mesh, which will give you three assets:
- Skeletal Mesh: The actual mesh of the vehicle;
- Physics Assets: The physics representation of the vehicle (such as collisions);
- Skeleton: The skeleton asset to explore the bones.
Once you have those, you can also create the Animation Blueprint, needed to correctly move the vehicle, by creating it from scratch and making it inherit from VehicleAnimationInstance.
As Unreal Engine doc states: "A Physics Asset is used to define the physics and collision used by a Skeletal Mesh.", and that is what we use it for Vehicles too.
As you may have read it is not able to pre-generate collisions correctly, so every time you import a Vehicle you delete them and then re-create them. You will need a collision for the main chassis of the Vehicle and for every tire.
The Vehicle Animation Instance we use for our Vehicle is simple as you can see from the screenshot.
It is responsible "to control the animation of our Vehicle Skeletal Mesh so that it has animations specific to a vehicle, like spinning tires, suspension, handbrakes, and steering." as Unreal documentation states
