I decided to try out enabling and disabling the physics when picked up and see if that would improve some of the crazy swings of the asset when in motion. it seems like it has helped and i also adjusted the attachment point from a general grab point using the scene object to just parenting it the character mesh with a socket from the ribcage area.

I wanted to see if I can trigger a success state, i looked at a couple of different tutorials, I wanted to blur out the scene and show some text. I created a widget and added it to the viewport. Then i probably spent about 20 min or so looking at different ways to adjust the post processing volume so I can change the depth of field.

Which later I realised it probably does not work with the orthographic view and therefore no matter what I did in the blueprint the visuals won’t be visible. I did however find a way to desaturate the scene which is probably something I will use when I am looking into the fail state.

Instead what I did is that I found a tutorial that allows you to add a background blur component to the UMG widget, which works exactly how I want it!

I then spent a bit of time with this tutorial, it’s really long but the guy does a really good job explaining concepts and tradeoffs of certain blueprint decisions for detecting when the player is in proximity to an interactable object. I went through it quickly until i got to almost the end and learnt about the node patch i need “add impulse” which requires some shuffling of the order of my blueprint to make it look right. but it did the job.

I then wanted to add some particle effects when I pick up the art, which is more complicated than I anticipated. I made some graphical stars and circle texture so it can be used for particles. Maybe I will continue that tomorrow, since I plan to start adding enemies over the weekend.