Marionette VR

As the name implies, this is about playing around with marionettes in VR.

Read up about it here

Requirements

• Oculus Rift + Touch, or Vive
• Unreal Engine 4.14
• Visual Studio installed
• VICO Dynamics plugin. (It's unfortunately pretty expensive for an Unreal plugin, but the results are well worth it.)

You should be able to open the .uproject file and run it.

Adding your own marionettes

• Open up BP_Marionette
• Click the skeletal mesh component and replace it with your own mesh

If your mesh uses a different skeleton than the Unreal default skeleton, you'll also have to:

• Make sure your skeletal mesh has a physics asset associated to it with constraints set up (look at Mannequin/Character/Mesh/SK_Mannequin_PhysicsAsset for reference)

• Inside BP_Marionette, take a look at the components called LeftHandRope, RightHandRope, RightFootRope, LeftFootRope, HeadRope. They have a property called bone name in them, and make sure to change that to reflect the bone structure of your own skeleton.

Optional: You can tweak things like rope width and length in the components mentioned above.

Key files

Hands

Unreal doesn't support the Oculus Avatar SDK yet, so I had to fake how the hands and gestures are done. You can find those in MarionetteVR/Core/Hands, with the blueprint called BP_Hand.

The pawn is at MarionetteVR/Core/VR_Pawn. It listens to trigger/grip presses from the controllers, and passes that along to BP_Hand.

Maps

The default map is Theatre. There is also a map called Creepy inside MarionetteVR/Maps. You should check it out ;)

Marionettes

All the marionette stuff is in MarionetteVR/Marionette. The BP_Marionette is the main blueprint for it, and BP_Nub represents the little tab/nub that you use to drag individual string around.