2.4 Creating a Rotary Wheel

In this section, we will once again use the Turnable (Lever) actor, which can be found under Components in the Tool Spawner. This time, however, it will not be configured as a lever, but as a rotary wheel. Click on Turnable (Lever) to add a new one to the scene.

Position it as shown in front of the other actor and direct your attention to the Details panel.

Under the menu item "Settings – Mesh", you can assign any 3D model to the mesh. Click the dropdown next to the mesh field, type "SM_Valve" in the search bar, and select the suggested 3D model named SM_Valve_Test.

The result should look as follows: As you can see, the wheel is now rotated 90 degrees relative to the red arrow, which represents the rotation axis.

To correct this, open the "Mesh Pivot Transform" section and set all rotation values to 0, as shown below.

The 3D model of the rotary wheel is now aligned with the rotation axis. The result should look as follows.

In the next step, we select the wheel in the viewport and rotate it 90 degrees using the arrow pointing toward the drawer. We then position the wheel just in front of the drawer.

In the next step, we need to take care of the grip point of the wheel. As you can see in the previous image, the "Hand Offset" is located below the wheel.

To correct this, go to the “Hand Offset” parameter in the Details panel and set all three values to zero. This centers the interaction point in the middle of the wheel.

Now, let’s adjust the Hand Range. Enter a value of 11 here — this nicely covers the entire wheel with a collision shape.

Finally, we want to set the degrees the wheel needs to be rotated.

To do this, go to the top of the Details panel under the “Settings – Angle” section. Set the “Min Angle” to 0 and the “Max Angle” to 720. This parameter should result in the wheel needing to be rotated two full turns to the right.

To activate the wheel and make it interactive in VR, we need to enable it again using the Tasklist Editor. Create a new section with a task that includes the new object. It should look as follows:

Now try it out in VR.