Full Body IK with IKinema. Demos And Examples.

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hey guys,

Over the last couple of weeks, we have been working on updating and creating new content to show off interesting behaviours using our full body IK solver – RunTime. I’m hoping to use this thread as a kind of official-unofficial place to archive these examples for people looking for ways they could implement IK into their projects.

On top of that, there are a number of places we monitor for feedback and with the Unreal community being super important to us, we wanted an obvious place here to post. So, if you have any questions or requests, feel free to add them below. We are also really interested in any examples of behaviour that you guys have implemented using IK already or think would be a cool idea.

We will be updating and checking back here regularly. As we update with new content, this post will likely get formatted to make it more archivey. If you guys post any material I will be sure to include it as well.

UE4.14 Demo Pack:
Includes full set up and blueprints for all of the behaviour shown below.

**Current Demo:

Foot Placement Tutorial Part 1**

ARKit Interactive AR

**Community Examples: **

](IKinema - Part 1 - Basic foot setup - YouTube): Playlist covering a bunch of cool IK behaviour and fleshed out tutorials - Foot Placement/Climbing/Reaching/Button Pushing/Generating strafe animations.

Past IKinema Demos:

Stretch IK
Video Link: - YouTube

Quadruped Foot Placement Speed Setup
Video Link: - YouTube

Generating Reactive Combat Animations Using Full Body IK.
Video Link: - YouTube
Tutorial: https://ikinema.com/index.php?mod=do…how=184&id=315

Full Body Prone That Adapts To Terrain
Video Link: - YouTube
Tutorial: http://www.ikinema.com/index.php?mod…how=184&id=308

Racers Part II. Full Body Procedurally Generated Animation Driven By In Game Props.
Video Link: - YouTube

Bikers - Prop Driven full body IK
Video Link: - YouTube

Quadruped Foot Placement:
Video Link: Quadruped Foot Placement
Tutorial found here: http://www.ikinema.com/index.php?mod…how=184&id=312

RunTime For VR - Upper Body IK Solving And Crouch Behavior
Video Link: Upper Body IK Solving And Crouch Behavior In VR
UE4 Project Download: Dropbox Link
Tutorial: http://www.ikinema.com/index.php?mod…how=184&id=310

Performance Demo - 650 characters @ 60FPS
Video Link: Full body IK solving for 650 in-game characters locked at 60FPS

Adaptive Prone - Prodcedurally Generated Prone
Video Link:Adapting static prone animation to adapt to terrain Video
Tutorial http://www.ikinema.com/index.php?mod=documentation&show=184&id=308.

IK For AR
Video Link: IKinema For Procedural AR and Mixed AR Video

2

Hey all, time for another demo.
We have been experimenting with integrating our bull body IK solver into AR (using this great plugin UNREAL4AR). We take our assets and their static poses straight into AR and use real world targets to drive their animation.

Here is the video:

We also had some requests for some text tutorials and thought the prone demo we showed last would be a good starting place. It uses only Unreal Starter assets and covers everything from project creation on-wards, so everyone should be able to follow along.
Tutorial found here.

Any feedback is welcome.

3

Great news. I really like the idea of more info on how to use IKinema. Feel free to add my videos i have on my youtube channel. I’ve talked to AlexH and Ahmed earlier about it.

4

Demo Time!

This time around we are showing off the scale at which IKinema’s full body IK solving can be implemented. The video below showcases IK solving used to procedurally generate animations for 650 individual characters in a single map running at a solid 60FPS on PC. With a strategic use of LOD to reduce the number of solves far in the background and a solve time of around ~0.1ms per character in the foreground, we get smooth performance and quality solving on a large scale.

In other news, for anyone interested in VR, we released a new demo project (found here), to showcase some of the new features found in the latest release of RunTime (we will be following it with an updated tutorial shortly).

If you have any questions or comments, leave them below.

5

Some feedback, the product looks good and very useful. However the pricing is quite prohibitive for most hobby or indie developers, but that may not be your market. Perhaps consider indie friendly pricing to increase adoption.

6

Hey, RunTime does come in an Indie flavour at its own price point. Its a one-off payment that gets you a perpetual license with free updates as we add new features and/or Unreal gets updated.

7

HumanoidVR Demo/Tutorial

Hey, we have a new video/demo project/tutorial to share.

With out latest update for RunTime came a new pre-oriented motion controller task which enhances our upper body IK solving in VR. We put together a demo project to showcase this found here: Demo Project

We also have a video of the solving in action. We have been asked many times over the last few months about the possibility of solving for the lower body with only upper body motion controllers. We have been experimenting with driving the hips based on your players hands and head and have been able to produce reliable crouching animations (bear in mind we only have a single static animation for all of the content in this post. All animation is procedurally generated by our solver). The crouching and VR solving is shown below and is something we are still experimenting with.

We also have a tutorial, which, coupled with the demo project should guide you through the process of setting up the same project. Found Here.

8

Quadruped Foot Placement

Another day another demo.

This video/tutorial combo covers procedurally generating full body animation using IKinema’s RunTime plugin for reliable in-game foot placement for a quadruped character.

The set-up is repeatable for any quadruped skeleton so we have included a tutorial found here: Quadruped Foot Placement With IKinema

Shout out to https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/animals-deer whose skeletal mesh/running animation we used.

Any questions, don’t hesitate.

9

Hi all,

Today’s demo showcases how you can procedurally generate full body animation using our IK with moving props in-game. This was a fun one to put together and I think the results are pretty cool. We included some look-at behaviour for the head but its mostly position/orientation tasks for the limbs/hips/chest of our character and the solver handles the rest.

It’s worth noting, you can drive the props however you like. In the video, we used animated meshes but we could have just as easily used game-logic and static meshes to achieve the same results.

On to the video,

Full Body IK Using In-Game Props:

As always, any questions/feedback/suggestions/comments etc. etc. are welcome.

10

Racers Part II

We had the biker, now we have the car… driver? Doesn’t sound as cool as biker but that’s OK.

In a similar vein to last weeks demo, we have another example of prop driven, full-body, procedurally generated, IK character animation to post (what a mouth full).

We start with a static pose and our character is fully animated using our generic IK solver node and some simply animated skeletal meshes.

On to the video.

Any questions, give me a shout.

11

Prone II

Today we are revisiting the procedurally generated adaptive prone/crawl animation that can be applied to any character.

We have gotten a nice prone animation to use on the UE4 mannequin from mixamo, so we thought we could use this weeks demo to showcase a fully adaptive, procedurally generated prone animation which adapts to the terrain.

We use the crawling animation from mixamo as input to our foot placement node so that the most important parts of the characters body are placed firmly on the ground. It gets rid of any floating/clipping your character might have to deal with otherwise, while naturally positioning the body relative to the ground.

We have a write up of the set up used here in our documentation from a previous demo, the only difference here is that we have an actual animation to feed into the full body IK solver now.

Tutorial: http://www.ikinema.com/index.php?mod=documentation&show=184&id=308

On to the video:

12

Reactive Combat Animations

We have a new demo to share with everyone with some potentially exciting behaviour.

This time around, we are showing off fully reactive combat animations that made use of only three base animations (shown in the video) which we layered our IK on top of.
That allowed us to generate fully dynamic and controllable punch and hit animations which can be varied in any number of ways quick and easy.

We will be re-releasing our demo project with the latest demos included and also a tutorial for the video below.

14

The tutorial for the above punching demo has gone live and can be found in our documentation here: http://www.ikinema.com/index.php?mod=documentation&show=184&id=315[http://www.ikinema.com/index.php?mod=documentation&show=184&id=315](http://www.ikinema.com/index.php?mod=documentation&show=184&id=315)

If you are interested in the blueprints for any of the above demos, we have updated our demo project for UE4.14, which includes a number of improvements and we have included all of the above behaviours.

Here is the dropbox link if you want to try it out: Dropbox - Error

If you already have RunTime, just make a “Plugins” folder in the top level of the directory and copy over the contents of the RunTime plugin. You will also need the typical C++ visual studio environment for developing in UE to build the project.

If you don’t already own a RunTime license but want to try out our IK, you can get a free trial from our website here.

15

Does it work with custom source builds of the engine now?

16

Hey John,

On their forum somebody mentioned a work around. This is a link http://www.ikinema.com/index.php?mod=forum&forum=9&theme=349&pg=2. It works but a little bit long winded process still :frowning:

17
  • I am need to modify some sword animations so that they correctly target specific bones on a target mesh. Is this something that I could easily do with ikinema?

Basically the arc of the swing may be too high or too low and I want to modify it at runtime based on the targets position.

I am downloading now and starting to work through some of the tutorials…

Thanks for any insight/advice

18

Hey,

This sort of behaviour is well within IKinema’s wheel-house.

A quick set up would be to give the sword bone (assuming it has one and is included with the player skeleton) a position/orientation task. You could then generate target positions at runtime as you please.

Using a similar method of blending into and out of IK covered in the punching behaviour above, your sword would move from its position in the original animation, to the target location and the full body of your character would be modified to allow it to best hit its target.

You would want to blend in to the IK as the character begins swinging, until its sword reaches the generated target and then out of the IK as it returns to rest.

The logic is very very similar to that in the punch demo, in the video we used a socket attached to the head bone whose position we track during runtime. We then use this position as the target for our other characters hand when he punches. If we move the socket around the punches will be aimed at this new location.

19

Quadruped Full Body IK Foot Placement In Under 3 Minutes

No new behaviour this time around, instead we are going to be giving one of our staples a little bit of love.
The latest demo is a speed run setting up full body foot placement for a quadruped character. It takes less than 3 minutes and only a handful of clicks.
The only assumption going in is that your character blueprint and input handling are already taken care of. Following that all you need is to create the IKinema Rig (where you select and state which bones you want to give IK tasks) and then drop a foot placement node in your animation blueprint. With a little bit of config you are good to go with the basic set up.

If you want a more in-depth set up we have a tutorial here:

Quadruped Full Body IK Foot Placement In Under 3 Minutes:

20

So it still doesn’t work, that’s sad. That workaround isn’t a solution.

@-IKinema You should create this plugin in a way that it works with custom engine versions. Look at plugins on the UE4 marketplace, many of them do it correctly. I would really like to use IKinema, but it has to work with custom engine builds for that.

21

It is planned for RunTime Indie but there is no concrete time line unfortunately.
Development is currently focused else-where in the form of new features (we have a cool one coming up next week) and supported platforms (android/ios).