Hi, guys! I am working on procedural animation engine for walking characters. Currently, it works perfectly for different kinds of robots with two or more legs.
It could be used to animate units in a strategy game, robots in simulators or even for 2D games. It supports multiple gait types, all possible types of skeletons, different kinds of leg structure, legs count, partial support of hands, etc. There is a ton of properties, no sliding, and absolutely different level of control.
Top down:
Technical demo of in-cockpit view:
Some in-editor handling (in some other engine):
So, the question is, would you buy it? Is it worth to invest more time in polishing and features? I have many TODOs and WIPs (melee weapon animations, hands, animal and human movements). But, how do you think, is selling of this asset is able to support further work? Or am I have just to finish my game?
@mindwarp
I’ve been looking for something like this for a while actually.
The only things that would make or break this for me compatibility with current Inverse Kinematic solutions such as: BIK: Full Body IK Solver - Work in Progress - Unreal Engine Forums
As long as this can play nice with this and/or IK solutions on the UE4 Marketplace. I would like to know how it works character animations, if that have already been made can this enforce accurate walking (no sliding) on top of them?
How does the whole thing work with pre-made animations if at all?
Sure, depends on the quality, The robots above seem to ignore inertia and anticipation.
It is not only about solving the Inverse Kinematic but also about how the limbs actually move and the whole body reacts to this motion.
Sweet! I’d be interested in this too, given more information, videos / demo, and reasonable price (for me anything $100+ is only worth it if I know I’m going to use it for a game or prototype. $50 and below puts cool packs into the “nice to have / build something with in the future” territory.)
I’d want it to play nice with built-in Unreal pathfinding, AI controllers, and animation blueprints - eg can I play bespoke anims on top of the procedural movement (like upperbody only?), but as I’m making a game with robots right now, taking some of the animation burden off of myself could be huge! Cool stuff.
If the rate of posts are any indication, it seems people are in fact interested in this
We do need to know how this impacts performance, what limits are there (as in, how many characters can use this in a scene, performance of that) and can it be enabled/disable during runtime (for us to optimize are projects by disabling it for far away characters/out of view characters).
This engine, of course, maintains its own IK for steps and movement planning. Although I haven’t needed a connection to external systems, I can’t see much trouble of connecting its outputs to the external IK or animations. But it seems like a must-have feature, thanks for the requirement!
Thanks for the critics! Sure, inertia is what sits in my eye for a while :). And they do have anticipation, maybe not for enforced movement. Just as planned. Anyway, have ways to improve.
Sure, IK is the least tricky part. There are a bunch of heuristics and algorithms for decision-making and steps planning.
Hey this is good news, I brought it up because many projects have already integrated IK solutions into their work, and having the option to makes these work together instead of replacing entire systems makes your plug-in gold to us
I would be interested only if it runs on its own thread, because otherwise it just adds unnecessary workload to the main game thread maybe compromising game’s render time once you have some tens of actors using it.
We have a strong correlation with numbers For me it is close to base price VS sale price.
Yes, integration with external animations is one of the most requested features. And yes, for me it was about reducing work with animations too. And also about getting rid of sliding.
It is going ok! I already finished polishing of bipedal and multipedal skeletons. You can see some results at https://twitter.com/ykravchik . Now I’m planning to first publish the lib on the Unity Asset Store. Then, depending on sales, on the Unreal Store. I’m also considering contracts instead of store publishing.
