Advanced Locomotion System V3

So its been a long time since Ive posted updates, but I’m proud to say that after finally getting a break from school I was able to finish and release it :slight_smile:

Preview -

V2 Update video -

Short Description - This system is an advanced bipedal character locomotion system focusing on high quality character animation with responsive movement. (100% BP)

Long Description - Too often game animation lacks quality due to the underlying movement and animation systems being poorly thought out. Animators can create good looking assets, but a badly designed animation system can diminish their quality and create a sub-par experience. This system’s purpose is to bridge the gap between the front end and back end of in-game animation, and give animators a good foundation to create assets that will work well with responsive character movement. This system demonstrates a method for achieving responsive movement while retaining a high level of animation quality.

This system:
• Looks realistic and works in many game types (3rd person shooter / Action Adventure / True first person)
• Keeps player in constant control
• Looks good at all times and conditions
• Simplifies animator workload wherever possible (For low budget games)
• Is very flexible and highly adjustable (Everything can be tweaked and tuned to get the best balance between movement and animation)

Features:
• Direct Capsule Control (No Root Motion)
• Multiple Locomotion States
• Smooth Blending between Directional Animations (minimal foot crossing, if any)
• Adjustable Rotation Offsets
• Single Pose Additive Leaning
• Custom Rotation Rates
• Multi Directional Stopping Transitions
• Transitions between Idle Stances
• Timeline Driven Turn In Place
• Third Person / True First Person
• Rotate Towards Velocity
• Look in Input Direction
• Jumping
• Seamless Ragdoll / Get Up Blending
• Multiplayer Support (Dedicated Server)

More info can be found on the Store Page here - https://www.unrealengine.com/marketp…tion-system-v1

Let me know what you think :slight_smile:

Thanks, Caleb

Edit:

Hey guys, real sorry I haven’t been keeping up on the forums. I do get a lot of emails, and support can many times be physically draining, as I’m only one guy with other things I need to do as well. I do try to get back to people when I can, but it’s always easier with emails, since things can easily get lost in the forums.

**So when I first started on this system I never intended to sell it. It started as a hobby and a learning project, and was basically my first introduction to game animation and development. I’m entirely self taught, and have no real experience before this ( I also suck at programming…math, right?) It was also something I was planning to use for my own projects, but due to the positive feedback and encouragement I received I decided to give the marketplace a shot. After it went live it kind of blew up and my life has been pretty busy ever since. I had never expected to sell very much and so I greatly underestimated the amount of support that would be needed of me. **

**One thing I learned early after release is that it’s very very difficult to make an asset as complicated and integral as this and have it work for everyone. Character movement and animation systems can be very hard to integrate with other systems (and vice versa) due to the nature of it being directly tied in with many other things. I’m also still very new and have very little programming knowledge so I did the best I could with what I had, and at the very least I hoped it could be a useful learning tool. I would have loved to build a system that was completely modular or “plug and play”, and I still would, but that’s super tricky, especially with something like this. Most of the times in game development, character movement and animation systems are built around the design of a specific game, and so they become highly specialized to work with a specific project (also, it can take months to build a system just for one game, and hiring someone to do it would cost much much more than $60). And even if something is made highly flexible and customizable, it still wont work for everyone. Each game will have its own unique needs and it’s impossible to account for everything. The best approach would simply be to make something as generic and boring as possible, but then you’d get generic and boring results…oh and then there’s networking, which has a completely different set of problems. **

**So yeah. I hope you guys understand the difficulties of some of the things I have to face. Obviously I’d love to make the best thing ever and have it work perfectly in all situations, but I mean c’mon…this is game dev and when does that happen. **

**I’ve been listening to all the feedback I can, and I understand that this system can be difficult to integrate into existing systems, especially for people who are new to programming, animation, and gamedev. I’ll be honest I’ve been wanting to move away from the marketplace for a while to work on my own things, but of course I don’t want to abandon my system either. Right now I’m still trying to decide what I should do. As I continue to learn, I discover new ways to make the system better, but I know that even if I recreate the system for the third time using different methods in order to be even more easy to work with, I’ll still run into some of the same things. So right now it’s kind of up in the air. Also, If I do recreate it, I may have to split up the system into a single player version and a multiplayer one. With networking, some things such as character rotation and physics are difficult to get just right, and so I might have to use some built in features to keep things generic enough for Multiplayer, but I don’t want to compromise on singleplayer quality if I don’t have to. **

**I also know that a lot of people want to see many more features. Again, I’m just one guy so I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t do everything for everyone. As long as I can build a system that is relatively easy to add to, I’m hoping that should be enough. **

Once again I’m sorry for my lack of support in some cases, I meant no offense. I’ll do my best to be more diligent If I can, but please please don’t expect me to be able to solve everyone’s problems right away. Sometimes I simply don’t know the answer as I’m still learning too :slight_smile:

All the best, Caleb Longmire

3 Likes

This is fantastic! How hard would this system be for multiplayer support?

I guess that all depends on your knowledge and experience with networking. You can think of it as a more advanced version of Epic’s 3rd Person Template, and so multiplayer support is definitely doable but it might require some extra work. I’m a full time student so my time to learn new things (like networking) is limited unfortunately, but I’m hoping to add to this system or perhaps release a new version with more functionality if this does well.

This is amazing man, thanks for the hard work. :slight_smile:
Are you planning on adding foot IK and active ragdoll states?

Depending on how well the system is received I plan to add more features and functionality. Those things are pretty high on my list. Unfortunately school is keeping me really busy and I don’t have much time so I don’t want to set anything in stone.

+1
love it
if support the multiplayer that be GREAT!!!

+1
Looks amazing ! great job !

This is a great asset pack.
One Question though. How did you generate the additional animation curves? Did you bake them into the animation in motion builder?

Nope, I simply made them in the curve editor. They are simple enough that it doesn’t take that much time. It also gives me the flexibility to tweak them to get the best results.

so you are saying that you guessed them?

I created them to match my animations…which curves are you talking about exactly?

Ah I see you set the footdirection to 90 in one of your animations and the interpolation gets calculated by the blendspace. :smiley:
I thought that you baked them down in Motion Builder or so.
Great asset pack by the way

Ohh ok. Yeah the curve stuff can be difficult to explain and hard to understand. I tried my best to explain the function of them in the documentation.

Thanks for the feedback!

I got a custom mesh to move around using animation retargeting. I run into a problem where the character tilts through the ground when turning, and flips upside down when jumping. I checked the import axis directions, and they match the epic mannequin. Any idea what I’m doing wrong?

Hmm that’s odd. Did you change any rotators or modify anything in the blueprints? It seems like there is roll and pitch being applied instead of just yaw. Id have to take a closer look somehow to see whats going on, as I’ve never encountered that problem before, or heard about it from anyone else. Would it be possible for you to send me your project files and so I can look at it? You can send me a link on the support email listed on the store page.

Other than that it could just be a re-targeting issue, or perhaps an additive animation issue.

Hi. I keep looking at this to purchase but as animation is not something I’ve delved into yet I’ve no idea if it would be useful. Maybe you could make a quick video showing setup and the steps you’d take to add and modify animations please? However i do know my game will need to use IK for various things so will this ultimately be no use without root motion?
Kind regards.
John

If you don’t know much about in-game animation, it might be a good idea to watch a few existing tutorials (like the ones provided by Epic) before you consider purchasing the system. My system is essentially a more advanced version of the default third person template, so you might want to start there to get comfortable with the in-game animation process.

I probably wont be able to make a tutorial at the moment, but the system comes with extensive documentation that explains what everything does. This can help you understand the system so you can expand upon it. The system is also built to be very flexible so expanding on it isn’t hard it you understand the logic flow :).

What kind of IK are you planning on implementing? IK shouldn’t be a problem with or without root motion.

Thanks for the quick reply. I sent you and email with the project to your support address.

I emailed support like suggested and the problem was fixed rather easily. Here is the text from the email I received in case anyone else has a similar issue:

Hey!

It was actually a really quick an easy fix, as I thought it would be. So the problem had to do with the Root Bone of your custom skeleton. It might not be oriented the correct way, but that’s ok! If you look in your characters animgraph, you will find a “RotateRootBone” node at the end before the “Final Animation Pose”. By default, the Root Offset Yaw float should be fed into the Yaw pin. Apparently, the Yaw of your root bone happens to behave like the Pitch (this might be the case if the character skeleton was created in Y-Up, instead of Z-Up) which is why the Root bone was being rotated weirdly. You can fix this issue easily by feeding the Root Offset Yaw pin into “Pitch” instead of “Yaw”.

Also, I noticed that the turning in place anims aren’t set up yet, but you can fix this by selecting them in the TurnInPlace macro inside the AnimBP event graph under Set Rotation.

Looks great but by watching the video its lacks some basic animations like crouching and prone? if it had these i would probably buy it as a base.