We are pleased to announce that we have launched our RunTime-Indie product for small and indie studios for just £99.
This is identical to the technology used by top publishers and studios for advanced full-body IK for foot placement, locomotion, look-at, pointing of weapons, climbing and lots more!
We have simplified the workflow and now all rig creation and tuning is done within the Unreal Editor! The toolset comes with ready made nodes, like foot placement, look-at and pointing of weapons, as well as the core solver node to build ANY behaviour. The full documentation and FAQ is included here.
Apply to any character, human, spider, quadruper or anything exotic!
The plugin now includes PC, but in the next month or so we will be adding our iOS, Android, MAC, tvOS, followed by PS4 and XBoxOne!
We are running a campaign till 24th of Jan, so please use this coupon “RT-INDIE-6Jan” to get 30% discount here.
Very interested in picking this up before the 24th. I’ve done some research on your tool and want to make sure I’ve got the right idea on its use. Does the following workflow sound accurate?
Model Humanoid character in Blender/Maya/Max
Rig (FK/IK) Humanoid in the same
Create for example an animation where skeleton presses a switch in front of it
Import rigged model into UE4
Import the animation
Use iKinema plugin to create the IK solvers for the bones of interest on the humanoid rig
Use iKinema plugin to manipulate that switch pressing animation to press a switch anywhere, not just in front of the skeleton
Essentially you can vary one animation in an infinite number of ways, hence less assets. These variations could be pressing objects, looking at objects, pointing, foot placement, etc.
Some studios even do the all the turnings procedurally by just manipulating a forward walking animation.
There are more thinks that you can do on top, for example manipulate centre of mass to auto balance or bend forward on a climb walk.
I made some question in the other thread, I paste the questions here:
How often the new “not free” updates at £30, will be released?
Do you have any road-map?
How much cost the non indie runtime for those who reach the 80k indie limit? I cant find the price.
this is a question with probably an obvious answer (sorry, programer with little art skills). I need place my characters hands on a weapon mesh and keep them in a correct place, can i do this with runtime-indie right?
Do you have a video or documentations explaining how to do this with runtime-indie?
I would buy if not for the $30 upgrade fee.
UE4 is very volatile with updates and plugins stop working quickly, I would be ****** off if I’d have to pay $30 every time I need to update a plugin for the newest engine major version.
The DRM also is a pain only for the legit users; whenever hardware is changed there’ll be issues with licenses while pirates are out there still freely using your pirated software anyway.
This is a good point. On the website you say the following:
*Do I need to upgrade and when?
We are adding new features and from time to time we might ask you to upgrade for a small fee of £30.*
Can you clarify on the frequency of these payments? Will we have to pay £30 on every upgrade/new feature? It’s not clear as you say ‘from time to time’. What does that mean?
I don’t want to be nickel and dimed for every single upgrade through out the course of a year.
Some major releases would involve an upgrade fee; We expect 2 to 3 over the year, for example tvOS support, console support, new features and nodes, etc.
The plugin will be updated to the official UE4 releases.
Yes you can use the runtime-indie to place the hands on the weapon.
We have a node that does this; Documentation is available here.
Could we upgrade at the end of the year and pay 1 fee for all the upgrades for that year? Certainly sounds like iKinema costs £99 for an indie license plus at least £30 per annum for updates.
I would recommend thinking about Allegorithmic’s upgrade plan where you’re only charged an upgrade fee on a major version change e.g. v2.0 to v3.0. This is much more attractive to indies.
HI, yes this is what it is - you pay from version to version. However, RunTime-Indie v2 might be only available for say Unreal Engine 4.12 as maintaining all RT-I versions to all UE4 releases will be very costly to us.
And yes if you upgrade down the line to a version, you get all the latest …
The license is perpetual so as long as your environment doesn’t change you don’t need to buy an upgrade.
I agree at that price the hobbyists and even small 1-2 man indie teams wouldnt risk having to pay for updates. Huge market share gone. Might need to make additional pricing models. Just a suggestion I have no such need for this ATM.
I’m too worry about the “not-free” updates, the perpetual license for the version you got is great, but you might simply can’t use it when API changed in Unreal Engine. But that might be the problems of all close sourced plugins ( I guess we’ll see more coming to marketplace this year)
Do you have a demo? I’m quite skeptical about the whole thing, and last time I wanted to try web demo ikinema, it immediately asked me for my paypal account. Which left negative impression.
Also, would be nice to have that available through steam. But I bet that won’t be done any time soon.
In general, it is very unclear what your software is capable of. Videos show very basic functionality that is roughly equivalent to very simple animation rig. Can I use it for animation retargeting? What will happen to head’s ik solver if character is tilted sideways or turned upside down? Does it work with blender? Would it work with with complex animations like cartwheel, walking on hands, or doing complex martial movements? What about props that can be thrown, juggled, dropped, and moved from one hand to another? How about multi-character movements, like choke holds, throws and grabs?
That kind of thing. Instead, the video shows process of assigning limbs to a chicken. That’s … not very promising.
The runtime product in Unreal is not for retargeting. For retargeting we have and the Action products in maya and motionbuilder. IKinema also drives the animation tool in Modo and other high-end packages.
Runtime in unreal essentially allows customization of your animation during gameplay or for producing new animation by manipulating IK constraints in a procedural way in the game. Say you need to pint a weapon, instead of having 15 or mpre c;lips to blend, you have only a single pose and runtime produces all variation without any additional assets.
All what you describe above is possible, you just need to ciome up with the way to drive (puppeteer) the IK rig in the game - this is not easy though but we provide ready made nodes for some behaviors like pointing, foot placement, look at and so on. More are coming in the future
As you can imagine we keep all of our tools to latest unreal API (official); From time to time we will be also adding new features. Upgrades will apply to new futures and will be from time to time as described above, license is perpetual and we grant you publishing rights as per the agreement…
Each time UE 4 comes out with a new version (4.11, 4.12, ect), you have to pay Ikinema $45 US (more or less) to get the upgraded version of this plugin?