Best way to animate non-interactable NPCs?

Development Character & Animation
1

I’m creating an Oculus demo where there are some dummies walking around and I’d like to know if the method shown in this video (Basic AI Navigation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KDazrBx6IY is the best or if I should just be using matinee. If I use matinee for walk cycles opposed to AI , am I saving resources?

The advantage of using the AI method is that it’s very fast to animate (just basically drop some waypoints), and by using matinee I can’t seem to make the feet “stick” to the floor. I have to spend a lot of time fine-tuning to make the feet feel coordinated with the actual speed.
The advantage of matinee is that I can simply drop the NPCs anywhere and they’re not bound to a navmesh.

2

If the scene is fully scripted and one off just use matinee. If it is explorable and you might want to expand the npc features than make them real AI.

3

My suggestion would be to use the AI and make them full AI, this gives you more flexibility in the long run. Having said that however, I have noticed that there are many different ways to achieve the same results in UE4. Use what works best for you at that point in time, if you find it is not performing well then try to change it up or modify what you are doing … it is the best way to learn.