Believable foot placement, body lean and angle*velocity blended animations is something that I can’t find any resources for when it comes to Unreal. CryEngine has Parametric Skeletal Anim system and Unity has Locomotion system created by Rune Skovbo Johansen. I know animations have changed a lot in UE4, and I’m wondering if we’re able to achieve the same quality of animation with the new engine.
Anyone already achieved a similar level of quality with their animations, or know any info regarding this subject?
We’re still working on fleshing out tutorials and documentation (link) for animation, but for an initial tour, I’d suggest checking out the Animation level in the Content Examples project.
We have 1D and 2D parametric blend space assets; you can pick arbitrary parameters for the space, including angle and velocity.
We also have a number of IK nodes, but foot placement is not a built-in node. However, the PlatformerGame example includes a plugin to do Foot IK (it’s kept separate from the engine so we have a test of adding new animation nodes outside of the engine).
I read your blog and your attempt to solve this issue Kris - would you say these guys have accomplished that task? I’d be looking at getting it for 3 animators for an indefinite amount of time (6-8 months at least), which is a small investment for something that is potentially very buggy for the next 6 months while they work through UE4 issues.
Do you think it’s going to actually save significant time over the solutions provided by Epic using 1D/2D parametrics?
PlatformerGame isn’t released yet for the monthly version of the engine (at least that’s what my version is saying here). Is the plugin from that example IKinema, or something else I should check out?
The IKinema plugin is not used in the PlatformerGame. However, Our solution and UE4 integration is used by top AAA studios and it is now at an affordable price for PC and mobile (late April) $19.99.
As part of the pack you get when downloading the UE4 plugin, is a locomotion behavior, with procedural foot placement and into/outoff transition for (Idle—>Walk—>Idle).
A youtube video showing what can be done can be found at our announcement post at
in the editor view it’s quite good as the players are in static poses. however when the game is played (4:00 in the video) it’s really jumpy and flickerish, the character teleports to ~30 cm below in some cases. sorry but for me this looks far from usable, is this planned to be improved?