How to setup 3rd person quadruped character?

Development Character & Animation
1

Hi there :slight_smile:

I’m currently working on a game in which you play a wolf. I need the animations and the movement system to work perfectly smooth and natural, so I tried a few approaches to movement and animations, but am not sure what is the best to continue on (as none of them really worked).

I want the wolf to lean into curves (when running), rotate its spine along the movement path and no ground sliding at all.

The first thing I tried was to setup normal character movement with an Anim Blueprint that rotates spine bones towards the move curve (kind of like this GwenFreyTheTA - YouTube) and set the play rate according to the speed, but there was still a lot of sliding in the curves.

The second thing was trying to write my own movement component and play a turn animation, if the movement input is not straight forward (again with the spine-rotating anim blueprint), but that didn’t feel good and still had a lot of ground sliding.

The last thing I just tried was to use Root Motion in all animations and totally drive the movement by animation. The input would then just decide what animation to play at which rate and move the player accordingly. The first try didn’t work at all, so I thought I’d ask you guys, if this is a good idea before I discard my whole movement system and replace it with a root motion system.

Did any of you ever tried to include a quadruped character? How did you solve the movement?

Thanks in advance!

2

Animate the lean-run in the 3D Modeling program itself and import the animation(s) as lean turn left/lean turn right accordingly. Set up your skeleton so your wolf has a root bonextending from the ground to the wolf’s center. Size the capsule in the character blue print so it extends from the top of the wolf’s back to the ground (this keeps the wolf stationed on the ground) Use root motion to slightly lower and lean the wolf when initiating a turn. As far as preventing it’s head or hind quarters from penetrating walls and other barriers, you would attach collision spheres to appropriate joints.

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