I’m surprised that there isn’t an equivalent UE4 IK-Locomotion blueprint on the marketplace (unless I’ve missed it)
that works as well as the Unity’s system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
I’ve seen IKinema, but it requires a $19.99/month subscription.
(I would prefer to buy a blueprint as a one-off payment).
Is it because:
(a) the implementation quite difficult/complex to produce in blueprint
(b) no one is really interested in characters that can realistically navigate height-based obstacles with correct foot placements
(i.e. everyone is fine with a simple/crude vertical offset)
(c) not enough interest to justify the development time required
(d) developers are implementing such IK-Locomotion, but only for prorietary use and not for sale
The ue4 skeleton already has IK bones, so you are 90% the way there. Tilt the IK foot root to match the slope, raise / lower feet based on line traces, angle the feet, etc.
@BlackRang666 - the problem is that it requires a bit of trickery in order to deal with the standard capsule collision. There are some threads floating around about how to do it, but I wouldn’t say it’s totally trivial for most people (this is referring to foot-IK).
Well, I can’t post the systems I’ve done for work, just hints. Decide how many feet you want touching the ground at a particular moment in time and then work from there.
I have a C++ implementation for a full body IK system floating around. Right now it just seems quite hard to get the C++ content pushed to the marketplace so I haven’t put the effort into making it release ready.
Anyone looking into IK solutions is trying to add a level of polish to their products. The goal for anyone making an IK solution should be to build a system that holds logical, polished foot placement on any angle or step that’s naturally within the boundaries of the character. The first step would be to make it work with a default human character (like the sample one provided by Epic). The stretch goal would be to add functionality so that buyers could easily change the constraint limits/locations to match creatures of any shape or size (or number of feet).
Something like this has far greater potential to sell since it’s not based on art style. It would be used by anyone who has feet in their game. That’s a lot of games. It applies to a huge portion of the UE4 developer community.
That’s why I’m surprised I haven’t seen it yet. It would sell quite well on the marketplace (as a blueprint) if it was drag-n-drop (ish) with tweakable params.
A physics/animated character (biped/quadraped) that is aware of the collision model it is walking on/over so the legs & pelvis height adjust accordingly and naturally, just like in the Unity example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=. Basically, slopes, and steps.
As n00854180t said, it isn’t trivial. I have done similar IK/Locomotion in another engine and it takes a lot of work to make it generic enough to drop into any project rather than being in-house and bespoke.
I’ll look into that when I have some time, thanks.
Hand IK would be pretty sweet as well but this ventures more into Full Body IK. When a sphere overlaps a wall with collision adjust the arm to react to the wall etc… I know Foot IK is the main one tho…
