Mover pawn with custom skeletal mesh not traversing blocks correctly

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’ve seen multiple videos about using other custom meshes with the mover pawn, but I always had odd visual results. Since I don’t need to be able to change between characters, I thought why not just copy the mover pawn and replace the skeletal mesh with my own. It works great and solves some of the visual issues I was seeing otherwise. The one problem I’m seeing is that when climbing/jumping over traversal blocks, it seems to put the character about 2x higher than it needs to. Has anyone else seen this, otherwise know what I might need to change to fix this? thanks

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That “about 2x too high” symptom usually means the mesh is being offset by the capsule half-height twice. In the stock Mover pawn the skeletal mesh component sits at roughly Z = -(capsule half height) relative to the capsule/root. When you copied the pawn and swapped the mesh, a few things can double it:

  1. Check your Mesh component’s relative location. It should be about -90 (for a default 90 half-height) and 0 for X/Y. If you moved the mesh up to “fix” the feet earlier, or your skeletal mesh has its origin in the middle of the body rather than at the feet, the offset stacks.
  2. Check the capsule/collision half-height on the Mover pawn (and on the Mover component’s shape if you changed it). The step/traversal logic uses the capsule, so a capsule taller than your character will make the character visibly clear the block by too much.
  3. If the traversal blocks use a Mover animation/“layered move” with a fixed height value, check whether it is using the base position or the capsule bottom. Print the actor location and the mesh world location while climbing: if the actor Z rises by the block height but the mesh rises by double, it’s a mesh/anim-offset issue. If the actor itself rises too much, it’s the capsule or the move’s height setting.
  4. Also check your Animation Blueprint/Control Rig for a root motion or “Root Offset”/Foot IK node adding a vertical offset on top.

A quick test: enable Show > Collision in the viewport (or “Show Collision” in PIE) and look at where the capsule sits relative to the character during the climb.