Procedural animation

[TechLord]

@VerumBit

THE RESEARCH:
I recently discovered **Procedural Animation **tecnique and was amazed by the natural movements you can achieve without any predefined skeletal package animations.
As far as I understdood, It is all based on physics and AI, IK bone rig and interpolation. The best video examples based on this tecnique are made by Makan Gilani and this is an example of what you can achieve with no player or enemy animations at all, just Procedural Animation system:
https://youtu.be/tKDzm8KgPP0?t=9
It has already been created a package in Unity: https://assetstore.unity.com/package…/moveen-101452 that contains all the principles of Procedural Animation.

THE GOAL:
the goal is to create a similar concept in UE4 via customizable Blueprints that must be simple and adaptable to any type of character

ADVANTAGES & DISADVANTAGES:
A: avoid skeletal rig limitations, Epic or Not Epic
A: stop using hundreads of animations with complex ABP graphs
A: leave to the AI system create all the interpolation between one keyframe position and the next one
A: apply this system to any type of character with N legs, wings, etc
A: have a more natural moving character responding to physics more than predefined recorded animations blended together
D: effort in building an initial Ai system
D: during the construction, always think out of the box is mandatory because the goal is to create a system that can be easily adapted to any type of character (human, animal, robot, walkin, flying, swimming, etc) with one or more arms/legs/wings

Sounds Amazing and I would have never imagined this to be possible 15 years ago. I look forward to whatever Animation System is developed from this body of work. Perhaps in the very near future, Full Scenes will animated procedurally.