Just to update my Procedural Animation work: 2nd tentative ‘Poses Interpolation’ was a total failure!
Also 3rd tentative ‘Multiple leg joint’ was a failure due to world<>relative rotations complexity.
I’m at my 4th tentative called ‘Simple 3 bone Lever’ and it seems more stable and simple to manage via bprint+parameters.
Sorry, I should have referred to it as **LIMB **as it relates to Legs/Arms (easier for me as a user to understand). LEVER sort a hints to a type Physics constraint. Looks incredible, nevertheless.
Procedural RUN tests: I compare the four procedural LIMBs animations (2legs, 2 arms) with the mannequin skeletal anims…just to see how much I 'm close to a realistic movement.
Need to move the overall structure up and down to give a realistic bouncing movement. The bprint that moves the 4 LIMBs is all there in the pic!
@VerumBit The potential for this type of animation is enormous. I can visualize chaining LIMBs to form the central SPINES.
I’m ready to make a video this week.
Yesterday night I destroyed and re-created the whole bprint because there were too many parameters to manage and most of them were rotation angles. I must keep it simple to let anybody use this as** it will go to the marketplace**. Now you can control the walk/run animation with just 2 float numbers (1 limb angle and 1 spine torsion)…the rest is in the code and it calculates the movements based on the capsule speed (walk, run) and on the jump (if is in the air or not). Also the spine+head torsion is automatic and based on the closest actor that has a specific TAG ‘LookAtMe’ (can be an enemy skel mesh, a static mesh, whatever has a TAG ‘LookAtMe’ )
Much more to build but after 4 failures I found this 5th to be the best and the simplest to manage.
Next steps:
- feet+leg must align to the ground inclination to generate a sort of IK effect
- legs lateral angle must align to the ground inclination (this happens when you walk across a mountain, not vertically but laterally) and your leg lateral angle changes to be close to the ground
- when jumping arms must rotate to check for possible grip points on front walls->if they overlap a grip point, then pass to grip/climb positon and automatically jump vertically to climb the wall
Nice to have:
- Once I have stabilized these animations, I’ll try to map the procedural man key bones on the skeletal epic mannequin bones and see if it is possible to animate a skeletal mesh using the procedural animation rules which are much more dynamic and easy to control via parameters
- I’d like to add some sort of muscle streched sphere meshes on legs and arms and scale them dynamically during leg/arm animation to try to replicate a sort of muscle effect. This would really take the animation to the next level of realism. As is today the muscle increase law I set is simply: when the leg is compressed and the foot touches the ground then scale the muscle mesh and increase it, otherwhise decrease it gradually to the relaxed scale shape.
Pretty impressive how you can retool the blueprints. For marketplace, will the system only be suitable for biped animation? I hope not…
You can create any kind of creature that has a spine, arms and legs. By the way, the only difference between an arm and leg is a ‘-1’ value that decides if the knee or elbow opens forward or backward….apart from this value, leg and arm follow the same animation rules.
@VerumBit this system really sounds and looks powerful thus far. Let me know if you need a tester for network replication. Ill pre-purchase if necessary.
I’m also interested in the procedural animation topic, but haven’t had time to do anything tangible yet. Very nice progress here @VerumBit !
In the 4.24 there is something new called Inertial Blending:
Maybe this will help you? Sounds promising, but I’m not sure how it works and what exactly it does.
@VerumBit I’m new to this whole thing but I want to learn how to do stuff like this so I’m researching it as well. I know I have a long way to go before I can share my original work, but I have found a video on the subject that has gotten me interested in the topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE if you wanted to learn how someone has made something that looks insanely good and is very basic, yet really powerful. What I would like to do is ultimately point to a sekeleton, plug in poses, and be able to animate anything with just a few inputs. I have gotten a bunch of free assets and paid for several as well so I have a few really nice quality animation sets, but the idea of procedural animation feels like it’ll be the most fluent way to create a game and keep it running smoothly, especially for small teams (ie, if I were to keep going solo, I would benefit from a system like this). If you ever manage to get this system working well and sell it, I would definitely buy it.
I saw the rabbit video. Very cool approach, blending from pose to another pose.
I recently was fascinated by the work of Mattias Malmer on twitter, who gave mne an explanation on how he moves each leg of his creature:
[https://twitter.com/3Dmattias/status/1197441317959294976
](https://twitter.com/3Dmattias/status/1197441317959294976)
@VerumBit, Will we be able to pull off tail / tentacle procedural animations like these with multi segment limbs/spines?
Ahhh that tail stuf is a new entry! Very well made.
It could be done using my fractaltree bprint and animating 1 line of points connected together, rotating in a loop and then set these point in a vecotr array as world loc and use them to create a spline. Lot of test and work to reach that fluid animation!
I saw this work in Houdini and is an amazing creature with procedural walk! The camera motion movement is also amazign and is captured from a real camera movement with motion capture.
I’m not sure it is interesting for you but I’ve read your subject and found it really exciting. Recently, I’ve seen some papers on this kind of work made with Unity and neural networks, so I wanted to share it with you : GitHub - sebastianstarke/AI4Animation: Bringing Characters to Life with Computer Brains in Unity</
It’s a Github with videos, demos and papers published on his researches.
PS: sorry for my English if there are any mistakes left.
Yes was one of the first video I saw: as written above, it uses poses and blending from pose to pose + some compression and rotations.
What I’m working on is a more structured creature, where you start from an IK leg (3 bones), attach it to a body (a sphere that should be the pelvis) and frome there move the body and have the leg follow it on any terrain. Then add more legs, arms, bodies and so on. You can make a man, a spider, any kind of creature.
Found this thread when researching how to make procedural animations in Unreal (still pretty clueless atm) and just wanna say thank you everyone for sharing all the links and lessons learned.
Out of curiosity, it’s been over 9 months since last post here. OP, how ya hanging in there? Did generalizing the procedural animation system at a high level of quality with plenty of params become too complex? If possible, could you share the technical downsides that got in your way?
Really interested in hearing more about your journey here, sounds like a lot happened!
It’s like you are telling the character.:
*'start off standing up here, like this, then figure out (by yourself…) how to end up standing down there like this, all bent over with your hands over your head… k? Also, if there is anything in your way, like a rope or a pipe, don’t forget to react naturally to it! like, hold your hands out to deflect if there is time, or just smash into it if there isn’t! *
LOL
It won’t (necessarily) have personality, it is intended to do the necessary physic ‘basics’ using ‘physical’ mechanics necessary to get from where you were, to where you want to be. (Not having tried it but knowing so many things a lot like this even from as far back as the DOS days (30 or so years ago, 
I was working in 3D Studio for DOS what became 3ds Max!) anyway, i’m certain, it is as extensible and complex as you want to make it, ie: I fully suspect you could configure it run from here to there and favor your left leg, (Running while hurt preset’ … I know IU could do all that in Character Studio (not procedurally) but using multiple motion capture tracks (or takes) that ‘informed’ each other in a weighted fashion,. This would allow the same sort of layered approach, just without using motion capture,
(or maybe also with Motion Capture: to add what might be called (instead of ‘blend shape’) with BONES, (OR BONES THAT HAPPEN TO MORPH> I have used that too.)
So,. more like,. ‘Blend Relative Bone-Group Positions’ to layer specific personality or even reactive acting or DIALOG!!
Using bones instead of morph targets like I did way back when in DOS!) .
…) but mostly, this tool is about, using the …‘natural’ physical abilities (and maybe more importantly: LIMITS!) of the body, the joints and (and perhaps more importantly: WEIGHT!) and Gravity and Time,.,. All come together to make one perfect solution that a Human (Or Centipede or Alien Jelly) would use to go from here to there!
Woody.
my new series premieres soon!
‘WORKING (while…) IN VR!’**
Subscribe for announcement: youtube.com/NextWorldVR
Hey OP I was wondering wether you would be open to share the project that you’re working on and maybe we could all push changes and make it happen soon because the idea is awesome and I do feel that there is a need for something like this in the Unreal world. Maybe we could start collaborating via GitHub/Perforce etc. ?