Rodents: Rabbit, Squirrel & Rat

Distribution UE Marketplace
1

Rodents is now Available in the Unreal Marketplace. :slight_smile:

Rodents makes use of the Perception System in conjunction with Behavior Trees.
These Rodents will move between random Rodent Path Nodes, taking breaks to feed and rest. They will run away from any Actor with a “Enemy tag” that has entered their perception range. So you can have many Enemy’s running around your levels and these rodents will run away from all of them, including Player and NPC Actors. Very easy setup.

Rodents v1.0 Includes:

  • (3) Rigged and Animated Skeletal Meshes (Rabbit, Squirrel & Rat)
  • (63) Animations
  • (6) Animation Blueprints (NPC, and PlayAs)
  • (6) Character Blueprints with 2 Parent Classes
  • (2K) Textures and Materials
  • (3) Physics Assets
  • 2D Movement BlendSpaces
  • LOD’s
  • Perception based enemy avoidance
  • (3) AI Controllers
  • (3) Behavior Trees
  • (3) Blackboards
  • Overview map with setup information

Scaled to Epic skeleton: Yes

Rigged: Yes

Animated: Yes

Number of characters: 3

Vertex counts of characters: Rabbit (2628-734), Squirrel (4394-963), Rat (4252-831)

Texture Resolutions: 2048 X 2048

Number of Animations: 63

Supported Development Platforms: (Windows)

Rodents_2.jpg
Rodents_2.jpg1920×1080 578 KB

Rodents_Featured_Thumb_2.jpg
Rodents_Featured_Thumb_2.jpg894×488 163 KB

3 Likes
2

The running animation for rats looks wrong. The butt shouldn’t be jumping up like that, am i wrong?

3

Looks very interesting to me. Sound it be possible to have them follow a spline on command. Or to have them move from position x,y to position a,b on command ? I could use some cool foreground background animations for my game
Kind regards
Stucki

4

Rats can bob quite a bit.

But I’ll take another look and tone it down a bit. Animations are still WIP :slight_smile:

Attaching characters to curves is easy to do, here is a tut i found on youtube- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxgELeJC6jo
There are many more just search- “Unreal 4 Spline Path”

5

Here is a longer look at the Enemy Avoidance for Rodents.

6

Here is a longer view of the in-game enemy avoidance.
In this demo you can see the Perception system interacting with the Behavior Tree and Blackboard.

8

Could you please elaborate on the collisions you used for the animals. Are they capsule component based, or custom of some sort?

9

Yes they are capsule, and in the next update ragdoll when health is at 0.

10

The first Rodents:Rabbit,Squirrel &Rat update is now live. I added a health system to the Rodents, and they will rag-doll when their health runs out.
If you want to draw their health bars above their heads you can do so in the Rodent Parent class (BP_NPC_Rodent_Base). Just tick the Bool “DrawOverheadHealth?”, and “RotateHealthBarToPlayer?” to true, then save.
Enjoy the update :slight_smile:

11

Excellent work.

12

Hey, great! I’m really looking forward to a united big ecosystem, that contains all the previous packs: birds, fish, rodents, and the future boar.

So, are there assumptions, when such ecosystem can appear on the marketplace? And will it cost a little less than the sum of all the packs?

And one more question. I like animals created by GiM (Content by GiM - UE Marketplace). Is it possible to combine them and your packs? Can those animals act according to your AI-blueprints?

13

From my looking over the setup it looks like you have created the functionality to handle threats being killed (or removed) but they’re not actually removed from the threat queue. Is that unimplemented functionality?

15

As of right now that is unimplemented functionality. It will be built upon on a future update. :slight_smile:

16

I’m going to be annoying and say that rabbits aren’t rodents :stuck_out_tongue:

18

How annoying. :stuck_out_tongue:

I had my Father over for dinner one night and was showing him how Rodents worked and he said the same thing. I said for these purposes Rodents are anything that scurries on the ground and runs away from an Enemy, Behavior wise. So new animals can be added to Rodents in the future, and they also might not be classified as Rodents. Its more the behavior, these are the little guys that scurry away from danger. perhaps I should change the name to scurry’ers. :slight_smile:
Update Epic liked Small Animal Behavior Pack so we’ll go with that. :slight_smile:

20

Quick question. Where are the enemies array stored in the project. Im trying to make a new one off the AI you build and running into an issue where the new is not exactly matching structures. Thanks in advance.

Got it working thanks for this awesome project :).

21

Can’t seem to get this project loaded. CPU maxes out and launcher gets stuck at 45%. Am a novice when it comes to UE4 so might be missing something obvious. I’ve selected ‘create project’ which results in the previous state. If I copy the contents to an existing project, I’m at a loss on how to get it working there.

Anyone got any ideas?

22

I, too, have problems loading this project. I have tried with engine versions 4.18 and 4.19. Launcher gets stuck at 93%. I even downloaded it again.

23

How long have you let it sit while it was loading? And what sort of computer are you using? For me it took a few minutes to get everything loaded and the shaders compiled. A quick trick you can do to see what you are getting stuck on is to open task manager and hit the drop down arrow next to UE4, this should show you it is is choking on the shaders. Hope something in there helps!

24

Just sits at 45% project loaded for over 20 mins, seems broken for me.