Root motion not working even though it's enabled

What the title says. I really don’t know what could be the issue, the root bone is animated, on the top of the hierarchy, root motion is enabled in both the assets and in the ABP. I do think its weird that the root shows no transforms in the BS, though.

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(Fixed non-working link)

Video of the animation asset

2D Blendspace Here’s where the root shows no transforms, which I don’t know if it’s the issue or not.

Animation EventGraph with root motion enabled for everything

I think there’s a confusion here. When you enable root motion, it should in fact make the model animate in place when you preview the animation. (By that, I mean it seems like it but it’s intended purpose is to transform the whole actor along with the root bone, instead of just the mesh) I couldn’t notice any issues after checking out the images and videos you provided, or am I missing something?

Oh, I just noticed the first link doesn’t work. This is what’s in it:
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As you can see, the character is has no motion after compiling.
That you for responding by the way.

You’re welcome :blush:
Could you explain what does it supposed to do? Like I said, the root motion’s purpose is to ensure the whole physical actor is moving along the root bone while in normal animations what’s moving is just the mesh. You would need some additional code to make it move. Do you have those set up? If so, could you show them as well?

So basically what I want is for this NPC’s movement to be based on the animation of the root bone.
I used to have a more complex behavior tree based on traditional locomotion but right now, with root motion, I’m just trying to make him reach a random point in the map.


This sets the Target Location with a random reachable point in the CBP EventGraph


This interface compares the character’s location with the target location and returns a desired direction/velocity


This is what’s in the ABP EventGraph, it’s supposed to get the desired velocity and turn in into the speed variable, which controls the blendspace.

Thanks for sharing those! Now the thing is, I still can’t see any reason for the actor to move from the screenshots you’ve provided. Aside from the animation, you would also need to physically move the character. Another thing is that, if you want a roaming NPC, you can just place a Nav Mesh Bound into your scene, get a random location and move your character using an AI Move To node instead of doing all those. And you do not need root motion to achieve this objective. It serves different purposes like I explained earlier, it’s certainly not necessary in your case. (Though still change your animation to be in place if it’s not originally and reimport it) Also, if your character does need to have root motion enabled for one animation, you can just enable it for that one. Others don’t need to have it enabled in order for that to work. I hope I was able to clear up some of your confusion :innocent:


Here’s a tutorial, check it out:

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. In fact I’ve been using MoveTo, check it out:

It’s just that I didn’t like the way the character’s feet would slide when turning so I thought using root motion for locomotion would solve that. Well thank you anyways, people rarely reply in here for some reason.

There are a lot of ways to have the characters’s legs move naturally while turning. You can use motion matching animations, control rigs, split the body… but that’s a completely different topic and it definetly can’t be demonstrated perfectly from a post so I recommend you considering one of the options, checking out some tutorials and consulting to the forum if you encounter any issues :grin:

SOLVED: It turns out you need to have gravity and physics enabled for the root motion locomotion to work. But it gets trickier because It isn’t enough with enabling it in the Character Blueprint, you need to have an AI_Controller for it to work.