Starting a new game and need help choosing best animation system

Development Character & Animation
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So I am starting a new game and I am trying to decide how best to go about animating my character.
These are the things I need.

Motion Matching.

Feet Ik with ledge detection

Hand Ik for weapon handle clasp.

Momentum leans when running and turning.

Dynamic mantling with hang and climb-up animations.

Smooth switch between strafe and turn style controls.

Smooth animations, with momentum when attacking or casting spells.

I know all of these are in ALS however, ALS is insane, hard to wrap your head around, and difficult to add onto. On top of that, it’s kinda outdated.

UE5 new systems like, foot IK, motion matching, and motion warping can do all of these as well. However, finding good tuts on how to do these things has proven difficult to say the least. Like I have yet to find a tut on dynamic mantling with hang and climb-up systems even though I know it’s possible with motion warping.

Then there are marketplace add-ons that I could buy to handle all of these. However, how do I find one that really fits my needs? I also have found that most of the time with plugins or add-ons it is usually easier to build my own than fully integrate them properly. Worse yet if I run into something I can’t fix because I don’t know how the add-on works I have to contact the dev for help and it can take days, if ever, for them to get back to you.

So I am kinda at a loss on which way I should go.
Honestly, If I had my pick I want to use UE5.1/5.2 new systems to build the locomotion from the ground up but as I said learning them has proven difficult due to a lack of quality tutorials I can understand.

Thanks for your thoughts in advance.
LordMaddog

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Hey there @LordMaddogs! Welcome to the community! So this is an age old question of whether to build your own or extend an available system and often it comes down to your goals for the project. I’ve seen developers utilize ALS to it’s maximum and it’s amazing when they do, however, it’s also a skillset to be able to work from someone else’s codebase, and ALS is no different. if you are looking for motion warping and certain physics reactions, you’d have to integrate them into ALS or use the the UE variant.

In my personal opinion I always prefer to run my own, because it’s more effort having to look through previous code. Though it personal preference at the end of the day.

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Yes, I would much prefer to make my own from the ground up the problem is, I don’t know how. I really like to learn though.

Do you know of any good tuts paid or otherwise that cover stuff like manteling, hanging, and motion matching?

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Some of the new utilities don’t have many resources to learn from due to their newness or difficulty to implement for indies (Gameplay ability system and things of that nature), however I can grab you a couple of resources you may be able to put together, and with a little knowledge from looking through the sample project that shows off some of the new animation tech you may be able to put together a good system.

Disclaimer: One or more of these links are unaffiliated with Epic Games. Epic Games is not liable for anything that may occur outside of this Unreal Engine domain. Please exercise your best judgment when following links outside of the forums.

So if you’re really wanting to work with motion warping, you’ll be using animations that are based in root motion. So first I’ll gather the documentation and some videos to get acquainted with handling root motion in UE as well as motion warping to make them conform to what you’re doing.

After reading through each of those, some video tutorials to get your feet wet.

Basic motion warping:

Series to use root motion to recreate assassins creed movement:

If you preferred a longer more drawn out take with more mechanics explanation I have a different series that covers much of the same.

This series is rather long, but the presenter does go very in depth with making the actual systems themselves, however they are not using root motion for most of this, so some of it will need to be translated, but once you get motion warping down, translating a root motion mantle/slide/wall run should be relatively straight forward. I’d skip through the portions of his movement series down to where you’re most comfortable. He has episodes on root motion dashing, wall running, mantling, sliding, climbing, etc.

Now, both of these sets of tutorial series kind of mix in and out of best practices, but they are some of the best resources on getting your own locomotion set up. Once you’ve done it once or twice, you’ll understand where you can improve and change things. Root motion follows a different paradigm than what most people are used, but it’s really rewarding when you accomplish fully realized locomotion.

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Hi,
It’s rather wide topic, and you listed a lot of features. Some of them covered in tutorials @SupportiveEntity provided. Others can be found in web.

I’ll try to talk a bit about Motion Matching.

  1. First of all it was not used in ALS :wink:
  2. In UE5 there is a plugin named Pose Search but don’t let the name fool you, it is the motion matching technique. It’s still in Experimental stage and is not documented, but if you can read source and familiar with the concept, it’s possible to crack it down.
  3. In terms of plugins you may check out MotionSymphony, I heard a bunch of good things bout it.
  4. And if you want to be at the edge of technology, you may check paper from Ubisoft called “Learned Motion Matching”. It’s using machine learning techniques and several NNs to generate next pose for motion matching. Awesome stuff, but requires altering the engine to integrate and of course knowledge for understanding. There are working examples on github, but not for Unreal.
  5. if you get Motion Matching working, you probably won’t need some of the things you mentioned, like momentum leans, acceleration blends, turning and all that usual locomotion state logic, since Motion Matching does it all for you, if you have correct dance cards that have these. But of course, you will need to blend and layer it with other animation logic.

Hope this helps~

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Thank you soooo much!

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I just realized motion matching is basically an AI-driven ABP lol.
What I actually meant when I said motion matching is I want the feet to be in sync with each other.

Where when you turn and move your feet don’t just play the starting animation but move as a human does.

Though yes motion matching does look interesting I just don’t think it works the best yet.