Hi All - I know most developers prefer not to use Root Motion for locomotion (walk, jog, run) but I noticed all of the cool new animation features in UE5 (Stride Warping, Orientation Warping etc.) need to use Root Motion. So, for UE5 is the guidance to use all root motion animations now even for locomotion if you want realistic movement?
Hey there @HappyKat100! For game development root motion hasn’t been great for a myriad of reasons, mostly because having full control over your animations and how your character moves programmatically is important. However, the new Pose Warping tools you’re talking about were developed to mitigate those concerns for game development as well as make it easier for the disciplines that use root motion more like film projects. So really, you don’t have to use root motion if you don’t want to, but as you said you could get more realistic movement with it.
Thank you! Yeah I noticed Lyra use it and that seems to be a solid template for game dev, so I’m thinking it could become the new standard for realistic movement.
Hi there,
I shared a few resources in the thread below. Hope that helps.
Thank you!!
But motion matching and distance matching don’t work without root motion enabled, right? So root motion wasn’t really replaced by them but rather better leveraged by them?
Good question, it is true, you need root motion animations with root motion enabled, however, I learned the advantages are:
→ works better with AI movement and networked games, and you can edit the curves and increase/decrease the range of movement/rotation with code, creating custom motion files. I am not sure about this one, but I believe root motion animation sequences are not easily interrupted as anim montages are. If you character bumps into a wall, will perform a full stop cycle, unless you have a proper detection logic combined with a state machine transition.
Really appreciate your thoughts, thank you!
1 Like
There seems to be not many options to modify animations runtime, other than changing play rate and motion warping, can we dynamically change or add animation curves when root motions are driving the locomotion?
Ok so I find the solution myself, the key to smooth and believable animation transitions is to use the BP class Animation Modifiers.
The problem when switch between root motions and capsule movements, is that root motion momentum is not preserved, because the movement component doesn’t store the velocity of root motions, it overrides the speed which results in character complete stop at the end of any root motion.
Edit: The momentum stop problem when root motion completes has been mysteriously solved by changing this setting: “Root Motion from Everything” to “Root Motion from Montages Only”
And then the dodging root motion plays smoothly with normal non root motion blend space movements.
1 Like