VR Thumbstick + Roomscale Movement With Fully Animated Skeletal Mesh Attached

Development Platform & Builds XR Development
1

I’ve been playing around with VR and UE4 recently and slap together locomotion with Skeletal Mesh body attached. It’s a mixture of thumbstick + room scale movement. My goal is to have something really similar to what insomniac games did for the Stormland game. Here’s my first try:

How i did it:

  • The thumbstick locomotion is done exactly like you would a third person game, with the velocity/speed and direction fed to blendspace to take care of the animation.
  • Detach the skeletal mesh on event begin play, and update the mesh location separately to handle for real life body movement. Here i manually calculate the velocity/speed and direction based on vr camera and mesh direction and feed it to the blendspace for animation.

I’m still not satisfied with how it turned out because the animation is jerky when i’m doing real movement. Exploring other options after this. Please let me know if you have better solutions :smiley:

2

So after playing around somemore i’ve come out with a custom solution for the foot placement. I wrote some foot placement prediction function and in combination with IK hopefully solve the jerky animation using animation blueprint.

Here is the prototype feet placement prediction in action:

And here it is with the Skeletal Mesh and IK applied

I might or might not over engineered this lol, because i don’t know what’s the best solution yet. But this 2nd solution runs a lot better IMO.
Next is applying the same prediction but for room scale turn in place.