Procedural Animation For Humans In Unreal Engine 5

Create a dynamic and flexible animation system which can be adapted to any style of character movement

What you'll learn

The fundamentals of procedural animation

How to create a fully procedural walk and run cycle

How to analyse and incrementally improve your animations

How to create custom functionality within control rig

How to control every element of your animation through logic and variables

How to use IK for realistic foot placement

How to predict player footsteps based on the environment

How to seamlessly blend between different angles of movement

How to create a dynamic cycle-time that adapts to different speeds

How to create a natural and smooth human animation system

How to create a system which can be modified for various styles of character movement

Requirements

No experience with animations or control rig necessary. Basic familiarity with Unreal Engine would help but all steps are demonstrated and explained.

Description

In this course you will learn how to create a fully procedural walk/run animation system for characters, entirely within Unreal Engine 5.1+ This system will allow you to control every aspect of the characters walk and run style, with manual control over every bone, using custom logic and variables inside Control Rig (which allows for very good performance, allowing it to be used on many characters at once).With a fully procedural animation system, your characters will fit within their environment and adapt their movement based on the surroundings. Whether the character is walking, running or anywhere in between, standing with one foot on a ledge, walking across stepping stones, running up a ramp backwards whilst spinning in circles, or any other situation your character may find themselves in.To create this level of interaction with traditional static animations, you would need to create hundreds if not thousands of walk cycle variations and a complex system to blend between different animations at the appropriate times. Then if you'd like to make a tweak, such as to change the character's walk style or speed, you would have to start all over again.Instead, with a procedural system, we figure out the logic that dictates how a human actually walks: where they place their feet, how their speed influences their stride time, how they swing their hips and spine to accommodate for their leg movements; to create an intelligent system that mimics how a human (or any character) would walk.After you've created the system (which is included as a download for use or reference), you can adapt it to any character you may want in the future. For example, you may create a heavier & stronger character for your game, perhaps a robot / mech / monster, and instead of spending hours creating walk cycles to figure out how he should move, you simply tweak a few numbers in the procedural system to see how the character looks when he stamps his feet whilst walking, or takes longer strides, or swings his arms like a madman.We don't rely on any major inbuilt functions within the engine, and so the same concepts and techniques can apply to any form of procedural animation. For example, after completing the course, you may want to take what you've learnt about creating procedural human animations and use the same concepts to make a procedural swimming animation for a shark. Or procedural weapon recoil controlled by the strength of the gun. Or a parkour climbing system. In theory, anything that can be animated can be animated procedurally. Is it always beneficial? No. But procedural animation is the best solution for any animations which need to be adaptive and change based on the environment, user input, or gameplay events. The best part is, everything we create in this course runs as a single node in the animation blueprint, allowing you to blend it with regular animations, or any input pose for the character.This is not a course where I simply tell you what buttons to press. Every single step is explained, and the thought process behind decisions about what to do next is discussed, so you will always have an idea of why we're doing each step. We routinely take a look at what we have created so far to analyse it for further improvements. The information and ideas in this course are not available anywhere else, trust me; I have looked, as all of the solutions are a result of 7 years of experimentation with procedural animation. This method of animation isn't being done to this degree by any game developers yet, only basic hybrid IK systems, and I strongly believe it will be the primary form of character animation in the next few years.I have set up a Discord server where you can directly ask me any questions, or see the results of other students of the course. If there are any areas that you don't understand or need further explanations, I'll be happy to help, and look forward to seeing your results!

Overview

Section 1: Initial setup

Lecture 1 Getting started

Lecture 2 Creating your first 'procedural animation'

Lecture 3 Basic leg IK

Lecture 4 Put the feet into an array

Lecture 5 IK both legs in a loop

Lecture 6 Prevent multiple copies of each foot being added to the array

Lecture 7 Optional: Sphere trace example

Lecture 8 Collapse to functions

Lecture 9 Rotate around point function

Section 2: Foot rotation

Lecture 10 Creating a SetFootTransforms function

Lecture 11 Foot platform traces

Lecture 12 Foot platform rotation offset

Lecture 13 Calculate foot platform forward offset

Lecture 14 Rotate foot bone around foot platform

Lecture 15 Calculate ball rotation point offset

Lecture 16 Calculate tip rotation point offset

Lecture 17 Calculate heel rotation point offset

Lecture 18 Rotate foot around ball

Lecture 19 Heel point fix

Lecture 20 Unrotate ball/tip

Lecture 21 Rotate around tip of the toes

Lecture 22 Rotate around heel

Section 3: Velocity, cycles, and leg movement

Lecture 23 Create a calculate velocity function

Lecture 24 Calculate world velocity

Lecture 25 Convert to rig space velocity

Lecture 26 Locked feet locations array

Lecture 27 Calculate world delta movement

Lecture 28 Create calculate foot targets function

Lecture 29 Basic time cycle

Lecture 30 Foot locked bool array

Lecture 31 Calculate foot targets lerp (linear interpolation)

Lecture 32 Lock the feet

Lecture 33 Shift the locked feet based on the world's movement

Lecture 34 Unlock the locked feet

Lecture 35 Predict foot landing spot (basic)

Lecture 36 Stride length

Lecture 37 Set the feet cycles to be out of sync

Lecture 38 Floating foot fix and stride length improvements

Lecture 39 Predict character movement for foot traces

Lecture 40 Basic foot spline

Lecture 41 Dynamic cycle time

Lecture 42 Swing time as a percentage

Lecture 43 Foot landing spot prediction improvement

Lecture 44 Minimum stride time

Lecture 45 Velocity based spline diagram

Lecture 46 Advanced foot spline

Lecture 47 Minimum cycle time and Z lift tweaks

Lecture 48 Swing time tweaks

Lecture 49 Clamping the IK distance to prevent 'popping'

Section 4: Pelvis and spine control

Lecture 50 Pelvis motion initial setup

Lecture 51 Pelvis sin cycle

Lecture 52 Pelvis up/down offset

Lecture 53 Pelvis bob based on speed

Lecture 54 Pelvis left/right swing

Lecture 55 Shoulder swing compensation

Lecture 56 Neck rotation

Lecture 57 Save foot platform outputs for later

Lecture 58 Pelvis offset diagram

Lecture 59 Calculate target pelvis rotation

Lecture 60 Save and visualize movement angle offset

Lecture 61 Offset the landing spot foot angle

Lecture 62 Rotate IK pole vector

Lecture 63 Rotate pelvis to match foot rotation average

Lecture 64 Head rotation fix

Lecture 65 Foot separation

Section 5: Smoothing and rotation limits

Lecture 66 Reduce rotation offset

Lecture 67 Snapping issues

Lecture 68 Creating vector lerp (linear interpolate) function

Lecture 69 Velocity smoothing

Lecture 70 Movement angle offset smoothing

Lecture 71 Sideways movement foot rotations

Lecture 72 Locked foot rotation limits

Lecture 73 Relax midair foot

Lecture 74 Leg intersection problem

Lecture 75 Basic foot avoidance

Lecture 76 Dynamic stride length

Section 6: Arm motion

Lecture 77 Arm motion setup

Lecture 78 Arm IK

Lecture 79 Arm swing

Lecture 80 Arm swing sync

Lecture 81 Arm swing based on speed

Lecture 82 Swing angle offset

Lecture 83 Reduce arm swing running backwards

Lecture 84 Arm swing sync improvements

Lecture 85 Shoulder bobbing

Section 7: Tweaks, fixes and improvements

Lecture 86 Foot twist fix

Lecture 87 Leaning

Lecture 88 Arm lift tweaks

Lecture 89 Pelvis tilt

Lecture 90 Pelvis tilt overcompensation

Lecture 91 IK clamp fix

Lecture 92 Feet lagging improvements

Lecture 93 Extra smoothed velocity

Lecture 94 Dynamic rotation factor

Lecture 95 Knee alignment with velocity

Lecture 96 Foot angle for slanted surfaces

Lecture 97 Smooth pelvis offset based on a floor trace

Lecture 98 Using a better pose

Lecture 99 Identifying issues exposed by the new pose

Lecture 100 Use the accurate leg pole vectors

Lecture 101 Use the accurate arm pole vectors

Lecture 102 Smoothing the predicted landing spot

Lecture 103 Smoother interpolation

Lecture 104 Improved smoothing and replacing all blendspeeds

Lecture 105 Sideways movement arm raise

Lecture 106 Foot angle offset tweaks

Lecture 107 Side movement pelvis tweaks

Section 8: Improved foot traces and foot avoidance

Lecture 108 No floor, no problem

Lecture 109 Lower foot trace for pelvis offset

Lecture 110 Aim math result constraint

Lecture 111 Check multiple landing spots

Lecture 112 Front of foot traces

Lecture 113 Find the flattest landing spot

Lecture 114 Prefer higher spots

Lecture 115 Prefer lower offsets

Lecture 116 Use the ideal landing spot

Lecture 117 Prefer valid hits

Lecture 118 More weight to the default landing spot

Lecture 119 Setting up a basic walk course

Lecture 120 Angle switch timing limitation

Lecture 121 Foot avoidance function setup

Lecture 122 Foot avoidance swings

Lecture 123 Foot avoidance based on the other foot

Section 9: Congratulations!

Lecture 124 Next steps..

Game developers wanting to create a robust system to save 100s of hours hand-animating walk cycles,Animators who want to prototype and visualise different animation styles rapidly,Unreal Engine developers who want their characters to interact with the environment