Procedural animation for humans in Unreal Engine 5

About this course

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 long

Course objectives

• build an animation system that allows for seamless transitions between movements
• reduce the need for extensive static animation cycles
• adapt animations for different character types easily