Mech procedural locomotion animation

Video tutorial by David Williams.

While doing preliminary work for the STEC 560 mech game, my group linked a video about a procedurally animated mech. I didn't know much about what the video involved, or that the video is two hours, but by the end I was amazed by how robust Unreal Engine 5 is.

There's an experimental plug-in for character locomotion that simulates the steps a character would take. If you then hook up an IK system to your character these two system can then simulate walking not only for a bipedal character but any multi legged character you have. This even goes a step furthers by setting up all the bone the character has and giving them physics so everything can have a slight spring like motion when moving an stopping.

The locomotion system uses something call a control rig that is created from a fully rigged skeletal mesh. This control rig has an interface like a blueprint but access different parts of the skeletal mesh, particularly the bones.

You can then add different nodes that you need, like the locomotion and IK nodes, in order to get procedural animation.

A control element, the red arrows under the model, can then be used to move everything.

Locomotion node and IK node for the legs.

Setting up all the bones and then giving the physics.

Since we have access to the bones, we can add physics to them when the control rig initializes. By add joints between the bones and different amounts of strength in the those joints we can get a very wobby mech or one that has a lot of spring for animations.

Removing all strength but keeping joints connected together we can make a pretty nice death animation of our mech collapsing.

Procedurally generated death animation.

After the two hour video I was able to replicate the mech from the tutorial. The mech here is all done with no walk/run/shoot animations that you would need to get a character to properly animate. While I would never replace an animator for something like this, having something like procedurally generated locomotion in your tool belt can help animate trickier characters.

Fully walking and shooting mech, no animations needed.

I was asked to implement a FPS camera.

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