Procedural animation for humans in Unreal Engine 5 by Lincoln Margison
Release date:2023, April
Duration:08 h 47 m
Author:Lincoln Margison
Skill level:Beginner
Language:English
Exercise files:Yes
This course teaches you how to create a fully procedural walk/run animation system for characters, entirely within Unreal Engine 5.1+. The system allows for complete control over the characters’ walk and run style, with manual control over every bone, using custom logic and variables inside Control Rig. This results in a highly performant system that can be used on many characters at once.
With a fully procedural animation system, your characters will adapt their movement based on their surroundings, fitting seamlessly into their environment. Creating this level of interaction with traditional static animations would require creating hundreds or thousands of walk cycle variations and a complex system to blend between them, making tweaks difficult.
Instead, a procedural system mimics how a human (or any character) would walk by figuring out the logic behind their movements. Once the system is created, it can be adapted to any character in the future, making the process much quicker and easier.
The course covers creating a procedural human animation system, but the concepts and techniques can apply to any form of procedural animation. It’s the best solution for any animations that need to be adaptive and change based on the environment, user input, or gameplay events.
The course explains every step and decision, so you understand the thought process behind it. The solutions presented are a result of 7 years of experimentation with procedural animation, and the information and ideas are not available anywhere else.
The instructor has set up a Discord server for students to ask questions and share their results.
1 – Initial setup
01 – Getting started
02 – Creating your first procedural animation
03 – Basic leg IK
04 – Put the feet into an array
05 – IK both legs in a loop
06 – Prevent multiple copies of each foot being added to the array
07 – Optional Sphere trace example
08 – Collapse to functions
09 – Rotate around point function
2 – Foot rotation
10 – Creating a SetFootTransforms function
11 – Foot platform traces
12 – Foot platform rotation offset
13 – Calculate foot platform forward offset
14 – Rotate foot bone around foot platform
15 – Calculate ball rotation point offset
16 – Calculate tip rotation point offset
17 – Calculate heel rotation point offset
18 – Rotate foot around ball
19 – Heel point fix
20 – Unrotate balltip
21 – Rotate around tip of the toes
22 – Rotate around heel
3 – Velocity cycles and leg movement
23 – Create a calculate velocity function
24 – Calculate world velocity
25 – Convert to rig space velocity
26 – Locked feet locations array
27 – Calculate world delta movement
28 – Create calculate foot targets function
29 – Basic time cycle
30 – Foot locked bool array
31 – Calculate foot targets lerp linear interpolation
32 – Lock the feet
33 – Shift the locked feet based on the worlds movement
34 – Unlock the locked feet
35 – Predict foot landing spot basic
36 – Stride length
37 – Set the feet cycles to be out of sync
38 – Floating foot fix and stride length improvements
39 – Predict character movement for foot traces
40 – Basic foot spline
41 – Dynamic cycle time
42 – Swing time as a percentage
43 – Foot landing spot prediction improvement
44 – Minimum stride time
45 – Velocity based spline diagram
46 – Advanced foot spline
47 – Minimum cycle time and Z lift tweaks
48 – Swing time tweaks
49 – Clamping the IK distance to prevent popping
4 – Pelvis and spine control
50 – Pelvis motion initial setup
51 – Pelvis sin cycle
52 – Pelvis updown offset
53 – Pelvis bob based on speed
54 – Pelvis leftright swing
55 – Shoulder swing compensation
56 – Neck rotation
57 – Save foot platform outputs for later
58 – Pelvis offset diagram
59 – Calculate target pelvis rotation
60 – Save and visualize movement angle offset
61 – Offset the landing spot foot angle
62 – Rotate IK pole vector
63 – Rotate pelvis to match foot rotation average
64 – Head rotation fix
65 – Foot separation
5 – Smoothing and rotation limits
66 – Reduce rotation offset
67 – Snapping issues
68 – Creating vector lerp linear interpolate function
69 – Velocity smoothing
70 – Movement angle offset smoothing
71 – Sideways movement foot rotations
72 – Locked foot rotation limits
73 – Relax midair foot
74 – Leg intersection problem
75 – Basic foot avoidance
76 – Dynamic stride length
6 – Arm motion
77 – Arm motion setup
78 – Arm IK
79 – Arm swing
80 – Arm swing sync
81 – Arm swing based on speed
82 – Swing angle offset
83 – Reduce arm swing running backwards
84 – Arm swing sync improvements
85 – Shoulder bobbing
7 – Tweaks fixes and improvements
086 – Foot twist fix
087 – Leaning
088 – Arm lift tweaks
089 – Pelvis tilt
090 – Pelvis tilt overcompensation
091 – IK clamp fix
092 – Feet lagging improvements
093 – Extra smoothed velocity
094 – Dynamic rotation factor
095 – Knee alignment with velocity
096 – Foot angle for slanted surfaces
097 – Smooth pelvis offset based on a floor trace
098 – Using a better pose
099 – Identifying issues exposed by the new pose
100 – Use the accurate leg pole vectors
101 – Use the accurate arm pole vectors
102 – Smoothing the predicted landing spot
103 – Smoother interpolation
104 – Improved smoothing and replacing all blendspeeds
105 – Sideways movement arm raise
106 – Foot angle offset tweaks
107 – Side movement pelvis tweaks
8 – Improved foot traces and foot avoidance
108 – No floor no problem
109 – Lower foot trace for pelvis offset
111 – Check multiple landing spots
112 – Front of foot traces
113 – Find the flattest landing spot
114 – Prefer higher spots
115 – Prefer lower offsets
116 – Use the ideal landing spot
117 – Prefer valid hits
118 – More weight to the default landing spot
119 – Setting up a basic walk course
120 – Angle switch timing limitation
121 – Foot avoidance function setup
122 – Foot avoidance swings
123 – Foot avoidance based on the other foot
9 – Congratulations
[Udemy] Procedural animation for humans in Unreal Engine 5 by Lincoln Margison.7z
[Udemy] Procedural animation for humans in Unreal Engine 5 by Lincoln Margison_Subtitles.7z
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Hi, Chapter 110 in Section 8 is missing. It is called, “Aim math result constraint.”
Hopefully you can find it, but thank you regardless!
Hi, thank you a lot!
Would it be possible to pack all of them to have just one file to download?
Hi, please add the missing video – Chapter 110 in Section 8. Thanks!