ue-procedural-limbs

Procedural animation for insectoid limbs (WIP) brought to UE4 inspired by /u/happygamedev's post on reddit.

Only the root component of an actor needs to be translated in world-space. The limbs are automatically animated accordingly using IK. The body also reacts automatically to the limb movement by leaning and (spring-based) raising/lowering.

Demo

The demo gif is in 15fps to keep the file size down

Goals

This should eventually become a pluggable C++ component-suite, that allows you to add/create insectoid-like limbs on your models, without having to animate them by hand. Ideally this could overcome challenges in dynamic gameplay systems, where fully pre-made animations may be a limiting factor.

Current state

Everything right now is in Blueprints. I plan to migrate this over to C++ once I have a clearer plan of what features I want to consider.

There are 2 actor components that do the job right now: LimbAnimator and LimbCoordinator. LimbAnimator animates a single limb, whereas LimbCoordinator tries to coordinate all the limbs movements in a sensible way, i.e. preventing simultaneous movement of neighboring limbs.

TODOs

• Prevent overlaps of limbs with other geometry
• Allow climbing walls (or at least prevent violent glitching close to walls)
• Create a new component, that supports animating existing limbs on the model/skeleton.
• Experiment with blending between multiple animations (e.g. idle animations)