"Step by Step" Procedural Animation

Full length course on procedural animation for human characters: www.udemy.com/course/procedur...
Discord server centred around procedural animation: / discord
Free download of the spider model: / lincolnmargison
More coming soon, subscribe, follow, all that jazz.

[@bigmartin343]

"let me know in the comments and I'll delete it" Underrated humor right there.

[@bass-dc9175]

Also: "Excuse the lag on the recording (...) but you get what you pay for" Love that extremely dry humor.

[@shion1364]

1:33 Open paint :> . 3:24 Create Control Rig file, set Pelvis. 5:49 Animation Blueprint: Set Control Rig 7:30 Set first leg. 11:00 Set settings for all legs 13:41 pelvis 19:13 individual index. 20:32 Calculate velocity 25:30 to world location. 31:37 Random. 33:00 Foot timing. 55:32 Calculate average

[@elektra81516]

spiders don't have paws

[@greedy_mf]

why?@@elektra81516

[@Vaneko911]

people who make time stamps seek for attention.

[@shion1364]

@@Vaneko911 I did it for myself, I needed a structure so that I could return to the right moment whenever I wanted. But I'm glad it helped others.

[@kikijewell2967]

@@shion1364 thanks. I was actually about to the exact same, and also put it into a comment so my work wasn't wasted just on me. Thank you for your service. Also, spiders don't have feet either. "Paw" is recognizable. Some people take their misery out on others, I guess.

[@Rahulsingh-theraha]

😢that photorealistic drawing blew me away , ur drawing skill is Noice

[@xKeray]

i've read your comment first THEN saw him drawing the photorealistic spider and I lost it

[@priyeshpv]

I hope you're kidding. That spider is far from being photorealistic. It's missing it's eyebrows!

[@666thmoab]

@@xKeraysame

[@googoogly]

​@@666thmoabis your pfp a bomb or a zeppeline?

[@666thmoab]

@@googoogly its a moab from bloons td 6

[@maniacb0y]

We need more content like this. Such quality deserves recognition. Well done.

[@FramesOfGames-lv5nj]

Currently studying to become a technical artist and wanted to dive into procedural animation so this is exactly what I've been looking for! 10/10

[@sudiptoartstudio1338]

For anyone sturggling to figure out why the imported skeleton won't stick to the ground, just delete the import PhysicsAsset. Took me about 2 hours to stumble into that solution, lol.

[@bleeeblop]

Thanks, that saved me 2 hours.

[@LincolnMargison]

I think this should only affect things if you are simulating physics? Which we aren't in this tutorial. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the issue.

[@_B_E]

@@LincolnMargison Maybe the physics asset is overriding something? Because i had the same issue and deleting it helped as well. At the stage at the start where you did Sphere Trace by Channel, the spider wouldn't snap to the ground. Deleted the physics asset from the content drawer and it fixed it right away.

[@Sh1nshon]

ur my god, that saved me 2 hours too.

[@AdamMohamed-ji7pk]

​@@Sh1nshon istaghfiroluh Allah bro wtf ?

[@CosmicComputer]

Wow, dude thank you so much for putting this up, this is exactly what I've been looking for!

[@stefancekacekic]

What a beast of tutorial!! Looking forward to your new deep dives, learned really a lot, really appreciate it

[@p1ontek]

What a great tutorial, thank you for breaking down the control rig a little bit. It's pretty hard to get an idea about the potentials of control rig and you brought some light into this room

[@user-ed5vg9ws1g]

The absolute king of spiders in unreal engine, everything worked fine, thank you ♥

[@SirGraph]

I'm loving your great course on procedural animations, thank you so much!

[@wouwourm]

I never ever thought of doing this until today so this video is an amazing drop! You even dropped the 3d model! big thanks!!

[@darabjakab]

Awesome tutorial, best explanation I have found so far for foot IK! Wish there were more of this kind of "step-by-step" tutorials! thank you for your time making this!

[@slipoch6635]

One of the best tutorials out there. Fantastic work man, thank you.

[@SpikeTheSpiker]

Holy shit dude, thank you so much for this. Not only was it a fantastic intro into control rig, but you also talked about the methodology in a way that was easy to understand.

[@PreeminenceWon]

Great work, breakdown, and end result. Been hoping for something like this ever since I saw your "Procedural Walk System" teaser video. Take my sub!

[@real2late]

Do not ever even think about deleting this video, I tried making exactly this and I failed, then I saw your awesome video! Please also show the spider tutorial in blender, that would be awesome!

[@sowianskizonierz2693]

It's awesome that you made this. Thanks!

[@jamesfield8023]

This is so inspiring. Thanks for taking the time to make this video!

[@Metalpaved]

Thanks you for this. That debug line tip is something i have been desperately needing!

[@aecl4287]

This was one hell of a ride but the end result was so worth it! Hopefully in the future you could create more procedural animation videos for like sticking to walks!

[@Aimbok]

You're really good at drawing "photorealistic" spiders. Can you make a tutorial on how to draw next? Bits aside, incredibly helpful tutorial just like the control rig gun tutorial you made. :]

[@robertdavies5139]

Awesome tutorial! thanks for posting this. procedural animation is on my "must learn" list. I was using the simple procedural walk plug-in up until now and although that works well I wanted to do something a little more bespoke for my current project. I'm using 5.3 and so far so good.

[@Floky]

I've been looking for a good guide like this! Looking forward to more content like this!

[@lolaswift111]

Really brilliant! Many thanks Lincoln

[@ProjectOniricDEV]

You are a God and i wish nothing more than endless happiness to you, keep it up, you don't know how much you're helping ppl!!

[@zerolinke8768]

UE5.3 Update - Debug: ControlRig.EnableDrawInterfaceInGame 1 - Rig Node: Use "Construction-Event" Node replace "Setup-Event"

[@xl-pu2zp]

thanks alot，I really come up with a lot of problems in 5.3，

[@Tedeums]

CalculateVelocity don`t work.

[@huaishan4348]

Thank you so much for your generous sharing,This tutorial is the best I have ever seen.Please keep creating~~❣

[@prosota8083]

Brilliant tutorial!

[@arsenurano4164]

Incredibly amazing.

[@TheFrederickz]

Thanks for the video, leveled up my control rig understanding :)

[@flamebrindger3984]

Giant. Enemy. Spider. *Starts singing*

[@kfirkfir]

Exactly what I wanted! very good stuff

[@lordkelvin1]

This is such a good tutorial. Been meaning to get into procedural anim in Unreal. Keep it up!

[@akzork]

Recreated this successfully thanks!

[@lemma6994]

Video is very helpful indeed. Thank you muchly

[@dylanwainwright8644]

Loved this Tutorial! You clearly explain everything and I learned quite a bit. :) Can't wait for more. Couple suggestions: Add chapters! At almost an hour this is an epic length tutorial. It is really hard to navigate if you mess up and need to go back to an earlier part. Also, slow down a tad. Particularly near the end you really sped up. For someone who doesn't type quickly it was hard to keep up.

[@DeeOdzta]

Thanks for the chalk and talk, really appreciated.

[@MasterPiffy]

if you get to the end of this in 5.2 and your mesh starts sliding forward, clamp the value you plug into average location on the return in CalculateAverageFootLocation between something like 1 and 150. I got errors that the value wasn't normalized. that's the fix. you can also use the hit normal in a vector to vector quaternion to automatically handle the rotation for you as well

[@kabargin]

58:05 love that kind of humor, like

[@maddened3746]

this is just amazing !!!! thanks a bunch for making this mate. cheers !

[@Eroktic]

how much of processing power does this cost in comparison with traditional animations?

[@LincolnMargison]

I've not done specific comparisons but it's all run in the same way as animations are through the animBP (which I believe is a separate thread), so it's performant. I think the only time you really notice any slowdown is with loads of linetraces. You could probably slow it down with some huge loops too. So far for anything I've used it for, it's been negligible performance loss.

[@idikutkasgarli3637]

This is the only tutorial that I could find Thank you so much

[@Spook]

Brilliant tutorial! Please make more like this😄

[@Monument_07]

Thank you ive been looking for a video like this one

[@Evil__Bacon]

Holy shit Thai video is amazing bro keep up the great work and I promise you your gonna grow big in absolutely no time 🔥

[@parse_error]

Amazing tutorial! I learned so much here as it's my first time with control rig. I did it with 5.2, and as already mentioned the main difference is that the "Construction Event" replace the "Setup Event". Otherwise everything works perfectly. As you said at the end of the video, a tutorial for the Blender rigging part would be great! Thanks for your work!

[@gabrieladriannogueirarosal5401]

Thanks a million!

[@CortVermin]

that is some crazy good resource, holy shit

[@airmancooma]

Thanks!

[@itisWhatitis12345]

Damn bro. Keep up the good work.

[@Qubot]

Thanks you very mutch !

[@jasonartcraft9148]

Was quite an adventure making this thing to work. It was my first time using Control Rig. Now cool buggy jittery thing can follow my player)

[@mindlessghost5092]

Bro all things aside i love your drawing skills like best easy han total mess free.

[@dmytriy8008]

Спасибо. Ты замечательный человек.

[@d74g0n]

This was great - made it to end... mines a jittery but good nuff lul. Wish I had a blueprint png to scrutinize to find my failures

[@OxenTeVe]

I would also be very grateful if you could provide an image of the blueprints. I dedicated a few days and followed the steps, but I didn't get the same result.

[@akzork]

Let me get something to eat while watching this video

[@gorimostly]

Awesome, thanks a lot for making this! Lost it at the squid lol

[@CortVermin]

photorealistic spider got me good :D

[@chAXvrl]

this youtube recommendation..i dont know why im watchin this, but dayum, this is interesting xD

[@kioly_ah]

非常感谢！！！

[@xovexyz]

Very interesting

[@phoshooo]

After I brought in my spider it looked fine. Once i put imported the hierarchy it was so broken like every bone was is crazy places

[@nourhassoun7099]

Please do tentacles that flow/move alone next!

[@viktorsola1784]

Man, it's looks so disgusting, that it looks so good! I am not going to lie, I got goosebumps! :D

[@MonkeManOfficial]

yess please show how to make spider in blender (and how to import properly to ue5 if you dont mind)

[@donfalcone7560]

Thanks for the tutorial. What to do if the limbs of the skeleton have only 2 bones, and not 3? Should I use something else instead of BasicIK?

[@cupsster1]

What you could do is to limit foot projection to calculated length of one leg IK + some fixed offset, that way it would not stretch that much. Also optionally clamp that distance so shorter legs have chance to catch up on movement of longer ones. Other than that, good stuff! Thank you.

[@amerboss99]

for a beginner, how different is it to do this for a metahuman skeletal mesh?

[@King-mj2bn]

For the sake of avoiding getting into bad habits, running a string search in a loop that's running every frame (for every instance of a creature) is absolutely a horrible idea

[@LincolnMargison]

For sure, but for time constraints I did it this way. Ideally I'd recommend adding them/naming them in an array but that's less dynamic, so the alternative would be the save the references or names after the initial search on construction. In the udemy course on the topic we do it the latter way, but for this 1 hour video I kept things simple. But you're absolutely correct.

[@mikivm1]

Very well!! first of all, this is the best tutorial of Procedural Animations in Unreal that I have never found, Incredible Work! But I have a small problem, at Minute 52.55 you add the remap in the "IncreaseFoot..." and then the next remap in "Calculatenew ....", my question is the following: Everything perfect and identical to yours so far, after this my Spider makes very short and fast steps while your's seems to soften! having exactly the Same values as you, any ideas? (I assume that the "0,1,1,5" of the first remap and the "0,500,1,2" are the final values?) or you got some change that not see on video? Thanks so Much and Keep doing these , thats amazing!

[@LincolnMargison]

Hmm this video was a while ago so I don't know the exact values I used, but I likely did go through tweaking them a few times. It depends a lot on the movement speed you want and the general look you're aiming for, so it's worth playing around with the values and trying to understand how they relate to the leg speed.

[@oofnoof9024]

10/10 stopped me from pulling my hair out

[@dwd5057]

10/10 keep it up

[@bof8850]

Look as if they are just playing catch up with the body as opposed to the legs carrying the body.

[@TheEightfoldPath_]

A+ tutorial, Goddamn! As a side note, how is this on performance? Something reserved for player characters or could it scale to be used on some enemies as well? And how would this fare in a networked environment? I suppose it wont have any issues as everything is done client side anyways, as long as latency is smoothed out

[@LincolnMargison]

Yeah all clientside so as long as the player movement is replicating properly it should work. If you need something more specific where the feet are moving in sync across the server, you could do the timing/cycles in a replicated way (ie. blueprint which passes the timer to control rig, and since it's deterministic you'd get the same leg placements). As for performance, I've done the same with 100 characters doing 10 traces per frame each, with the same kind of movement logic, with no issue. But also keep in mind that this tutorial is more a 'here's how to figure things out' not strictly an optimized/best way of doing it. For example, this loops through more bones than it needs to, and does traces when the legs aren't moving and such. So there's definitely room for improvement but it seems to have no impact on FPS.

[@jamesonvparker]

I’d love to try and make the legs also go to walls when the spider is close to the wall 😮

[@flyingroads3498]

You earn a sub🎉

[@ethanbergendahl5566]

For my spider skeleton the "foot mesh" is like at ankle level so the foot of the spider is never correct looking. Is there anyway to edit the bones in UE5 or do I need to use a different software to change the location of the bone to be closer to actual foot level?

[@bobboland8505]

I am using this for a humanoid character and instead of basic ik I use full body ik so I don't use children to get the feet. it works fine until the calculateFootTarget Function, I don't know how to put the Return Event into the loop when I do not have a For Each node, I tried a few things but in all my attempts this is where I have been stopped with errors. I would appreciate any help, Thanks for the great tutorial.

[@SeanLake3D]

You can right click on your skeletal mesh(skeleton), and create a control rig from that :). Save ya a step. Also, @5:38 I connected mine exactly as yours, and it did NOT pop to the floor!!! Mesh, is also not snapping to the floor :(

[@HyperDashYT]

Zeekers 100% watched that video

[@Evangeder]

This looks just exactly like lethal company's monster

[@itsbunbunni]

did they get rid of the setup event? im not finding it. Update: they replaced it with construction event, and if the editor crash when you hook anything up to it, go verify your build of unreal engine.

[@indira4435]

thank you, was just encountering this!

[@LincolnMargison]

Yeah construction event replaces setup. I think searching 'setup' still finds it. I hadn't encountered the crashing issue but good to know for future reference.

[@pattyspanker8955]

I like your funny words magic man

[@billysatkowski6938]

I'm still a noob, does this work with more bones in the legs? Having trouble getting the foot attached in right rotation. Everything else looks right just can't seem to find the foot rotation within the axis values.

[@soojungkim8201]

Thank you for the great tutorial. Which IK should I use for setting with one more joint? I'm trying using ccdIK.

[@LincolnMargison]

I'm not too sure about that. Not something I've done much with, it seemed like there was less control with longer IK chains, so I usually have tried to fake/bypass it. I'll look into it though

[@LittleBlue42]

Hey there! I see you published this a while ago but i have areally quick question that coud help clear up my understanding of global vs world space. At about 22:35 you set a variable after converting it to world space, but then directly compare it against the value before its conversion. Therefore, you are comparing values that live in two different spaces. Can you touch on that? Would you not want to compare the values all in world space?

[@MiniZaraki]

Is it possible to make his spider walk from ground to wall then to ciling and back to ground?

[@petepan5656]

I laughed way too hard at "And now we can see we've made a squid."

[@BeastGamingHD]

bro I thought that was a real hand at first then was like wtf lmfao

[@mainepolen7909]

the giant enemy spider do do dododoododooo

[@drinksoft5191]

Can someone share the completed BP? I'm having some problems and I want to deconstruct it at my own pace.

[@benl.4903]

Hi there, I got stuck, I am using 5.1 but I do not get "transform" in the Set Transform under the Control Rig.

[@jsogman]

can you/someone please explain how the initial skeletal mesh must be set up/imported? does it need to have an animation already ?

[@abhilashlr9259]

Sorry for the lag, you get what you paid for lol. thx for the tutorial mate.

[@sphangman]

This tutorial is amazing. Can I ask if you ever created this in earlier versions ? The basic IK initial sets the bone to infinity in 4.27 but is fine in 5/5.1 , trying to work out if it’s a bug in 4.27. Thanks

[@LincolnMargison]

Hmm I can't remember if I did it entirely in control rig before 5.0, there were some features added that made it much easier, like functions/etc which I don't think were available in 4.27. Not entirely sure what the issue there would be.

[@ExistentialPineapple]

Yeah I'm having the same issue which is a bit of a bummer since UE5 is not exactly the most stable engine version to be doing production quality stuff in

[@sphangman]

Thanks for the reply , I think it’s a bug in the basic IK node , the code is identical from my 4.27 and 5.1 versions and the guy below is having the same issue. I might try and reproduce the effect with a different IK node , would a different IK node work in the basic IK nodes place do you think. ?

[@sphangman]

Good hear to you’re having the same issue. Means it’s not just me screwing something up. Agree with the ue5 sentiment. I was suggesting maybe a different IK node could work ?

[@LincolnMargison]

​@@sphangman I'm not sure if there's another IK node that allows you to set the pole vector in the same way, that might be an issue. I've always used the basic IK node for this. I don't currently have 4.27 installed to look for myself. Personally, I've moved to 5.0 without issue now for all projects. 5.1 has a few 'interesting' quirks at the moment, but 5.0 seems stable.

[@SLAPMYGORILLA]

This is such a good tutorial that I'm using it just for Manny. The Basic IK Axis for Manny are as follows: Primary(x-1).. Secondary(Y+1).. And then just set the pole vetors Y+100 Z+100 just to start. Its not perfect but its close!

[@SLAPMYGORILLA]

The Primary and secondary axis invert for the Right leg.. Is this a problem with Manny or have a missed a step? I know i can just use a seperate Basic IK for my right side, but the For Each loop is really cool, and I'd love to still be able to use it. If anyone has any idea on what i can do to still use the for each loop, then let me know please!

[@amerboss99]

the thighs dont move in my case, any idea what could be wrong?

[@akzork]

When is next tutorial ?

[@olliveraira6122]

Is it possible to control skeletal IK directly from BP or do you need to use the controlrig graph? I feel like logic like this makes more sense in the same place where you are moving the actual actor, otherwise you could end up in a scenario where the actor is standing in a slim area and the feet have basically nowhere to go

[@LincolnMargison]

You can, in certain ways, do it directly, but the way I prefer is still via control rig, but you do the calculations in BP and pass it the final foot target positions. Although for your example, even if it's figured out from the same place in BP I'm not sure how you'd solve it. If it can't find any way to place the feet where they would connect to a floor, there's not much you could do in BP either. Having the player movement affected based on the animation (eg. falling because there's no foot position) would be annoying/inconsistent I think.

[@utkarshrastogi5766]

Can you please do a tutorial on how to climb this spider on walls?

[@carbonatedmilk5934]

Would you be able to adapt this to go up walls or maybe something skinny like a tree limb?

[@LincolnMargison]

I don't see why not. Adapting it to go up walls wouldn't require much, in terms of the animation, it would probably be mainly a challenge of the blueprint to let a character walk around walls (not the simplest thing but pretty doable, there's plugins that do it for you too). I think if this character was just flipped upside down, it'd be trying to 'walk' on a ceiling. I'm not sure if the traces it does were in worldspace or not so there might be a slight tweak needed but basically should work on any angle.

[@italianjack]

sorrry dumb question from a newbie, how do you lock your camera on the selected object while it moves when you simulate the scene?