Unreal Engine 4 - Climbing a Ladder

[@master11213]

TY FOR THIS. so many tutorials made me make the ladder then scale it to the height I want but I already had made a mesh.

[@Purbow]

Thank for your awesome tutorial!!!

[@pencilgun4934]

One really important little detail I want to add if you don't mind. :-) I had a lot of problems with actor falling off ladder at end of climb. I adjusted the "blend in and blend out" settings for the animation montage. That made a huge difference. I set it to "cubic" and 0 and 0 for in and out blend times. :-) Otherwise the montage doesn't play all the way to the end and the actor's feet doesn't line up with collisions on at the top of the ladder. So it falls back down again.

[@titanicgames4785]

Good to know! I'm interested to see how the montage would look with IKs attaching the hands and feet to each of the ladder rungs. Could be something cool to expand upon for even greater control over the ladder climbing system you have.

[@pencilgun4934]

Yeah there are tutorials on that in regards to feet placement on stairs on You Tube. I am also interested in this since I want to create a character who can pick a book or note up from a table and hold it in front of his face to read. Since my setup allows for the follow camera to zip in and out from way behind the character to first person view in front of his face. So this would allow the player to mouse wheel in past the character's head up close to the book he is holding and you should be able to read what he is looking at. I hate all this "Hit key" and then there is a big note on the screen stuff. :-) Now I have a system by which I can snap the orientation of the character right before the animation montage plays. All just one key with one collision volume. So the moment he turns the montage kicks in. So what that means is that I can now have him walk up to a table or desk, snap his position to face the right way and then play an animation montage of him picking up the book, kinda like a weapon's pickup you know where you kill the static mesh of the book on the table and spawn it onto a socket in his hands. Something like that :-) Lots of work ahead )

Thank you so much for this! My character kept falling off the ladder and I couldn't figure it out at all, but once I adjusted the blend settings for the animation montage it worked perfectly.

[@marcinlapczyk5340]

are you gonna make an updated video regarding how to climb a ladder with different heights??

[@EEEEEE1337]

Thank you so much, I really liked that one, greetings from year 2018!

[@alecek]

How to make in Topdown view to climb the ladder with click on it. I've done everything here but doesn't work in TopDown view.

[@pencilgun4934]

Wondering how you would set up root motion in a case where the ladder is on a moving ship or truck and not standing still on the ground. :-) Is it possible?

[@dsyr_altair4757]

i need help for im using mostly mixamo animations and when i need to make a root bone animation everything gets screwed up can u please help me out idk what is going on because everytime i need a root animation its breaks everything :( your tutorial is really good but for some reason its not working for me its messed up and im using unreal engine 4 version 4.19.2

[@pencilgun4934]

Jackson wondering if I want to include a "getting ready" to climb ladder and at the end "getting off the ladder" animations in stead of doing this in BP or state machine, wondering if I shouldn't just include that in the animation I would do for the ladder climbing bit like you have here. In other words just have the getting ready and getting off at the head and tail end of the animation, but keeping it all ONE animation if that makes sense. What do you think?

[@titanicgames4785]

That could definitely work. It all depends on what specifically you are trying to do, but truly there are many ways to go about accomplishing this task. The only thing problem with using animations instead of montages is that you can't drive root motion from an animation, so once the animation is done the character's root component (the collision capsule in this case) will still be at the bottom of the ladder since there was nothing to drive the movement of the root (that's why root motion montages can be helpful here). So just make sure that you move your root component to wherever the character ends up, once the animation is done. I hope that makes sense and that it helps!

[@pencilgun4934]

Yeah got it thank you. And also thanks for posting this. I have seen other examples but they don't actually explain how to set it up step by step so yours is really helpful.

[@pencilgun4934]

Just thinking too ... one could probably make ledge climbing, jumping, all kinds of jumping movements using this method but then you have to set up a BP for each scenario since this method doesn't actually "line trace" to determine when to stop and when to start. I guess one has to just play around here and figure things out :-)

[@pencilgun4934]

Yeah I set this up in U4 with Blender. All the blueprints fire and the thirdpersonscharaacter freezes up while animation montage plays. then you can drive it again. But the montage is now showing and character is not moving up with ladder. I suspect its Blender issues. I did select root bone only in pose mode to export from Blender and did bake the animation. But looks like there is a problem there. Blueprints fire all the way through though. No problem there. Also the animation montage plays and I can see it in Unreal. The character also moves up along with animation. So that looks fine. So not sure where the problem is. Wondering if I can do this with a player / mesh swap?? Just swap out the character with a duplicate as it begins ladder climb.

[@pencilgun4934]

Looks like Blender is the bad boy. Only difference I see between my result and yours is that my skeleton has "armature" on top of the bone chain. The root bone is one down from it. The root bone travels up with character as he climbs with orange line behind it (kinda like the red line you have) (if I look at the animation in U4). Then when I click on "enable root motion" the character DOES NOT snap back like yours do. When I built this character and imported it last year I didn't have a Python script to get rid of the extra bones Unreal creates if it receives a Blender skeleton. I suspect that the character is just not playing the anim montage because the bones / skeleton is not right. Everything else works. I can feel the character freeze up at the bottom of the ladder (as montage is supposedly starting to play) and then after the duration of the montage I am able to walk around with the character again. Must note I am getting red lines firing through some of my nodes in BP. So not sure. I should probably try and re-export the character from Blender and fix the bone issue.

[@Minchken]

Do you know how to "teleport" the player character to the perfect location to play an animation that will sync with the environment? Such as opening a door?

[@thesensur6214]

Theres a node called “Teleport” and you just have to cast to the player and then specify a coordinate. (I know it’s been 3 years and you’ve likely figured it out, but just in case)

[@mat_f96]

Thanks for this tutorial,very much helpful. One question: If i want to apply this to a procedural generated ladder (in this case the height of the ladder might change),can i use the same system showed in this tutorial? I already have an animation montage with ClimbStart,ClimbLoop and ClimbEnd animations. Many thanks.

[@titanicgames4785]

You definitely can. You'll want to have points on your ladder that define when you should enter the different sections of your montage. So like when you're at the base of the ladder and press the button to start climbing, you'd play the ClimbStart section, then once it is done you would play the ClimbLoop section repeatedly until you reach a point where you want to get off, at which point you could play the ClimbEnd section. And I have a video on some basic procedural ladder generation that you could look at if you need help getting started. I hope that helps!

[@thermonal9894]

does it work in fps?

[@GBTC2011]

Somehow I can never get your tutorials to work. Maybe they are too old, in which case you should update or remove them.

[@diegoaladdin86]

All of his tutorials worked for me, doublejump one is outdated but other ones arent. this channel is dead so...

[@pencilgun4934]

I figured out how to set this up so that the character can climb up a ladder on a moving ship, cable car or truck. :-) As you know as soon as the root motion animation kicks in, if the ground or actor he is climbing onto moves, then he is left behind. But I figured out you can attach actor to actor at the same time the root motion starts. worldofclouds.com/efmsblog.php The tricky part is the location, rotation and scale settings. What is keep world and what is snap to target. I am sure there is a better way and it can be refined but I got it to work. The root motion works great, ladder and character moves along moving vehicle and is free to walk around again once it reaches the end of the climb :-) All this while the vehicle moves. I am trying to come up with a way to get my character climb around a moving cable car: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rWOTaWWGhbt9Z6M

[@pencilgun4934]

How many lifeboats do you have on your maps ? :-)

[@WybremGaming]

This is terrible. This is not ladder climbing, this is trigger an event that starts a motion that moves the whole body, jesus christ.

[@Bogelma]

нееее не то....