Unreal Engine 5.4 Motion Matching Tutorial in 5 Minutes

Learn how to use Motion Matching to connect between your Character and animation in just 5 min.
Motion Matching is a system that meant to replace the current state machines. The special thing about it, is that it continue to select the best frame of animation to play out of big a animation pool using 3d trajectory prediction and it can be used to many things like vaulting, safe roll at landing or do what ever other thing you want.
Links:
MotionMatching Part 2: (Jump, Crouch, Walk and turn in place) • Motion Matching Advanc...
MotionMatcing Part 3: (Choosers and Shooting System Part1) • Unreal Engine Motion M...
Animation Tutorial: • Make Your Own Animatio...
5.4 Update video: • Why Unreal Engine 5.4 ...
Sourse for video: dev.epicgames.com/documentati...
Timeline:
00:00 Motion Matching?
00:24: Plugnis
00:40 Import Animation
01:12 Motion Matching
02:32 Character BP
02:49 Animation BluePrint
03:31 The Problem
03:45 Adding Animations to DB
04:01 Test and show Trajectory
04:16 Orient Rotation
04:23 Final Test
04:32 rest of 5.4 update
04:38 Consider to like the video
#gamedev , #unrealengine, #motionmatching, #animation , #gamedevelopment #tutorial , #unrealengine5

[@fuzzyhenry2048]

Years ago I spent hundreds of dollars to buy one plugin and it didn't work out eventually. Now it's free and It's so much easier.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

I feel you man. And yeah its amazing, its super easy and i can't wait to see how much it evolves in the next year.

[@RayaneAtd]

The frustration... 😭😂

[@dawidziemba5069]

Can't wait for you to show how to do the jump, vaulting climbing as the showed in unreal anim deep dive videos

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thanks, will upload as soon as i can!

[@Dudevid]

Tremendous video for a relatively small channel. You earned a like and a sub. Can't wait for the more advanced tutorial. I have a feeling this video and the more advanced one is going to do really well on this platform. Wishing you all the best and I appreciate your content.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thanks a lot man, i really appreciated all those words it means a lot.

[@guybenshitrit2008]

Greatly detailed thank you very much! I will use this for sure👍

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thanks man, glad to hear that

[@Nicolasan-sw9vk]

Nice video! waiting for the more advanced one

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thank you, I am working on it right now

[@necromansir6060]

so detailed and simple thank you so much

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thanks, Glad it helped you!

[@Wyrmex]

Thank you so much bro, this helped me so much

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Glad to hear that brother!

[@qyoinqyuri]

Great format, if you keep it up with hard-to-find info like this I'm sure you'll have success with your channel. Short and to the point.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Will do. Thanks a lot, much appreciated!

[@guilloisvincent2286]

Thanks for the tuts ! :)

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Your welcome, Thanks for the comment!

[@StefanJann]

Thank you!

[@olucasabreuofc]

Thank you from Brazil!

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thanks man! Happy to see i am reaching people across the globe, really cool thing to see.

[@olodum111]

Thank you for doing this...I just subscribed and will be following your skill set in UE5.4.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thank you! Hope to continue helping you

[@24vencedores11]

Hello sir. Loved it so much. Can it be used for cinematic in sequencer level ?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thanks a lot! To be honest, I am not great at cinematics and i don't want to mislead you. But it should work like state machines does, so if you can use state machines in cinematics you can use that as well.

[@user-bt6sm5ft1q]

Awesome!!! thanks bro! By the way, can i use this motion matching in ue5 sequencer?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thank you! I am not great at sequencer so I don't want to mislead you, but it's exactly the same as machine states. If it worked then, it should work now

[@user-bt6sm5ft1q]

@@KartoonDevelopTips Thank you for your reply!! have a good day. 😄

[@Matitospr]

This is out of topic, but when you say "subscribe" in the video, the subscribe button gets a nice highlight animation.

[@moeenkamali1288]

good jobs

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thank you!

[@MOCHILEIRO922]

excellent video! My character executes the Jog animation just by moving my camera, do you know how to fix it? and why are you casting character movement when it is not being used yet?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Thanks man! Can you explain again what do you mean by moving your camera? And i casted the character movement out of an habit, since you always need it in the animation blue print. It's used in the next video.

[@MOCHILEIRO922]

@@KartoonDevelopTips Thanks for the feedback, your content is helping me a lot! the movement of looking around, in third person, then the character performs the movement of walking, even while standing still. I'll post a video explaining, in my project, I ended up switching to a top-down camera so that there wouldn't be this problem.

[@DiegosGamesPlay]

Hi, where can i found this "Orient Rotations" on 4:18? Thanks for the tutorial.

[@DiegosGamesPlay]

I found it. Nedded to first to create "Character Movement" node, and then from this node call "Set" node.

[@justsleptnews]

@@DiegosGamesPlay I can't figure out how to call the "set" node to attach to the "character movement" node and the "flip flop"

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

​@@justsleptnews Drag the mouse from the "character movement" and type Orient Rotation, you should find it

[@MrOverDroid]

Now imagine what we can do with this bulky 500 animations Epic has promised... damn, even "quick tutorials" will have high quality animations and movement.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Yeah, it's insane. But even now with those animations, it's already a really good result

[@irusu.]

Alright i think even unreal showed this but been trying to look about how to inplement different databases so i can add them all in anim bo, for some reason when i mix it woth other animations only the locomotion gets recognized. How would you go about using dabatases for all animations in anim bp such as climbing jumping and so on

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey! I am uploading a more advanced tutorial about MotionMatching tomrrow and i'll show that as well.

[@justsleptnews]

for the part at 4:18 where you make the sets for the character movement how did you do that? It was kind of fast at that part of the video

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Yeah i was trying to not spend time for this since its out of the video's topic, but i'll try to be more clear next time. Drag the mouse from the "character movement" and type Orient Rotation, you should find it

[@justsleptnews]

@@KartoonDevelopTips I have "Let alt", "flipflop" and character movement with orient rotation selected. I'm missing both of the "set"s

[@justsleptnews]

nvm found it thank you very much

[@FPChris]

How do you add different states and switch for walking to crouch or jump? Do all of your animations go in one database or multiple databases per state?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

As it seems, epic ment for it to be on the same database. Currently its not working for me Everysingle time, so I am still trying to figure it out but it does work for most of the times so maybe i am just missing animations. But anyway, you can just do 2 different databases as well and switch between those in the ABP if you want to keep it simple.

[@SAMAR_178]

i have a question should I make a diff motion matching for crouch or I can use the same one?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey, just uploaded a tutorial about it

[@leyserpinto107]

Hello dear, a simple question how motion matching determines what animation sequence is showing?, i ask this for the simple question of change between walk, jump or another state. You or Any can help me?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey, it determines by the information you give it in your PSS. I am uploading a video about it in 10~ hours, hope it will help you.

[@leyserpinto107]

@@KartoonDevelopTips Wow, thanks very mucho, i'm goint to watch it.

[@paluxyl.8682]

I got a question about how many animations a single character can have. Is it possible to make a playable character that is so complex with thousands of animation or is there a limit ?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

In theory you can put as many as you want, but the more you add the more expensive it gets

[@paluxyl.8682]

@@KartoonDevelopTips Nice, I was asking because I heard from other engines that their engines got limitations. For example in The Sims games they can't put too many because they Sims would get stucked or the game would slow down or freeze.

[@thereeledbarkley9393]

My blueprint fails to compile when I hit PLAY at 3:30. The FootstepEffectTagModifier error. Did I miss where you correct for that? and thanks.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey! The blueprint that fails is the one we migrated from the Lyra project, not the one we are using. You can just delete this BluePrint, or unplugg the connection overthere. Double click the error and you will find it

[@eclecticgamer5144]

@3:03 you Cast *every* update. Wouldn't that be extremely laggy with lots of characters? Wouldn't it be more efficient to save the Cast to a local variable On "event begin" then use the variable during animation update?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey! There's a huge misconception and misinfroamtion about casting out there. It's not casting everytime. The problem with cast nodes is that as long as you have it connected in your blueprints its loading that BluePrint with the one that you are casting to. So: 1) It doesnt metter how many times you call a cast node (the same cast node) because its already loaded. 2) When you do it on Animation BluePrint for example, it doesn't change the "cost", becuase ABP is always loaded with its BP anyway. You can see it if you right click on the BP and click "Reference Viewer". BUT in other cases, if your BPs arent already loaded then dont cast, just use BPI. Becuase it IS expensive. It's a bit messy to explain it in writing, maybe ill put a video out to clear things out.

[@eclecticgamer5144]

@@KartoonDevelopTips I Don't know for certain if you're right or wrong. But what you're saying doesn't seem possible. When you explicitly execute a node in a loop... it's not going to magically assume it's already been executed and just ignore it. It's not really a "misconception", it's how programming languages work. Could there be some specific mechanism that works around this? Sure! But I don't see how, as each explicit call to a function generates an entirely new function call, with no way to tell if it's been called before, unless an input is changed by an output, which doesn't happen here.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

You are right, but this is different. I am not really good at putting it in writing, so I hope it will be somewhat understandable. When the Cast node is called for the first time its loading the other object as we said, which is expensive. When the cast node will be called again, the other object is already loaded. Means the "expensive and bad" part of the the node already happened. The node it self isn't the "bad" part, the permament loaded object is. I hope I succeeded explaining my self, and if not i'll probably make a short video about it so I hope it will help. Have a good week brother! Love it when people talk respectfully and putting their opinions like that.

[@eclecticgamer5144]

@@KartoonDevelopTips Ah. Yes, I understand. I always understood as the "cast" itself was the the 'bad part'. Regardless, the cast itself does take a non-zero amount of time. Wouldn't it, therefore, be at least minimally more efficient to put in a 'run once', store result in Variable, and use the variable only? Wouldn't it *always* be simply best practice to *only* put function in a loop that *must* be executed during that loop?

[@OCanalDeVideoGames]

i can like retarget this animations and put it to my character?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Yes, and it's really easy to retarget animation in 5.4

[@occupationalhazard]

When I connect to the output pose at 3:27 I get a Warning "UPoseSeachLibrary:UpdateMotionMatchingState invalid search result : ForceInterrupt [false], CanAdvance [false], Indexing [truefalse], Databases [PSD_MQ]" and nothing is animated. I also noticed I'm not seeing any previews of the animations when I click on the animations I added to PSD_MQ.

[@occupationalhazard]

Restarting the Engine solved this. 😅

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Oh nice, because I read it and became completely lost

[@twotimescreations1888]

I AM HAVING HELLA ISSUES, when i go to migrate it tells me to select the content folder, i do that and it just overwrites the existing animations instead of adding them into the character folder like the video shows. idk what im doing wrong but its just keeping the same file paths as the lyra project, i have migrated everything into a totally seperate build and it still creates a lyraproject folder, if i select any folders besides the content folder it gives me a error that its looking for a content folder. PLEASE HELP

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey, sorry i didn't understand exacly what is the problem. It's suppose to create the same file path as the lyra project in the video you can see it as well. If the problem is that its somehow overwrites the existing animations try to change the file names of the lyra project before importing. Let me know if i understood it wrong.

[@SuperMontana2008]

Which animations are you using?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey, I am using the animations from Epic's Lyra project- you can see it in the video, I also showed how to import them into your project. But you can use any other animation as long it has Root Motion (meaning the animation acttualy moves and not only doing the animation in place).

[@gregfrllo]

thats it!? god damn it's so easy and free!?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Yeah, it's insane

[@t-rexanimations1234]

Can you make a video on how to create realistic environment??

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey, I don't think I will make a video about it since there are already a lot in KZbin, but I am planning to do in the next weeks a lot of beginner tutorials.

[@t-rexanimations1234]

@@KartoonDevelopTips thank you, mind sharing link of realistic environment in U3 5 ?

[@haithammahmoud6825]

thanks i how u add turn in place too

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey! I'll add it into my next tutorial as well

[@haithammahmoud6825]

@@KartoonDevelopTips thanks a lot.. i added it but when rotate slowly turn look laggy

[@brocscogmyre5592]

I've just done this and it works but is this the same as animation blending

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Glad it works! 2 things: 1) It's because there are only few animations. I showed in the middle of the video what happen if you add 4 more, now think what happen if you add 500 more like in the sample epic will release for us. 2) It's much less complicated and time consuming then blend spaced and state machines so we already achived a good goal.

[@brocscogmyre5592]

Ok thanks for your answer. Do you know when Epic Games will release the full version of 5.4

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

@@brocscogmyre5592 No problem. They didnt say exacly when, but probably somewhere in May. (Again, I don't really know, just assuming by what they said)

[@taiyo3300]

where are the 500+ animations announced at the conference ?

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Will be released in few months

[@auragaming2776]

How can you use motion matching for shooting game ??.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Haven't test it yet, but I would probably make 2 databases 1 for armed and 1 for unarmed and change between the 2 in the animationBP

[@JaimeArlandisoficial]

Uno de los problemas que me he encontrado con este sistema, aunque ayuda mucho. Es que no consigo hacer las transiciones correctamente. Es decir si quiero crear andar y posteriormente correr. En el abp me causa errores ya que no identifica las velocidades o estados Boolean. Tampoco he podido ver mucho más pero hace falta más detalles para que sea algo correcto y que no sea una y exclusivamente para correr por el mapa

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey, I'll answer in English so google translate won't fck it. I know what you are talking about, but I think the way to fix it is just to add more animations between those states. Epic doesn't give us 500 free animations for nothing, this is probably the amount you need for smooth animations like they have

[@FPChris]

Hoping 5.4 brings GOOD archery motions.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Interesting, it could be really good with motion matching

[@FPChris]

@@KartoonDevelopTips archery is difficult to do correctly. Developers always use the wrong form or put the arrow on the wrong side of the riser.

[@carlosrivadulla8903]

we need a more elaborated example with ur own animations

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey! I wanted to upload a tutorial as fast as i could that only shows the basics, since i know many have been waiting for it. I hope to upload an elaborated video in the next few days.

[@lawrence9713]

Ubisoft could just grab this and Assassins Creed would be so much better

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Lmao

[@Nunya-beezwacks]

They do?

[@JyotiEntertainmentProduction]

Jump not working

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey, as i said in the video jump, crouch and other stuff will be on a different video. It's a bit more complicated and I am still trying to figure it out since its all really new.

[@zeymjaj]

is Motion Matching replicated ? (please yes)

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Yeah, Fortnite have been using it for few months already

[@boomwowsion64]

naruto bgm

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

A true man man of culture

[@luckycogstudios]

Final results look really bad tbh

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Well, it's tutorial about how to use the system not about how to create AAA quality animations. Play with the system, create animations and then it will look good

[@brocscogmyre5592]

the problem with these types of tutorials is they race ahead and don't show everything, i got stuck on the part where you select all of them and the presenter doesn't say how to do it, thumbs down

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey, Let me help you. I haven't understand exacly what you mean. What is the time in the video you are stuck in and what isn't working for you?

[@brocscogmyre5592]

@@KartoonDevelopTips Thanks for answering me, the tutorial looks good but I'm new to Unreal Engine and got stuck at 1:03 when you said highlight all the manikins you did it too fast I didn't see where you clicked to highlight them all

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

@@brocscogmyre5592 Oh, I just clicked on the first one, scrolled down and then pressed on the last one holding "Shift Key" so it marked them all. You can just do Ctrl A as well.

[@eclecticgamer5144]

Yikes... Ctrl A to select All is a *very* basic computer usage that all people that use computers should know.😬 Perhaps you should take a "basic computer operations" course before jumping into extremely advanced game development tutorials? No shade, as everyone has to start somewhere. Just blaming the Poster because you don't know basics is kinda cringe.

[@brocscogmyre5592]

@eclecticgamer5144 unreal engine is different to iclone and blender to which I have some experience so no I refute what you wrote. Constructive criticism is fine but stupid comments like yours? Why bother? Go back to feeding your cats

[@hurricanepirates8602]

please add flying / swimming.

[@KartoonDevelopTips]

Hey brother, sorry for seeing it only now. And its a bit too spesific for a tutorial. But i guess its exacly the same as crouch, you can check my new video about how to do it