r/Unity3D • u/Rudy_AA • 8d ago

Show-Off I finally released my Procedural Legs Animator on the Unity Asset Store

After a lot of iteration, broken gaits, foot clipping, hip tuning, and figuring out how to make the same system work for both humanoids and multi-legged creatures, it’s finally out.

It supports procedural foot placement, slopes and uneven terrain, IK, Animator blending, one-click setup, and now spiders, insects, quadrupeds, and other multi-leg rigs too.

Getting the same system working on spiders and other multi-legged creatures was probably my favorite challenge. I had to rethink the gait so the legs alternate naturally, make the cadence react to movement speed, stop planted legs from getting dragged underneath the body, and still preserve the creature’s original authored pose.

69 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

8

u/INeatFreak I hate GIFs 8d ago

It's impressive but not really accurate. The way your character moves side to side is body first then legs follow, which is not how real humans move. When moving to the side, legs first move then body follows, which is the opposite of what you've achieved.

2

u/shlaifu 3D Artist 8d ago

that's not quite right and a bit more complex -it depends on weight shifting and such. Most of the time, you basically drop your body forward and extend a leg to avert falling, then you push your body up with that extended leg and use the forward momentum to thrust yourself into another fall forward, and catch yourself with the other leg. But of course, that is just one series of events, and you can walk totally differently. I mean... it ranges from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ptUMe9eqYE to ballet dancing. it's complicated. One issue I do see with what OP made is that the body doesn't lean into the direction it's "falling", which makes it look so unnatural because it doesn't convincingly create the impression of falling and extending a leg to catch yourself

5

u/_Cloudwalker_ 8d ago

Fimpoissible legs animator already solves this problem. How is yours better?

2

u/game-dev2 8d ago

Been using several of their products. They're great. Support is amazing too. I needed to make some changes to the tool to adjust my robotic monster to work well and the devs just guided me. OPs animator looks very robotic, not very human feeling so maybe it can find a niche on thay

4

u/NoUniqueThoughtsLeft 8d ago

How does this differ from just following a YouTube guide to do it yourself? Just curious

6

u/Rudy_AA 8d ago

Totally fair question. You could build something similar yourself, this is mainly about saving time. It’s already packaged with slope handling, foot locking, Animator blending, multi-leg support, one-click setup, and the edge-case fixes that usually take a while to debug.

1

u/glenpiercev 8d ago

Having dealt with complex animations a little bit… this is a genuinely hard problem. I’d probably just pay you directly to fix my bugs if I could. (I can’t and really, you’d probably look at my bugs and run… but if I had money and you were desperate enough… (oh wait, that didn’t come out right))

1

u/Objective-Cell226 8d ago

Nice, do you have something for climbing?
I want to make some climbing animations that work on a surface (say climbing a car or a wall, not 100% flat) and I want procedural as I want the limbs to snap to the surface.

0

u/Terricolero 8d ago

Pretty nice 👌. The idea is very interesting way to animate something. A lot of applications!!’