Character & Mesh

Skeletal Mesh

For an optimal experience with Simple Procedural Walk, your Skeletal Meshes should have the following characteristics.

Feet Bones

Your model should have bones that define the feet positions. These bones should be:

  • On the ground.
  • Part of the bone chain that defines a leg, with the parent being the beginning of the leg and the foot bone likely the last element of the said chain.

This is needed to properly apply computations to the Leg IK. For instance:

Feet bones

Body Bone

The Body Bone should be at the center of the body, so that the rotation will not raise it in any direction. In practical terms, if this bone is rotated forward / backwards or sideways, the Center of Mass should stay more or less in the same position.

As an example, see where the Body Bone of this Tripod is located:

Body bone

Forward Axis

Your Skeletal Mesh must be along either:

  • The X axis.
  • The -X (negative X) axis.
  • The Y axis.
  • The -Y (negative Y) axis.

Basically, this means that when using it in your Character, you can apply rotations to your Skeletal Mesh components of either:

  • (0, 0, 0)
  • (0, 0, 180)
  • (0, 0, -90)
  • (0, 0, 90)

For example:

Rotation example

Character Movement Component

This component manages the movement of your Character, and it has some essentials parameters that you maY want to play with. As an example, the following are the parameters that can help you to achieve a nice moving Character.

Max Walk speed
In general, consider a movement for your creatures such that their legs' movements appears realistic. Therefore, your speed should reflect their size and configuration. A speed of 350 is a good starting point (in general).

Max Acceleration
Having the character slowly accelerate provides a certain degree of realism. Setting those values to 200 will give you a good starting point.

Use Controller desired rotation If you want your Character to turn on self gradually, you should:

Disable Use Controller Rotation Yaw on the Character's Class defaults
Character default settings

Enable Use Controller Desired Rotation on the Character Movement Component
Character Movement Component settings

Set a desired Z rotation rate, where 120 is a good starting point
Character Movement Component settings

This will have your creature turn on self naturally:


Playing with those settings allows to set the overall movement of the character.