Procedural IK character

For one of our projects I had to develop a fully procedurally animated character because we had no animators on the team.
This is why we chose a robot to do all of this!

Un-skinned

IKs tend to be expensive so I wanted to keep the system as cheap as possible, and the first thing I noticed is that in our setup, with a robot, we had no need to have a bone structure since we could arrange the pices on the same order but in the inspector and get the same result.

This helped us a lot in performance but mostly on rendering since there is no need to have the player rendering on the skined-mesh path, wich is way more expensive.

Fabrik

To do all the movement of the legs there has no need to reinvent the wheel, we went straight to FABRIK, an algorithm I had already worked with, it's cheap and looks really good.

walking

To do all the walking for the robot we ended up designing a system that constrains leg movement so that the robot can have different movement types like for example not lifting a leg if there are less than 3 making contact with the floor to look scared, or, for example, only be able to lift a leg if the one on your side is also lifted to gallop.
But as you can see in the video leg movement alone wont make the robot feel alive.

Feel

To tie up all the animations there is a layer on top of the leg movement that controls the height and the inclination of the head/body depending on the legs position and velocity, this way all the robot feels more unified with the movement and the world

Jumping

With all that system already working making the robot jump was fairly easy, I just had to create states for when the player is going up and when it's going down to reposition the desired position of the feet to look like a jumping animal.

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