Motion Matching has a problem nobody talks about (Unreal Engine 5)

Epic Games’ Motion Matching is one of the most beautiful things we have seen in Unreal Engine. But to get that result, Epic relies on more than 500 animations. The test in this video is simple: give Motion Matching far fewer animations and see what happens.

How Motion Matching works

In a classic animation system, you are the one deciding: the character stops, you play the stop animation; it turns around, you play the turn animation. Every case has to be planned and coded.

Motion Matching turns the problem around. You no longer tell it which animation to play: you hand it a large library, and at every moment it searches that library for the pose that best matches the character’s position and the direction it is heading. Transitions are smooth without wiring each case by hand. On paper, it is perfect. In practice, there are three problems.

Problem #1: the setup

To make it really work, you need to master Pose Search Databases, schemas, Chooser Tables, trajectory and the tags placed on animations. Nothing impossible, but it is not a system you configure in an afternoon.

Problem #2: it creates nothing, it picks

Motion Matching can only play what already exists in its library. If the character turns around mid-run and no animation resembles that movement, it takes whatever comes closest — and it shows:

• The feet slide.
• The wrong foot leads.
• The pose snaps all at once.

Problem #3: every game looks the same

The Game Animation Sample is free: Epic made it to teach the system, and it is a real gift to the community. But many developers use it as is — they retarget the 500 animations onto their character and stop there. Same walk, same stops, same pivots, same jumps: different characters moving exactly the same way.

You can still replace a few animations to give the game some personality, but to keep Motion Matching clean you have to dig back into the whole system. It is an incredible tool for studios with the animation budget to match; for a solo developer or a small studio, it can quickly become a trap.

Back to the State Machine

So many indies go back to the good old State Machine. It stays simple as long as you stick to an idle, a run and a jump. As soon as you want starts, stops, left-foot or right-foot turnarounds, more advanced jumps or traversal synced with the environment, it turns into dozens of states, hundreds of transitions, and calculations to predict where the character will stop and when it will turn.

Locomotion Framework

Locomotion Framework was born from rewriting that plumbing on every studio project: keep the simplicity of the State Machine without ever having to write it. Back to the opening test — same character, same animations: Motion Matching on the left, the plugin on the right. The right foot at the right time, clean stops and turnarounds, without a single added animation.

The difference: the plugin does not search for a pose in a library. It handles the states, the transitions and the prediction maths for you, and leaves you the most fun part — choosing the animations of your game.

From 2 to 200 animations

1. 1Create the character: the plugin generates the Input Actions, the Animation Blueprint, the character Blueprint and a Data Asset, already wired together.
2. 2Set this character in the Game Mode: it is playable.
3. 3Configure the animations in the Data Asset, where 99% of the setup happens.

An idle and a run are enough to get going. For starts, you add a row to the table and drop the animations into the slots provided; same for stops and turnarounds, left foot and right foot alike. Two animations or two hundred, it is the same system.

What the plugin covers

• Jumping: single, double, triple, or a Mario 3D-style chain of three increasingly higher jumps.
• Traversal synced with the environment, much simpler to configure than the Game Animation Sample’s.
• Lean, procedural or Blend Space-driven, when the character turns.
• Weapons and aiming.
• Multiplayer replication, with no configuration on your side.

In the Animation Blueprint, the whole system fits in a single node plugged into the output: if you already have your own jump system, you keep it and plug it in alongside. Swimming, flying or gliding like in Breath of the Wild can be built with the same table system — once you understand the table and the three main tabs, you can build pretty much any locomotion.

Your animations, your game

No need for 500 animations: you can use your own, the ones that give your character real personality, and your game will not look like all the others. The plugin actually ships without animations — it is your game, they are your animations.