The character in this video was modelled and animated in a few minutes in Blender. It has only two animations, an idle and a walk. Yet it is playable in Unreal Engine 5: its feet don’t slide, it leans into turns, and not a single line of code was written. For comparison, Epic’s Motion Matching relies on several hundred animations.
The usual route
Importing your own character into Unreal is usually where the trouble begins: create an Animation Blueprint, build a State Machine with its idle-to-walk transitions, a Blend Space, fetch speed and direction in the Event Graph, then tune the movement speed so the feet don’t slide. Leaning into turns is even more work on top.
As a result, many people give up on their character and keep the mannequin, and so many indie projects end up looking alike. Hence the opposite test: the worst case possible, a quick-and-dirty character with two animations, to see how far it can go.
In Blender
- A character modelled quickly and rigged with Auto-Rig Pro.
- Two actions: an idle, where it breathes and moves its arms a little, and a looping walk.
- The walk cycle is animated with root motion: the character really moves forward in the animation.
- FBX export with the animations.
The walk’s root motion matters: it is what later lets the speed be set automatically.
Import and character creation
In Unreal, a standard import: the Skeletal Mesh, the skeleton and the two Animation Sequences. This is usually where the hours of Animation Blueprint begin. Here, you open the Locomotion Framework wizard instead.
- 1Name the character and choose a folder.
- 2Fill in the skeleton and the Skeletal Mesh.
- 3Click Create Character: the Animation Blueprint, the character Blueprint and a configuration Data Asset are generated, already linked together.
- 4In the Game Mode, set Default Pawn Class to the new Blueprint — here BP_Cat_LF.
Two animations in the Data Asset
Everything else happens in the Data Asset. In the Forward section, an Idle slot and a Walk slot: drop the two animations in.
Foot sliding and Auto-Fill
Then comes the problem every home-made locomotion runs into: the feet skate, because the character’s speed does not match the distance the animation actually covers.
The Auto-Fill button reads the walk’s root motion, computes the character’s real speed in the animation and sets the movement speed accordingly: 200 by default, 129 after Auto-Fill. The feet stick to the ground. Speed, acceleration and deceleration can still be set by hand if you prefer to stay in control.
In game, the Blender character and its two animations are controlled like a Player Character, with no sliding feet — zero nodes, zero lines of code.
Speed Multiplier speeds up or slows down the animation playback straight from the Data Asset: handy for adjusting the rhythm or feel of an animation without going back to Blender or recompiling anything.
Procedural lean
One last detail separates a production character from a store asset: lean, the body tilting into turns. The Lean section offers two modes: Blend Space if you have lean animations, Procedural if you don’t — which is the case here.
- Lean Bones: the bones to tilt, here the pelvis and the spine, each with its own weight.
- Max Angle: the maximum tilt.
- Interp Speed: the interpolation speed.
Even with a very basic setup, the lean is enough to bring the character to life. You take care of your animations, the framework takes care of the locomotion plumbing — whether you have two or two hundred.