01 Before you start
Everything here is in centimetres, centimetres per second and degrees per second — the units the engine itself uses, so a speed you read here is the speed the Character Movement Component runs at. No conversion, no arbitrary “strength” dials.
| Engine | Unreal Engine 5.5 and 5.8 |
| Source | Full C++, Blueprint-exposed. One Runtime module, no editor-only dependency. |
| Animation | No Animation Blueprint required. Use your own if you prefer. |
| Content | Input Action assets only. |
The kit ships with no character content. No meshes, no animations, no creature. You point it at your own Skeletal Mesh and your own clips. Anything you see in the store video or images is a separate asset and is not included.
02 Make the creature
- Blueprint → Blueprint Class → search
CreatureCharacter. Name it after your animal. - Open it, select the Mesh component, assign your Skeletal Mesh.
- Select the creature (the top row of the Components list, or Class Defaults) and tick Auto Configure From Skeletal Mesh, in the Creature | Setup category. It runs at once and unticks itself. Then Compile and Save.
- Read Last Auto Setup Report, just below it. It lists every guess and everything it could not work out. A wrong guess is fixed by typing over the field it guessed.
Why a tick box and not a button? Unreal’s “Call In Editor” buttons do nothing inside the Blueprint editor: the engine drops class defaults from the button’s list of objects to run on, then runs the function only if that list is not empty. The button draws, the click is accepted, nothing happens, and nothing is logged. A property has no such limit.
What it reads
Leg chains, the head/neck aim chain, the capsule, the crouched capsule height, and which way the
mesh faces. It understands UE Mannequin (thigh_l), Mixamo (LeftUpLeg),
Rigify (thigh.L), 3ds Max Biped, L_Thigh prefixes, and the numbered limb
chains creature packs use — LLeg1 / LLeg2 / LLeg3, with F_LLeg1 for
forelimbs.
On a quadruped all four limbs become legs; on a biped whose arms are named the same way, they do not. A limb counts as a leg only if its tip sits near the ground in the reference pose — the only thing that separates a foreleg from an arm when the rigger called both “Leg”.
The capsule comes from the creature’s width
A capsule is a cross-section, not a plan view, so the radius is the narrower of the two horizontal half-extents. Taking the longer one would give a 13-metre animal a capsule 13 metres across.
A real quadruped, measured
The engine cannot make a capsule shorter than it is wide. Crouched Half Height is clamped up to the radius. If crouching does not shrink your creature, compare those two numbers first.
03 Give it animations
Auto Configure creates an empty Creature Motion Data. Empty is the default on purpose. Until you fill it in, the creature does not animate at all.
| Field | What goes in it | Needed? |
|---|---|---|
| Idle Anim | Standing still, looping | yes |
| Locomotion Blend Space | Walking / running, driven by speed | for walking |
| Turn Left / Right 90 | Stepping round on the spot, looping, no root rotation | for turn in place |
| Turn Left / Right 180 | The same, for big turns | optional |
| Crouch Idle Anim | Crouched or lying down, looping | for crouching |
| Crouch Start / End | Going down and getting up, played once | recommended |
| Crouch Blend Space | Crouched movement by speed | optional |
The blend space axes are fixed
The kit cannot ask a blend space what its axes mean, so it states them instead:
- X = turn rate, degrees per second (negative is left)
- Y = ground speed, centimetres per second — the same numbers as Walk, Trot and Run Speed
With the defaults that means Walk at Y = 206, Trot at
Y = 384 and Run at Y = 700.
You do not need a sample at zero speed. Below the slowest sample your blend space actually has, the kit fades the Idle Anim back in, so a creature standing still is not left walking on the spot.
Take the in-place clips
Where a pack offers both, use the _InPlace variants. The others move the root, and the
kit is already moving the creature — using them makes it travel further than it appears to and
the feet slide.
Point the mesh at it
Mesh → Animation → Anim Class → CreatureAnimInstance.
That is the whole animation setup: idle, the locomotion blend space by speed, turn in place with the
step clips, and the crouch pose, built in C++. No Anim Graph, no state machine, nothing to wire.
Prefer your own Animation Blueprint? Either make it a child of CreatureAnimInstance and
untick Use Native Pose — every value is then a variable in your graph —
or keep any plain Anim Blueprint and read the component:
Try Get Pawn Owner → Cast To CreatureCharacter →
Turn In Place.
If you leave Use Native Pose ticked, your Anim Graph is ignored — the C++ pose is used instead, and your blend space appears to do nothing.
04 Play it
The creature is a normal ACharacter: set World Settings → Game Mode
Override and its Default Pawn Class to your Blueprint, drop a Player
Start, press Play.
| W A S D | Move |
| Mouse | Look — the body turns to follow |
| Left Shift | Run, while held |
| C | Walk / trot toggle |
| Left Ctrl | Crouch, press again to stand |
| Right Mouse | Free look — the body stops following the camera |
| Left Mouse | Attack |
Spawned by a Game Mode? Then settings ticked on a creature placed in the level never reach the one you play — a spawned pawn is built from the Blueprint. Tick things on the Blueprint, and Compile.
05 Tuning how it moves
All of it lives in one struct, which appears twice: on the Motion Data asset (shared by every creature using it) and on Turn In Place → Locomotion Override on the creature itself. Only one is live at a time — if Override Locomotion is ticked, the creature’s own values win. Live Locomotion Source says which is in effect right now and what its numbers are. Read it before wondering why an edit did nothing.
Speeds
| Walk Speed | 206 cm/s | default |
| Trot Speed | 384 cm/s | the gait used when no key is held |
| Run Speed | 700 cm/s | while Shift is held |
| Crouch Speed | 90 cm/s | a cap, not a gait |
Turning radius
Moving at speed v with radius R, the body turns at most
v / R radians per second, so it walks an arc.
Turn Radius When Walking(600 cm) applies exactly at Walk Speed.Turn Radius When Running(2000 cm) applies at Run Speed and above.- Every speed between is blended between those two — including Trot, the default gait. A tight walk radius with a wide run radius still gives a wide turn at trot.
- Tick Use Trot Turn Radius to give Trot its own value, so trot can be tight while run stays wide.
Turning in place is a separate branch that does not use the turning radius at all
— it uses Turn Rate Deg Per Sec.
Animation smoothing
Animation Smoothing (0.15 s) eases what the blend space is asked for when speed or turn
rate changes sharply. It smooths the animation only; the creature’s movement is untouched. Too
much of it and the legs lag behind the real speed and the feet slide.
06 Seeing the radius
Judging whether a radius is “working” by the feel of a turn is hopeless, so the kit
draws it. Tick Turn In Place → Show Turn Radius Debug, or type
creature.DrawTurnRadius 1 in the console while playing. From a Blueprint,
Toggle Turn Radius Debug For All Creatures needs no target and can go on a key.
| Drawn | Means |
|---|---|
| Bright circle | the radius in force at the current speed, on the side it is turning toward |
| Dim circle | the same radius, other side |
| Cyan line | the path it has actually walked |
| Yellow circle | a circle fitted to that path — the radius it really turned at |
| Arrows | body heading, and where it is being asked to point |
If the two circles are the same size, the radius is doing exactly what it was set to. If the fitted one is wider, something else is the limit — and the on-screen readout names it, including the commonest case: the creature is turning in place, where the radius is not used.
With the game stopped, the same tick box previews each gait’s radius in the editor viewport
(green walk, blue trot, orange run). creature.TurnRadiusDebugReport prints the whole
state — what is switched on, which creature, and whether anything is being drawn at all.
07 Crouching
Left Ctrl, or Set Crouching / Toggle Crouch from Blueprint. The
kit drives the engine’s own crouch: shrunken capsule, correct replication, and
the behaviour people forget — a creature under something low cannot stand up,
and Is Crouched stays true until there is room.
What crouching changes is the collision and the speed. What it looks like is your animation. With no crouch clips assigned, a crouched creature keeps playing its idle: the capsule is half the height and the speed is capped, but it is still standing up in the picture. That is the crouch waiting for a clip, not a fault. The feet stay on the ground throughout rather than sinking with the capsule.
Crouch Start / End Anim— played once, in full, at their own speed: a four-second lie-down takes four seconds. Without them the crouch can only cross-fade between two still poses, and that reads as the creature sinking into the floor.Crouch Blend Seconds(0.5 s) — the cross-fade onto and off those clips. The kit hands over across the last of it, because the final frame of a lie-down and the first frame of a lying-down loop are almost never the same pose.Crouch Is Toggle— press to crouch and again to stand (default), or untick for hold-to-crouch.
08 Setting up from script
Auto Configure is also a plain function, AutoConfigureFromSkeletalMesh, callable from
Blueprint, C++ and editor Python. It returns the same report it stores, so a script
can set up a whole pack of creatures and print what each one guessed.
A script must compile the Blueprint afterwards, exactly as you would press Compile by hand, or the values never reach the saved asset.
09 Multiplayer
Movement and rotation replicate the way any Character does. The turn state and the crouch replicate too, so other players see the right animation. The owning client turns immediately and tells the server its desired heading; the server runs the same turn from the same settings.
10 When something is wrong
| What you see | What it almost always is |
|---|---|
| Nothing animates | Motion Data is empty, or not assigned to Turn In Place, or the mesh’s Anim Class is empty |
| Nothing animates, own Anim BP | the mesh points at a different Anim Blueprint than the one you are editing |
| Your Anim Graph is ignored | it is a child of CreatureAnimInstance with Use Native Pose still ticked |
| Ticking Auto Configure changed nothing | look at the capsule, not the panel. Still 34×88 means it did not run — check the Mesh has a Skeletal Mesh |
| It worked, then the numbers came back | the Blueprint was not compiled |
| Crouch reports true, capsule never shrinks | the radius is as large as the half height; the engine clamps the crouched height up to it |
| Zero legs on something with legs | the report says what it looked for; fill Ground Adaptation → Legs in by hand |
| It walks on the spot while standing | no blend space sample slow enough, and no Idle Anim to fall back to |
| A Turn Radius edit changes nothing | the other source is live (read Live Locomotion Source), or it is turning in place, or Trot is blending toward a wide run radius |
| The debug draw shows nothing | ticked on a different copy than the one being played — use the console command, or tick it on the Blueprint and Compile |
| Crouch does nothing | Can Crouch is off on the Character Movement component |
| The creature faces sideways | set Mesh Forward Axis by hand, which also switches off the auto-guess |
| A Call In Editor button does nothing | Unreal runs those only on a creature placed in a level, never from the Blueprint editor |