I don’t intend to use this blog solely as an ad space for what we do, but here’s something you should look at if you use Epic’s Unreal Engine in your productions. We’ve built a really nice integration into the Unreal animation tree that makes HumanIK a lot more useable; basically you can pretty much use HumanIK without programmer involvement. Of course for production code you might want your effectors to be driven or created by code, but to prototype stuff you really just need to connect nodes together in the animation graph.

Here’s some videos created by one of our engineers. It’s not marketing material by any means, in fact we created them as training material for the guys doing demos at our booth, so don’t expect a cool soundtrack and a pretty montage :p . Nevertheless, they’re useful and show how powerful HumanIK can be and how easy it is to use with the Unreal integration. In case you’re wondering, this integration is included with purchases of HIK 4.5 as long as you’re also an Unreal Engine customer.

Here they are, split into 6 small parts. Parts 1 through 5 show how you can use full-body IK inside the animation tree for various things such as a look at and climbing, and then part 6 shows the result in-game. I suggest you watch them in full screen, as the actual video resolution is higher than what you see below.