Legs Animator

About Legs Animator – Unity Editor Tool & Plugin

Procedural Leg IK Plugin for Unity

Legs Animator is a procedural inverse kinematics component designed to resolve foot placement, ground alignment, and motion stability for multi-legged characters and creatures. Operating in synchronization with existing animation clips, the system dynamically adjusts leg bones and hips across humanoid, animal, and multi-legged skeletal rigs. It features a built-in IK solver while also providing computed positions and rotations that can drive external solutions like Mecanim Foot IK or Final IK.

Locomotion Adjustment and Stability Features

The system provides automated mechanics to eliminate visual discrepancies during navigation and idle states without requiring manual frame keyframing.

• Terrain Adaptation and Foot Gluing: Aligns feet to uneven ground surfaces and locks attachment points to prevent sliding during non-root motion movement or transitions.
• Idle and Turn Mechanics: Manages complex attachment transitions during idle states and generates automatic in-place turning leg steps.
• Hips Stability and Push Impulses: Enhances animation posture through automated hip balancing, including a Push Impulses API to simulate heavy landing bends and impacts.
• Directional Locomotion Module: Features an automated strafe and 360-degree movement animating module using a single animation clip.
• Step Events and Diagnostics: Detects footfalls to trigger step sound effects and particle systems, accompanied by a compact runtime performance profiler.
• Procedural Stepping: Generates fully procedural walk and step motions for simple models such as multi-legged running insects.

Use Cases

• Suitable for third-person action games needing to eliminate foot sliding on non-root motion walk and run cycles.
• Useful for titles with uneven terrain where characters, quadrupeds, or multi-legged creatures must conform their stance to ground slopes.
• Relevant to character controllers requiring dynamic landing impact reactions and automatic in-place turning steps.

FAQ

Does the system generate running animations from static poses?

The component does not create running cycles out of stationary poses; it operates in sync with existing movement clips to correct foot placement. However, it can independently animate procedural walking and stepping cycles for certain simple rigs like insects.

What rigging configurations are required?

The character skeleton must follow a standard hierarchical structure where the hips bone is the parent of the leg bones. Additionally, the "Optimize Game Objects" setting must remain disabled in the model's rig import settings.

Is the component compatible with Unity Animation Rigging's Two Bone IK?

It does not work with the Two Bone Constraint IK from the Unity Animation Rigging package because that system discards source animation data prior to LateUpdate execution.

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