Today I spent several hours figuring out how I can make my characters actually stand on the ground… instead of floating above it.

Yesterday I selected the character models I’m going to use and today I started adding the animations for walking. Except once I hooked in an animation controller my characters were floating above the ground, like so:

That would be just fine for jetpack soldiers but it’s not really the down-to-earth style I had in mind.

Having never worked with character animations before, it took quite a bit of research and experimenting to find the right solution. Did learn a lot about avatars, the root transform and animations.

At first I thought I’d have to modify the root transforms inside the animations, meaning I’d possibly have to adjust every single animation I used. I could get it visually correct that way that but it felt wrong and did not work with the different character models (eg. the kid).

In the end I discovered I can leave the animations alone and simply offsetting the animator versus the actor controller that I’m using fixes the problem as well. And I can tweak the offset per base character model, much simpler. For now it appears to hold up in all situations, fingers crossed.

Gamedev Diary Knock-On Effect