Procedural Robot Biped Roaming Unreal Dunes

Julien Martorell

@pingouh · 801 followers

• Fully procedural locomotion: walk, run and gallop with planted feet and no pre-recorded animation
• Prototyped in Three.js, then ported to Unreal 5.8 with live PS5 controller play
• Tuned by simulating hundreds of creature lives to find and fix where it trips

“I wanted to test Fable 5.2 on something that felt impossible for me to code: complex behaviours for a creature. The starting point: a Three.js prototype. A little robotic biped living its own life, animated entirely by code. A lot of movement research went into it: getting it to walk, then run, then gallop without falling over, feet that actually plant on the ground, a head and neck that go looking for things, simulating hundreds of lives to see where it trips and fixing that. Alongside, a few reference sketches and visual research. Then I decided to try it in Unreal 5.8 and to make it controllable. No pre-recorded animation; everything is computed. All done in 2 days. Sound design is bad and world a bit random. The video is me playing around with my PS5 controller.”