In this quick tip I’ll show you how to make dynamic idle animation that feels more alive. I’ll be using Sword Animset Pro by Kubold for this tutorial but you can use any animation set (or your own) as long as you have Aim Offsets.

End result:

You can create an Aim Offset from Content Browser under Animation -> Aim Offset:

After that, open your AimOffset asset you just created and set the Axis Settings. In this example, I’ll call them HorizontalAngle and VerticalAngle and set their minimum/maximum values to -90 and 90 respectively. So if the value is -90 horizontal then player will be looking to the left or if its 90 then player will look to the right. The same goes for vertical also. If its 90 then player looks up and -90 means looking down.

NOTE: For the sake of this tutorial, we will use LookAround asset that is included in Sword Animset Pro.

Now that our Aim Offsets are done its time to modify the Animation Blueprint Graph for your character. I wont be covering how to create the animation graph and assign it to your character. If you are not familiar with it you can read more about AnimGraph here.

The basic idea for this system is to create random “look at” points around our character within our vision cone (that is 90 degrees up and right) and we will use those values to drive our LookAround aim offset. In you Animation Event graph you have to create a graph like below. The comments in the screenshot should explain what the system does :). (psst click image for high resolution)

Once that setup is finished you simply have to use those values in your Anim Graph.

That’s it! You have your own Dynamic Idle Animation. You can play with all those values in Event Graph and make it more alive 🙂