Custom pawn strangely moves down when idle

[Lucas Mattos]

Hey guys,

I'm having a little problem with my custom pawn, I know it seems a common problem and I've found some similar problems on the internet, but the solutions I've found didn't work for me, and I have some urgency on this.

What i have is a custom made skeletal mesh, with totaly custom bones and rigging (not using the UDK's standard bones), with custom animations, i set up my AnimTree and AnimSet and i'm using all this in my player's Pawn for a side-scroller game.

The problem is that when the pawn is idle, it moves down a little. Just for testing I'm using the same animation when idle and moving and it keeps happening (so it cant be the animation or the bones setup).

I've create a colision cylinder through code and it didnt work, that Skelletal Mesh's bounding also makes no diference (I don't know what they're for, thought it was for colision, but the colision cylinder seems to do that alone)

And i have some stairs on my scene, after climbing the third step the problem disapears, but when I go down it comes back again.

Some pictures of the problem, don't repare on the mesh quality plz, i'm not a pro, and the texture is just for testing.



You can see that when it is moving there is no problem (also after climbing to some height it is ok). It seems that the problem is somehow linked to the Z position of the pawn, but it doesnt makes any sense to me...

[FragWeapon]

I would like to bump this because I have the exact same problem but have yet to find a solution.

[garner]

offset the idle animation hip joint up to compensate for the -z translation

[FragWeapon]

Well in my case I have a hovercraft as a pawn right now, it doesn't use animation. So where in the code is this -z translation? I'd like to just remove it.

[garner]

Kinda depends on how you set up the collision/s surrounding your mesh, which needs to be adjusted down. If you're using the default collision with the pawn you can bring your pawn upward by double clicking on the skeletal mesh in the content browser, looking for origin within the mesh tab at the bottom and increasing the Z value. If you're using a physics asset you can increase the size and position of the lowest bounding box. There are even more ways to do this, by creating offsets in the mesh in the 3d program you use

[FragWeapon]

This problem is not solved, I guess I never mentioned (for me at least) that in multiplayer all other clients do it, not my local pawn. I don't think it's an animation issue.

[Stuart.A.Brooks]

Hey, I've been looking for an answer to this same problem myself, only on clients, slightly offset when moving compared to idle etc etc, and found a solution to my problem, so maybe its the solution to yours as well.

After giving up with this issue I moved onto some collision stuff, used the console command 'Show COLLISION' and it turns out that the collision box didn't encapsulate all of my characters feet.. While idle it was all cool and looked like it was in the right position, but when moving on a client, the position just so happened to be the difference between the bottom of my character's feet and the bottom of the collision cylinder.

Judging from this, I'd say its a collision box issue, slightly miss-positioned etc. I added a translation=(Z=35) to my skeletal mesh component in default properties. I also tried the translation line in the collision cylinder component as well; both worked the same.

Hope this helps!