Surface Movement and 3D Navigation for Insects, Centipedes, and Snakes

Video: HERE

Packaged playable demo: Download here
Check the Documentation: Read here

Asset showcase playlist: Watch on YouTube

More assets: View asset page

3D Surface Movement
3dNavigationPawns is a modular system for creating player-controlled and AI-controlled creatures that travel across floors, walls, ceilings, trees, rocks, and other collision surfaces.

The plugin combines:

• Surface-aware pawn movement

• Procedural insect gait

• Modular centipede bodies

• Spline-driven snake bodies

• Surface-aligned camera movement

• Modular ragdoll simulation

• Editor-baked 3D surface navigation
  

Unlike standard floor-based NavMesh navigation, the included navigation volume generates a connected graph across surfaces in every orientation. AI pawns can follow routes from the ground onto walls, around obstacles, across ceilings, and along suitable natural or architectural geometry.

Included Creature Systems

Insect:

Create spiders, beetles, and other multi-legged creatures using a modular skeletal leg mesh.

Configure the number of leg pairs, body length, left/right separation, and Root, Thigh, Knee, and Foot bone names. The gait component automatically:

• Generates and positions the legs

• Assigns natural stepping phases

• Traces surrounding terrain

• Adapts foot placement while moving

• Handles jump poses, landing, and ragdoll

Centipede:

The centipede system extends an existing insect pawn with modular body segments and repeated leg pairs.

It reads the source gait configuration, creates the requested number of segments, and follows the head during:

• Forward and backward movement

• Strafing

• Turning and turning in place

• Uneven-surface movement

• Jumping and landing

• Modular ragdoll simulation

Snake:

The snake component creates a spline-driven creature from Head, Middle, and Tail static meshes.

Configure section count, section length, body scale, ground offset, side-to-side motion, trail resolution, and tail tapering. The system updates mesh positions and tangents along the traveled path and supports modular physics simulation when entering ragdoll.

3D Surface Navigation

Place an Insect Surface Navigation Volume around the environment and build the navigation graph directly in the editor.

Important controls are placed at the top of the Details panel, including:

• Volume extent

• World Scale

• Path Quality

• Node and sample limits

• Blocked actors

• Debug visibility

• Navigation build controls

Navigation Features:

• Editor-baked and serialized navigation graphs

• Runtime rebuild and update functions

• Floor, wall, ceiling, and curved-surface navigation

• Scale-aware graph generation

• Configurable path quality and build budgets

• Persistent blocked-actor exclusions

• Per-request Actor blacklist arrays

• Location and Actor destinations

• Optional acceptance radius

• Asynchronous Finished and Succeeded outputs

• Stop Movement Blueprint nodes

• Surface projection and direct path-query nodes

• Editor and in-game path visualization

• Configurable path display duration

• Procedural graph debug rendering

Movement, Camera, and Physics:

The surface movement component handles acceleration, turning, strafing, surface alignment, charged jumping, falling, landing, and post-jump velocity blending.

The camera follows the pawn's changing surface orientation using configurable smoothing and angular-speed limits. Camera collision prevents penetration while smoothing conflicts between mouse input and blocking surfaces.

The insect, centipede, and snake systems include modular ragdoll and restoration nodes. Ragdoll velocity is preserved, and Exit Ragdoll searches for a suitable surface before restoring normal movement.

Blueprint-Friendly Workflow

The plugin includes ready-to-use player and AI pawn Blueprints:

• Insect player pawn

• Insect AI pawn

• Centipede player pawn

• Centipede AI pawn

• Snake player pawn

• Snake AI pawn

Also included:

• Matching GameModes

• Enhanced Input assets

• Navigation-volume Blueprint

• Demonstration UI

• Static and skeletal meshes

• Materials and textures

• Skeleton and physics assets

• Configured demonstration level

Open the included demo level to inspect complete implementations of player input, AI navigation, surface movement, procedural gait, camera control, ragdoll, centipede movement, and snake movement.