Breathe life into your NPCs. Idle Weaver adds procedural breathing, weight shifts, gaze and look-at, hand fidgets, foot IK and posture variation on top of the idle pose or animation you already have. Ensuring that no two characters look exactly alike.

Idle Weaver is a procedural motion and behavior layer for NPCs in Unreal Engine 5.8. It adds subtle, lifelike movement to your existing idle poses or animations. Each character has its own unique rhythm, ensuring that a crowd sharing the same idle animation does not move in perfect unison.

Procedural NPC motion: six channels

• Breathing. Chest and shoulders, with a natural rhythm that changes over time.

• Weight shift. The hips move to one leg, and the spine keeps the balance.

• Gaze and look-at. The eyes lead, the head and neck follow, with natural limits.

• Hand fidgets. Fingers curl, wrists turn, and now and then a hand clenches.

• Foot IK. Each foot finds the ground on steps and slopes, and the hips follow.

• Posture variation. A slow difference for each character.
  
  

Gaze that picks its own targets

• NPCs look at players, at other NPCs, at tagged actors, and at points of interest.

• Each source has a weight. With no target, the gaze wanders.

• From gameplay, one call makes a character glance at a location or keep looking at an actor.
  
  

Context from gameplay: Tension, Energy, Temperature

• One profile, many moods. Set three values from Blueprint or C++.

• Tension gives faster, shallow breathing and more fidgets. Low energy gives slow, deep breaths. Cold closes the posture.
  
  

Optional features (all off by default)

• Head tilt, hip sway, limb swing with foot lift, shoulder offset, and feminine or masculine body styling.
  
  

Built for crowds

• Four LODs by distance to the camera. You set the distances and which channels run at each level.

• A crowd mode for background characters.

• The motion node does not allocate memory on each frame.
  
  

Runtime or baked

• Use it live, or bake the result to a normal Animation Sequence with one button.

• Fixed seeds give the same motion on every run, for replays and cinematics.
  
  

Fits your animation setup

• Fastest: add the Idle Weaver component to an actor with a skeletal mesh, pick one of six presets, press Play.

• Full control: add the Idle Weaver node to your Animation Blueprint, after your own idle.

• MetaHuman: a second node drives the eyes on the face mesh, in agreement with the head.

• A Pose Library asset lets a character drift between your own poses and idle loops.

• Bones are found automatically on most humanoid rigs: UE mannequins, MetaHuman, Mixamo, 3ds Max Biped. You can also set them by hand.
  
  

What you get

• 3 animation nodes, 2 components, a world subsystem, profile and pose library assets, 6 presets.

• Full C++ source. Every feature works from Blueprint and from C++.

• Documentation and a changelog.
  
  

What it does not do

• It is a layer for characters that stand, sit or wait. It does not make walk cycles or other locomotion.

• The motion is small on purpose. You can raise it.

• Gaze does not check line of sight.

• The plugin has no characters and no animations. The characters in the pictures and videos are not included.
  
  

Technical details

• Unreal Engine 5.8, Windows (Win64). Other platforms are not tested.

• Code plugin, two modules: Runtime and Editor.

• Network replicated: no. The motion is cosmetic and runs on each client.

• Documentation: https://github.com/arazcreates/IdleWeaver-Docs

• Support: [email protected]