Smoothing the Turning

Firstly, click the top section of the character in the top left side of the editor window.

In our case this is AITestCharacter(self).

This will now show the character and actor information in the details section on the right.

In the Pawn section, Untick the “Use Controller Rotation Yaw”

Next, click the “CharacterMovement (Inherited)” section to show the character movement settings on the right.

In the top right search box type “rotation” to show the related options.

In the Character Movement Rotation Settings tab, change the Z Rotation Rate value to 180 and tick the “Orient Rotation to Movement” box.

Demonstration

In this demo we show AI smooth rotation in Unreal Engine 4 that use the Troll mesh and animations from the Troll Pack PBR asset pack found on the Unreal Marketplace by InfinityPBR.

Instant AI Rotation

Smooth AI Rotation

Conclusion

Your AI characters now rotation smoothly and can be customised based on the agility of your game characters!

Let us know in the comments or contact us directly if you have any problems or want to request new Unreal Engine 4 topics.

Further Reading:

To enable your AI characters to roam large open worlds, check out our guide on enabling dynamic nav mesh generation.

To read more about AI in Unreal Engine, click here to read the official documentation on Behaviour Trees.

The post How to Smoothly Rotate AI Characters in Unreal Engine 4 appeared first on Couch Learn.

Before we Start

To enable these features, dynamic pathfinding must be enabled to allow the navigation mesh to generate during runtime.

To learn how to enable dynamic generation during runtime click here for our guide.

Only the areas of the level that possessed pawns are near will be generated.

Enabling Generation around Nav Invokers

To enable this setting we must firstly go to the project settings.

Once the project settings are open, click on the Navigation System tab.

Tick the checkbox named: Generate Navigation Only Around Navigation Invoker.

This tells the engine to only generate around actors that have the navigation invoker component.

Nav Invoker Component

To enable navigation generation on an actor, we first need to add the Navigation Invoker Component.

To add this to your actor, click the Add Component button in the top left of your blueprint editor and search for Navigation Invoker.

Once this component is added, setup the radius that the navigation mesh will be generated and removed.

From my testing, the default values work well for open world landscape levels.

When creating a procedurally generated indoor level, I recommend slightly higher values.

This prevents the actor from being trapped in their current room or area.

Demonstration and Example Files

Conclusion

That is all for enabling open world navigation in Unreal Engine 4!

Characters and pawns can now traverse large open or procedurally generated levels.

For further reading into the navigation functions in Unreal Engine, click here for the official documentation.

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