Locomotion System Overview

When people see the Locomotion System in action, they sometimes get incorrect ideas about what the system can and cannot. Here is a brief description that can hopefully make things a bit more clear.

The Locomotion System for Unity automatically blends your keyframed or motion-captured walk and run cycles and then adjusts the movements of the bones in the legs to ensure that the feet step correctly on the ground. The system can adjust animations made for a specific speed and direction on a plain surface to any speed, direction, and curvature, on any surface, including arbitrary steps and slopes.

The Locomotion System does not enforce any high level control scheme but rather lets you move your character around by any means you desire. The Locomotion System silently observes the position, alignment, velocity and rotational velocity of your character and deduces everything from that, along with some raycasts onto the ground.

This flexibility means that you can use a CharacterController, a RigidBody (those are standard components in Unity) or something else entirely to move your character around in the world, exactly as you would normally do.

The Locomotion System is not:

• A physics-based system or active animated ragdoll system.
  The system has no integration with the physics simulation. It is purely kinematic, though it does base the kinematics on some raycasts onto the geometry of the ground.
  
• A behavior-based system.
  The system cannot make the character react instinctively to external forces such as being punched, tripping and falling, or being shot. The system only blends and slightly adjusts your existing animations.
  
• A unified system that can be used for all animation of a character.
  The system only controls the legs. (The whole body is typically implicitly controlled since the system blends together multiple full body animations. However, this can be overridden by the user with specific animations for the upper body, using the usual means available in Unity.)