Characters and movement

Set up a character's movement, capsule, mesh, camera and footsteps.

What it’s for

Ask your assistant to set up how a character moves and what it is made of: walk, run, crouch, sprint and swim speeds, jump and gravity, the capsule and skeletal mesh, the spring-arm camera, AI navigation movement, rotation rules, custom movement modes and footstep effects. You say the values you want and it writes them onto the Character Blueprint, so you skip the many nested settings of the Character Movement component.

Use it when you set up or tune a playable character: movement feel, the camera boom, the collision capsule size, or which footstep sounds, particles and decals play on each surface. It changes the Blueprint’s saved defaults, so every copy of that character gets the change.

For things that happen to a live character in a running game, such as authority, replication or local control, see Replication and networking and Local and LAN multiplayer.

Things you can ask

Tune how the character moves

Your assistant sets walking speed and friction, and gives sprint its own faster speed.

You: On BP_PlayerCharacter, set walk speed to 450, sprint to 750, and bump ground friction.

BP_PlayerCharacter now walks at 450 and sprints at 750, with ground friction raised to 8.

Make the jump feel right

A higher jump, tighter air control and more gravity, so the character floats less.

You: Give BP_PlayerCharacter a higher jump with tighter air control and a bit more gravity.

Set the jump to 620, air control to 0.35 and gravity scale to 1.3.

Match a surface to a footstep sound

When the character steps on that surface, the matching sound and effect play.

You: When BP_PlayerCharacter walks on grass, play the grass footstep sound and kick up the grass VFX.

Grass now plays S_Footstep_Grass and spawns P_Footstep_Grass when BP_PlayerCharacter steps on it.