Draugr Characters

Customize the living essence

The eye, chest and damaged-face treatment uses animated material shading. Open the assigned instance under Materials/EssenceR3. Duplicate the instance before editing exposed color, intensity and swirl parameters. Keep its parent and referenced mask texture with it.

Inspect the result in your intended lighting and exposure. Bloom, emissive appearance and contrast depend on your project renderer settings. The Juggernaut face treatment is an intentional magical effect.

LODs and physics

The default ragdoll uses conservative joint limits and thigh collision shapes that cover the skinned skirt or robe. The lower body bends less freely to protect the garment from extreme folding. These settings affect physics simulation only; they do not restrict the included animations. Loosening limits or changing collision shapes requires renewed clipping tests.

There are four LOD levels per character. LOD0 is high detail; inspect lower LODs and choose screen-size transitions appropriate for your camera distance and character count. Profile in your game. No frame-rate or mobile-performance guarantee is made.

A Physics Asset is supplied. Your gameplay code owns ragdoll activation and collision. Stop character movement, choose an appropriate collision profile and enable skeletal-mesh physics when needed. Prevent the movement capsule from fighting the simulated body.

Test on your actual ground geometry. Check constraint stability, floor contact, clothing deformation and restoration if your game supports revival. A Physics Asset is not a death animation.

Texture folders

All Unreal textures are under BISDraugrCollection/Textures, with Juggernaut, Gravebinder and Runecaller subfolders. Each character folder contains its base color, normal, metallic, roughness and essence-mask textures. A single-character package contains only its matching subfolder. Unreal material references are updated with the move.

Physics settings when migrating

The supplied project enables physics substepping. Unreal's Migrate command copies assets and their dependencies, but does not copy project settings. Apply these settings in your destination project before testing ragdoll.

1. Open Edit > Project Settings > Engine > Physics and expand the advanced Framerate settings.
2. Enable Substepping. Set Max Substep Delta Time to 0.008333333 seconds and Max Substeps to 8.
3. Use the supplied Physics Asset with its matching mesh. Keep mesh scale at 1.0 for the initial test and disable conflicting capsule collision while simulating the body.
4. Test on your project's floor collision and check the complete character, including armor and robes. Integration settings, larger impulses and different collision geometry can change the result.

The shipped project uses these values in Config/DefaultEngine.ini under [/Script/Engine.PhysicsSettings]: bSubstepping=True, MaxSubstepDeltaTime=0.008333333, MaxSubsteps=8. Automatic fall and impulse checks were run at 60 and 30 frames per second with these settings. These checks do not guarantee behavior for every game or force.

Inspect ragdoll movement

1. Open the matching PA_Draugr_Bruiser, PA_Draugr_Healer, or PA_Draugr_Mage Physics Asset and start Simulate.
2. In Unreal Engine 5.8, hold Ctrl and drag with the right mouse button over a collision body to grab and move it. Ctrl plus left mouse button applies an impulse. Clicking without Ctrl does not perform the simulation grab.
3. Lift the torso gently, move it sideways, release it, and let it settle. Repeat from an arm and leg. Stop Simulate to restore the reference pose.
4. Check the body and armor for excessive folding, penetration, stretching, or persistent jitter. Include these interactions in your own game's collision and damage testing.

The garment is skinned geometry; cloth simulation is not included. Physics tuning and your game's movement or damage logic are separate from the included animation demonstrations.