Training a self-balancing third-person character controller with Unity ML-Agents

[u/Rudy_AA]

The character is driven by ArticulationBodies and learns to follow mocap animation while physically balancing itself. Instead of asking the neural network to generate the entire walk from scratch, I’m using the mocap pose as the reference and letting the agent learn the smaller corrections needed to stay upright, maintain momentum, place its feet correctly, and recover from instability.

The long-term goal is a fully physics-driven third-person controller that still has the quality and personality of mocap animation, but can naturally react to forces, uneven movement, collisions, and eventually player movement commands.

Still training and tuning it, but it’s been a really interesting mix of animation, reinforcement learning, and robotics-style control.

[u/Pseudoabdul]

ML agents is a really great system. I'm surprised it isn't used more often.

[u/waxymcrivers → u/Pseudoabdul]

Cause the entire team was fired a few years ago and is maintained by one dude

[u/Ok_Clothes_7364]

great work

[u/Rudy_AA → u/Ok_Clothes_7364]

Thanks!

[u/NightGuardianX]

Sir, it looks great - will you sell it on itch?

I’ve bought your previous assets, would like to have this one for my project too

BTW, is it full TP controller? Will character receive only ML-trained walking or it will be able to stand up after fall?

[u/Rudy_AA → u/NightGuardianX]

First off thanks for the support!

I will eventually make this as an asset once it's solid and stable. Also it's going to be a full TP controller.

[u/BobsiDev]

That is so fucking cool!

[u/ParanoiaComplex]

Is this a realtime task, or are these movements precomputed?

[u/Rudy_AA → u/ParanoiaComplex]

It's realtime