What is the progress of the AnimBank and Instanced Skinned Mesh Component for version 5.8? Any tutorials about this?
If we want to simulate the NPC crowds like those in Hitman, which approach is recommanded? VAT with ISM? Massive Plugin or AnimBank + ISKM?
Thanks
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Hi, once the 5.8 release is available, our recommendation in this area will likely be Mass + ISKM and AnimSequenceTransformProvider (which is a different way to generate GPU-formatted animation data, similar to AnimBank). Compared to AnimBank, AnimSequenceTransformProvider provides greater flexibility for handling variation within instances and for simple retargeting to similar skeletons. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that these are new features, so there’s always a possibility for bugs/issues compared to the VAT + Mass pipeline. But we think the ISKM approach offers many benefits in terms of workflows vs VATs.
We are going to release a MetaHuman crowd demo on FAB at the same time as the 5.8 release, which will leverage all of this functionality as well as showcasing a new MetaHuman character compositor system.
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The ISKM class inherits from Skinned Mesh Component rather than Skeletal Mesh Component so there’s no support for anim blueprint with those components. But the crowd demo will show how to move from dehydrated Mass entities that use ISKM to full hydrated actor representations that use skeletal mesh and anim blueprint. It’ll also show how to synchronize animation playback between AnimationSequenceTransformProvider and anim blueprint in order to keep the meshes synchronized when the switch happens.
If you’re interested in a pure instancing approach with skeletal mesh component and anim blueprint, the closest thing that we have to that is the Animation Sharing plugin which leverages the Leader Pose Component system to share bone transform data between skeletal meshes. But the performance results with this approach are going to be much slower than the ISKM approach.
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Ok, I’ll leave this thread open for now in case you have any further questions. Otherwise, it’ll auto-close in a couple of weeks.
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Thank you for the update and suggestions!
I understand those approaches are suitable for the far-distance NPCs or crowds. Is there any chance we can instance the skeleton mesh component (which is driven by the animation BP or animation framework with more complex behaviours)?
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Appreciate, I will take a look.
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