Procedural animation is not new, but it was very computationnally demanding to be usable in game and even more so in real time. However I wonder if nowadays it is possible to reproduce this feature in Unreal for PC gaming. It would allow way more natural animations than keyframed bone transforms, both for bipeds and other legged creatures (quality gain) and to do much less animation work (time and cost gains). What do you think about it?
I saw a paper a few years back for a procedural “joint” solver that was reduced down to the equivalent of like 6 PID controllers. It worked amazingly well and I simply cannot find the **** paper again.
Procedural animation is definitely a useful tool, we already do things like using IK solvers to plant hands firmly on weapons for instance. So its not a huge leap to allow other types of procedural animation to be blended in the AnimBP, but don’t expect miracles. The work you showed was interesting, but very much an offline process (had to use genetic algorithms to find the configurations if I recall).
i’m sure there are people out there working on procedural animation technology for Unreal.
Yes IK solvers can work very well even to customize animations, like getting a zombi walk from a usual walking mocap, but I think an approach using heuristic optimization and a basic anatomy model can go well further and is more generic, for exemple you could add dexterity (e.g the character may fall) and energy constraints (e.g tiredness). As for use in real time it may be becoming possible with high end gaming PCs, that is something that would be interesting to investigate, also cloud gaming is becoming more and more mainstream. But even offline it would be interesting, you could record the logs in bone transforms of the functional animation you obtain and place it in a keyframed animation. Unfortunately, I didn’t see yet any people out there working on procedural animation^^’
You should also take a look at overgrowth, it uses procedural animation as well, mind you not at the local flexible muscle level, but a decent technique none the less.
Yes it is actually an “hybrid” system between manually keyframed animations and IK/ragdoll as the author explains here GDC Vault - Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation
This approach can produce very good results like with this system: FINAL IK - Full Body IK for Biped Characters - YouTube
It would be great to have this feature in Unreal Engine.
Completely procedural animation though is real movement and IMHO it is a basis for enabling more advanced AI, however to become interesting compared to the hybrid approach it would indeed have to be an online process, letting aside muscle constraints even with a basic model running optimizations in real time may be very expensive… I will still try to find a demo of a basic fully procedural animation and run calculations in real time with a good gaming pc rig, if it lags a lot well, that would mean that fully procedural animation in gaming is a Grail still way down the road^^'. An alternative would then be trying to implement an hybrid system like Final IK in Unreal which would already be awesome.
