Animation database features over 500 AAA-quality animations and a fully functional character and animation Blueprint, everything needed to get a character up and running using the new Motion Matching toolset.
Today, Epic Games announced the release of its free “Game Animation Sample Project,” with an animation database of over 500 AAA-quality animations and a fully functional character and animation Blueprint. The project contains everything needed to get a character up and running using the new Motion Matching toolset. Get the full story here.
Here are the highlights:
The Game Animation Sample Project showcases dynamic, fully functional animation systems commonly needed in games. Built using best practices, and it can be used for learning or to help kickstart creations.
For those working on AAA projects, the sample is a sandbox: a starting point for pre-production, learning UE gameplay animation features, and understanding Motion Matching best practices.
For indie devs, the sample provides plug-and-play locomotion, as well as hundreds of game-ready animations compatible with all UE Mannequins usable for humanoid locomotion in projects. Users are free to use animations with or without their accompanying animation Blueprints and retarget them for their own characters.
The Game Animation Sample Project comes with multiple Motion Matching databases. Check out the project documentation to understand the benefits of separating animations into multiple databases and learn why the Pose Search schema’s setup is the way it is. Also, explore scenarios where the system might select a dense dataset with hundreds of animations versus a sparser set with less than a hundred.
Choosers and Proxy Tables power most animation selections in the sample. To address gaps in animation coverage, users can use Pose Warping. The sample also includes world-class authoring and debugging tools like the Rewind Debugger, which enables users to record, inspect, and edit motion databases to understand and improve transitions.
Harness the power of Motion Matching:
Motion Matching is a simple yet powerful way to animate characters in games. It continuously selects the best frame of animation to play from its motion database, aiming to closely match the current pose of the character as well as its past and future movement.
The system scales the size of user’s dataset to reach desired fidelity and uses Pose Warping algorithms to fill in the gaps.
Motion Matching is about more than locomotion—it’s a powerful tool for jumping, falling, and complex traversal (think parkour). Using 3D trajectory prediction can produce seamless transitions with anticipation and long follow-throughs for realistic results.
Combined with a vast library of animation poses created from high-end motion capture data, the locomotion and traversal dataset in this sample project makes it a powerful new way to animate characters - including MetaHumans.
Download the Game Animation Sample Project here.
Source: Epic Games
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
