Ivo wrote: This presentation is based on the skeleton animation technology we implemented for the CRYSIS franchise and several unannounced titles. As we moved our technology from PC to PS3 and 360 we had to refine and redesign large parts of the code-base in order to cope with the massive amount of data that we were used to working with on a PC title. Our goal was to get maximum leverage out of canned animation data while keeping the asset count as low as possible. In this talk we will focus on parametric animations. We will discuss the necessity and requirements of this technique from the viewpoint of a game-developer and show in detail how to use these techniques for precise locomotion-control and full-body IK for arbitrary skeleton topologies. We will present a step-by-step approach how to create parametric animations and propose our own solutions for feature-extraction, blend-space construction, scattered-data interpolation and several techniques to generate animations that go beyond the range of the captured assets. Along the way, we will cover the blending, time-alignment and warping techniques that we developed, and the procedural modifications and physical simulations we used to make motion clips as interactive as possible, while preserving the original artistic style of the assets. Our own technique for parametric animations is based on academic-research (RBFs, KNNs, Geostatistics), but not much has been published on how good or bad these methods perform in game production scenarios. In that context we will discuss the pitfalls we encountered with the implementation of these methods and present a video comparison between different techniques. source
Link to presentation: Gdcvault.com
You can open the presentation with Open Office (open source software)
Edited by: Duruk
