You will be introduced to a novel, high-quality, real-time motion synthesizer -- a new concept for character animation that allows precise specification of the character movement, constraints and goals, while still leaving full control of look and feel in animators' hands. Speakers: Michael Buttner (Unity Technologies)

1. Michael Buttner
Principal Research Engineer
Unity Labs

2. The Future of
Character Animation in Unity:
High-Quality Motion Synthesis

4. →!

6. Unity: Kinematica
Precision
Responsiveness
Quality & Variation
Performance

11. Anticipation & Momentum
• 12 Principles of Animation
Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas
The illusion of Life: Disney Animation [1981]
• Anticipation is the preparation for the main action

13. Anticipation sells the body
mechanics of an action

19. Preserving
Inertia & Momentum
provides a sense of weight

24. Can you guess the next pose?

25. Can you guess the next pose?

26. Unity: Kinematica
calculates the next pose
given a desired trajectory

28. Motion database stores all poses in chronological order

30. Multi-objective
constraint optimization problem

32. • Joint distance
• Joint linear/angular speed
• Joint direction
• Only use joint subset
• Threshold based on speed

33. Neural Networks
• Motion Synthesis Networks
are an active research area
• Similar poses tend to get averaged
• Difficult to support specific animations
• Long training times
• Direct pose prediction will always
result in a loss of quality
• But Neural networks can fill
gaps in the data
• Constant runtime performance, no LOD

34. Machine Learning != Neural Networks
• No loss of quality
• Keep original data intact
• Remove redundant data
• Idle is not redundant
• Support for specific animations
• Perfect application for neural networks
• Data reduction & categorization
• Find the candidate poses in a scalable way
• Nearest neighbor problem
• Kd-Trees don’t work well in higher dimensions
• Kd-Trees suffer from poor scalability
• How about a near constant algorithm?

38. Convex combination of multiple motion streams
∑𝑖=0↑𝑛▒​ 𝑤↓𝑖 =1 !

39. 𝑛=1

40. Kinematica
Editor Setup

48. Kinematica & Gameplay Code
• Gameplay Code <-> Animation Runtime
• Point is: Your game needs to decide what needs to happen

49. Locomotion Ability

54. Parkour Ability

56. Unity: Kinematica – What’s next?
• More information & tutorials at SIGGRAPH and Unite LA
• Melee combat
• Climbing
• Physically simulated characters
• Full Body IK
• Tools – Rewind & playback

57. Thank you!