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[cormack12]

Physics-based animation holds the promise of unlocking unprecedented levels of interaction, fidelity, and variety in games. The intricate interactions between a character and it's environment can only be faithfully synthesized by respecting real physical principles.

To combine the strengths of both methods we developed DReCon, a character controller created using deep reinforcement learning. Essentially, simulated human characters learn to move around and balance from precisely controllable motion capture examples. Once trained, gamepad controlled characters can be fully simulated using physics and simultaneously directed with a high level of responsiveness at a surprisingly low runtime cost on today's hardware.

Check out the full article as it has embedded examples and good detail: https://montreal.ubisoft.com/en/drecon-data-driven-responsive-control-of-physics-based-characters/
Full paper is here: https://static-wordpress.akamaized....p-content/uploads/2019/11/13214229/DReCon.pdf


Some tangential stuff about the animation systems in RDR2



Typically, I think it will ultimately boil down to the frustration many felt with RDR2 and what he says here:

veteran game animator Dan Lowe (currently at EA's Motive Studios in Montreal) does a deep dive into the mechanics of the animation and sheds light on the creative choices made by its designers. For example:

"We could probably do 100% realistic animation in games if we weren't fighting player's expectations for response. Typically, a character in most shooter games is going to go from zero to 4.5 meters a second within about 10 frames or something like that. It's very, very fast the degree to which a character can accelerate or decelerate, really beyond what a human would be able to do. Over the years, that's what games have done, and because of that players have gotten used to that and now it feels very sluggish when you have a more realistic movement model. The fact that Rockstar has gone for this realistic movement model means that they can have very high quality animation; it just comes at the expense of game feel."

 

[stranno]

I didn't know SIGGRAPH was still a thing. It was the show where Final Fantasy SGI demo was presented.

 

[cormack12]

Ubisoft usually push a lot of NPC's so I'm guessing the low cost really makes this palatable for them. The tech demo is a bit weird looking though.

 

[GymWolf]

Now translate this on your games ubisoft.

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

This is why RDR2 has a 97 Metacritic score