Just a quick update on procedural animation theme mentioned in the Useful Middleware thread. I've been looking into NaturalMotion's endorphin quite a bit this week, and I felt obliged to post some thoughts here.
In the span of about 30 seconds, I was able to get a couple of human characters flailing around, knocking each other over, getting pushed around by various forces, and colliding with various objects in complex sequences, all at a level of quality that I think most professional animators would be happy with. No animation skill was required (which is fortunate, because I don't have any).
endorphin seems a bit limited right now by the fact that it's mainly useful for generating animations for human characters falling, stumbling, and generally getting knocked around in various ways. If you're not focused on human characters, or if you need animations not handled by endorphin's existing palette of Behaviors (say, attack animations, locomotion animations, or emotes/taunts), you're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way.
Still, though, endorphin is a huge step in the right direction. I'm really interested to see what new Behaviors will show up in the next release, and I'm encouraged that the next major endorphin release will apparently allow users to create their own Behaviors.
I'm also super curious as to what other kinds of tools might tackle the procedural animation problem from a different angle. As I mentioned in the Useful Middleware thread, there's been some very interesting work done on procedural locomotion animation for birds and fish. Speaking hypothetically, if you were in possession of a stick, and you also had all of the possibilities arrayed in front of you, you'd clearly have to drop that stick immediately, because the very thought of shaking that stick at all those possibilities is utterly preposterous.
Also, NaturalMotion released a new, free, time-unlimited Learning Edition of endorphin just a few days ago.
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Posted by PaulT at July 30, 2005 12:44 AMNice! I really like this little movie showing off the genetic learning that went into teach a bi-ped to walk:
http://www.naturalmotion.com/files/simplewalkevolution.mpg
Posted by: Thor Alexander at August 1, 2005 11:33 AMEndorphin does look promising. I've just read a little review of it in Game Developer as well. Will definitely look into it.
I assume you've all seen Ken Perlin's somewhat simple but powerful procedural biped demo, that he's been demoing over the past few years?
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/emotive-actors/
(he may have a spiffier version that's not yet online)