> Thankfully, the 360 and PS3's brute strength makes
> real-time synthesis a distinct possibility at last.
Nintendo Revolution, too, I'm sure :)
Posted by Paul T at March 13, 2006 01:03 PMKen is still working on procedural animation and looking to have that technology employed in games.
Interestingly, bearing in mind your comment about using canned animations (which I could never quite understand myself), Ken was telling me he has also extended his system to use canned animations blended with procedural. The reason he gave was that without that ability studios were reluctant to use the technology because they had amased so many assets in terms of animations that they were loath to throw those assets out.
So building on top of canned animations makes a product easier to sell into the market as it can more easily fit into the existing production workflow and does not require a wholesale production reconfiguration (however much games need that kick in the pants)!
For that reason I realized that my technology also needed animation blending capabilities so I could sell "what you have but better, cheaper and faster" rather than "a qualititively different level of behavior".
Like you I have been talking to the Natural Motion guys for many years, for me it was asking them when they would have a real time SDK available. It was always something that was possible, if you paid. The problem with real time technologies is not the systems themselves but the question of "how do you drive these real time systems?" If its just using a rigid state machine then it is little different from playing canned animations and all of the possibilities are lost.
I am hoping "Spore" will show the industry the power of procedural and then perhaps products like Natural Motion can offer "Spore without the years of research"?
And Havok is coming to the party too!
They just announced their real-time procedural animation and FSM behavior stuff:
http://www.havok.com/content/view/285/79/
Did anyone get a chance to check out Natural Motion at GDC? I wasn't able to make it to GDC this year, so I didn't get the chance.
Posted by andrew stern at March 29, 2006 01:55 PM