Motion Matching and the Game Animation Sample in UE 5.4 | Unreal Fest 2024

[@SphealIcecream]

This was actually even more educational than the hours long live stream lol

[@VygoOG]

I love Unreal so much

[@Illuxel]

Bruh, sponsored

[@dayton173]

And I love you!

[@DevGamerShripadAgashe]

Awesome tool cant wait for the next editions.

[@kubolor1234]

Epic needs to hire educators

[@B4H4D1R]

We need a complete tutorial series about crouching and walking toggle!!!!

[@kevinbittner5069]

One week ago? dang youve been holding onto this for a while.

[@ShimizuIzumi]

Yeah, this really took them some time and I still wasn't able to integrate it in my project

[@kevinbittner5069]

@@ShimizuIzumi The important part of programming is to not give up when things get hard. There will always be hurdles to overcome and if you try hard enough anything is possible. Best of luck!

[@darrenstone3406]

Try harder and stop crying ​@ShimizuIzumi

[@TertiaryButyl]

Nice beanie lol

[@treehousebandit]

Great work on this, thank you! Spline based detection breaks down a bit when the blocks are moving or if the block is spawned into the level vs already being in the level when begin play starts. has anyone else encountered this or have a fix?

[@martinchampagne9392]

Is that hours long live stream available somewhere ?

[@craneshen6819]

so coooooool, but so complicated

[@bernhard.rieder]

I guess I missed it. How do you use your own custom character? Or is there any other step by step video tutorial that shows that process?

[@josevillarroel9422]

There's instructions in the documentation here: dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/game-animation-sample-project-in-unreal-engine

[@ИгорьКретов]

Why doesn't metahuman usually work? Even if you do retargeting animations.

[@forgottenerror]

So is it okay to use stuff from the animation example and the UE templates in UE in my video game?

[@CallMeMistaPepe]

Where’s the sale?

[@featheredmusic]

We need more documentation and lessons, this is so fast and vague its hard to keep up

[@donduck1]

its not posible to use animations without root motion?

[@josevillarroel9422]

It's possible, but the root motion is what describes what direction you want your character to go. You'd have to express that in some way (i.e. a chooser that picks a database based on direction, but I wouldn't recommend it). The actual playback of the animation doesn't need to be root motion. Locomotion in the sample is Character Movement driven, and we switch to a root motion montage when doing traversal.

[@highflex370]

@@josevillarroel9422 Hi, not sure if you will see this but i have a quick question about the 5.5 attribute root motion support. I tried adding this myself to GAS, from my understanding you add the component to the character and then on the Offset Root Bone Node you check "bResetEveryFrame" to be true. However the biggest issue is that the character is unable to move when standing still unless he was already moving before. ( I assume the checks for bIsMoving need to be adjusted if it runs on root motion only ) the other thing is i noticed a lot of issues with the character not aligning correctly ( i had to set offset root bone translation and rotation to Release and also disable orientation warping ) but still then i see small alignment issues, i was wondering if you would be able to share roughly what adjustments need to be done, i would love to go root motion only for singleplayer R&ND. Cheers!

[@josevillarroel9422]

​@@highflex370 What you're describing is correct. We unfortunately found issues and the conclusion is that for Root Motion + Motion Matching we need to separate the state of prediction from the state of the character else we won't get clean results. We've seen some issues w/ blends and basically we're not confident we'll release a good example of this in 5.5 so we're moving this over to a future release. The summary of changes/hacks we did for the example above to work was that most things that rely on velocity used "Future velocity" instead (grabbed from a few frames in the future from trajectory prediction). We've heard from licensees that they've succesfully used root motion from the attribute so I'm sure it's possible. We just need some extra time to nail down a general solution!

[@highflex370]

@@josevillarroel9422 Thank you for the fast reply and detailed insight :) i totally forgot about the trajectory prediction model ha! Will keep experimenting and see what i can come up with, great to know that licensees used it successfully! Cheers.

[@43turkkkless]

Plz Can guys make a pro football game 🙏

[@Kinos141]

after 3 months and now you're teaching people how to use it. Kinda late, don'tcha think? Anywho, good video.

[@ConsuetudoGames]

I hope Epic will add motion matching to Lyra 🤞

[@CrisisDispenser]

It's too slow for a multiplayer game in its current state.

[@ConsuetudoGames]

@@CrisisDispenser Thanks for letting me know, I was thinking it would probably take a while to get it working well for multiplayer, one day hopefully.

[@josevillarroel9422]

@@ConsuetudoGames The sample itself is not multiplayer friendly yet. Two elements are missing: 1. Acceleration isn't replicated on Simulated Proxies, so Motion Matching doesn't work. This can be fixed easily in code, but not straightforward in blueprint projects. The next update will include this fix. 2. We still haven't figured out a strategy to replicate traversal. We're working on it. Fortnite uses Motion Matching for the base locomotion (not traversal) in a networked game (only difference is we replicate acceleration). We think the solution is scalable for multiplayer.

[@ConsuetudoGames]

@@josevillarroel9422 Awesome, sounds good. I kinda expected once Epic have this working well enough with Fortnite they'd use a similar solution to update Lyra. Thank you!

[@brocscogmyre5592]

Most of the KZbin animation tutorials are inadequate, many of the presenters don't answer questions because they don't know the answers. I'm having a serious problem with animation blending. Not one of the tutorials on KZbin is any good

[@PolMarinMartin]

eh

[@xshaide]

One thing I noticed about epic, is anytime they add a new big feature, its cost is equal to its fidelity. In this case the cost is too impracfical for most applications.

[@stephaneg8926]

Haven't finished watching it but what do you mean by cost ? The performance ? What's your experience with it out of curiosity ?

[@josevillarroel9422]

@@stephaneg8926 The CPU performance of the sample is not great, because a lot of its logic runs on BlueprintUpdateAnimation. This is by design, to keep complexity low, lower the barrier of entry, and serve as a better learning resource. Most of the optimization concepts here: dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-optimization dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-in-lyra-sample-game-in-unreal-engine#blueprintthreadsafeupdateanimation are applicable to the sample. We plan to move certain logic to BlueprintThreadSafe update, but never fully nativize the sample because that would severely limit its flexibility + userbase. The Motion Matching search is efficient, comparable to State Machines, and better for managing bigger sets (we run it on Fortnite on mobile on all players). The biggest "cost" in my opinion is the animation authoring pipeline since high quality locomotion requires huge sets. We include an example in the sample using a sparse set (similar to the FN setup 90~ animations and can be further reduced with mirroring). Here's an example using Motion Matching with 15~ animations from the GDC booth kzbin.info/www/bejne/ommQnGyYjtinl5Isi=NoLcG-3JbR5gAOlG&t=1481 We're working on improving performance and quality on sparse sets.

[@luckyboy5nu]

good news, with the new 5.5 update it is now using BlueprintThreadSafe. Also Motion Matching has been a thing for years now, this isn't something Epic came up with.

[@Rehd66]

Honestly wtf is happening to men?