Neural Networks Walk Better Than Humans For Game Animation

Modern day video games have come a long way from Mario the plumber hopping across the screen. Incredibly intricate environments of games today are part of the lure for new gamers and this experience is brought to life by the characters interacting with the scene. However the illusion of the virtual world is disrupted by unnatural movements of the figures in performing actions such as turning around suddenly or climbing a hill.

To remedy the abrupt movements, [Daniel Holden et. al] recently published a paper (PDF) and a video showing a method to greatly improve the real-time character control mechanism. The proposed system uses a neural network that has been trained using a large data set of walking, jumping and other sequences on various terrains. The key is breaking down the process of bipedal movement and its cyclic behaviour into a series of sub-steps or phases. Each phase translates to a natural posture for the character while moving. The system precomputes the next-phases offline to conserve computational resources at runtime. Then considering user control, previous pose of the character(including joint positions) and terrain geometry, the consequent frame of the animation is computed. The computation is done by a regression network that calculates future position of the joints and a blending function is used for Motion Matching as described in a presentation (PDF) and video by [Simon Clavet].

This approach proves effective in environments such as rough terrains and obstacles that involve interaction such as circumventing, climbing, jumping or stepping while following user directions. The end result is a very realistic rendering at a very low computational cost as shown in the video below. It’s applications go beyond games and all the way into the realm of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.

Neural networks are all the buzz these days and with Google’s Tensor Flow projects coming to DIY robots, it is a sign that a new era in programming is on the horizon.

40 thoughts on “Neural Networks Walk Better Than Humans For Game Animation

  1. You dont need neural networks and fancy animations to make an epic game. Minecraft is blocky and simple but it’s better than any other AAA game like GTA, BF, COD, Half Life 2 or Postal 2

    1. postal2 as an AAA game? seriously? also, i love minecraft, and also i consider many “simple” indie games as giving a more rewarding experience than many AAA games( mostly because they are made by people loving video games as opposed to people loving money from video game) but compare what’s comparable, not a sandbox /building/survival/exploration game to mainstream fps.

      also consider that AAA video games companies are also one of the main engine of computing innovation and these sort of works on neural network might lead to impressive stuff for an hypothetical minecraft2 or increased immersion in games where the actual animation sucks( hearing me andromeda?)

  2. The main problem with these systems and why they never actually become common place is that the only mechanism for artistic control is manipulating a training set.

      1. Um,no.
        Neural nets are pretty old hat, but they became *practical* only recently. Computational expense and all that. And we now have chips specialised in running them efficiently.

    1. I disagree with your comment. “Manipulating a training set” in itself is in fact – “artistic control”. Manipulation allows the vendor to be as creative as he wants to be, there is no limit.

  3. It’s not perfect, but certainly a massive improvement over current game animations. I would love to see this in any game with characters, as the aforementioned immersion will benefit handsomely.

    1. It’s perfect for adventure/exploration games, but for quick action oriented games, you don’t necessarily want your character to play “slow” realistic animations at each direction change :-)

        1. I don’t know, it seems to me that if you play an FPS game seriously, you disable all details, disable all effects and animations, replace object models with icons, set the field of view to 120° and pick a player character model that is least visible. The initial good-looking graphics is only for making you buy the game.

    1. Instead it requires an ungodly amount of training data! And unless all of the characters walk like a middle-aged man with chronic back pain as in the demo above, you need significantly more training data. Also, now your characters can only do things that people IRL can do, and let me tell you, real life is very boring.

      1. This only needed 1 hour of motion capture. I wouldn’t call that ungodly.

        P.S. Hackaday, can you place a yes/no confirmation on the report comment button? It’s too easy to hit it when you’re right handed and browsing the site using mobile.

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