Animation

Animation Blending

The animation blending system allows a model to play more than one animation sequence at a time and blend seamlessly between them. For example, the blend system can combine a ‘hold gun’ animation with a ‘run’ animation to create a ‘run with gun’ animation. This shortens development time by decreasing the number of special case animation sequences that need to be created.

Morph Blending

3D Morph heads
Control of multiple morph layers creates very
effective and complex emotions quickly

The morph engine allows many layers of morphing to be blended onto one model. For example, when a player avatar is talking, the mouth movement, eyes and eyebrows can be separate morph layers. An amusing additional morph layer could simultaneously cause the avatar's head to swell to twice its normal size, while maintaining the mouth movement and facial expression.

Animation Sequencing

Animation Sequencing

Animation sequencing takes a series of animation sequences and seamlessly chains them together into one fluid sequence.

Streamed Animation Loading

BigWorld’s animation sequences are streamed from disk to reduce memory usage without interrupting gameplay.

Entity Path Interpolation

Entity path interpolation smooths an object’s trajectory eliminating jerkiness.

Biped Physics

The character physics includes one bone IK, collision detection (triangular prism or ray-cast) and detection of foot-to-ground collision for automatic footstep placement.

Animation Matching

Movement animations are automatically selected based on properties such as velocity, pitch, yaw and user-definable flags. This system allows movement animations to be selected automatically, at the correct speed.