Euphoria Tech Reel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae3fgj2x1aI

I read about this in PC Gamer, with respect to the new Indiana Jones game. I'm sure a lot of us have thought, wouldn't games be amazing if characters animated their limbs procedurally in order to stay upright etc - it's amazing to see it when it finally happens! I can't wait to see this integrated into an amazing game.

It looks impressive and all but, I dunno, doesn't all this bland realism get a little boring? I'd rather have hand crafted, stylised animations I think, but maybe that's just me.

It will be great for FPS games and sports games.

I've played with this before, well the render version of it anyway. It's fun and quite a novelty at first, but the novelty quickly wears off and you realise that it's not very realistic after all ( the characters always seem too light no matter what you do and fly around all over the place, which is cool, but not very useful. You also realize that it's really not very flexible or versatile and that you're really tweaking other people's work most of the time instead of creating something new. If everyone wants a game where someone jumps off a roof to a helicopter or building where he is grabbed by man's hand, it'll be great because they've been using that bloody demo for years.

Of course, it may have improved considerably since I used it. But looking at that video, the flyaway characters still seem to be present.

Baby steps, Gabriel. Baby steps. :)

I agree. These are just the tools, and some clever bod will use them in a brilliant way soon enough.

Not me. I get much more bored seeing the hundredth character do the same thing the same exact way. It becomes like stock footage used over and over again in a film, even if loads of animations are created. Besides which, it's the transitions between actions which makes this look great. I hate it when a NPC in a game goes through one action, comes to a neutral position for half a second, then starts a different action.

You guys are nuts, that looks great! I wish they would have shown more what parts were canned and which weren't but I love the flow of the character movement.

Well Spore uses procedual animations for its characters, and it works very well.

someones making a soft body physics lib for ogre that reminds me of this.

It's kind of cool as you can cut the right mouse and lop off apendages, or drag and threo the character around, or if you use enough force rip them off of th ebody etc.

www.realmatter.com/files/RealMatterPublicDemo.zip


link to the interactive demo

That looks superb. I've been playing about with a 2d force based animation system for a while myself and the results are quite nice.

This could make games really fun to play. It may just seem like a visual thing, but think of the possabilities. In regards to the plane and fighting scenes. You could have an action stage where you have to run and fight your way through some bad guys, to the edge of the bridge and make a leap of faith and grab onto the plane in the nick of time as a bomb that you planted explodes.

Of course that would be mainly a scripted game moment, but this technology would really let you get involved into this kind of cutscene like animation.

I have been waiting this for Tekken style fighting games.. imagine if you could hit anywhere and opponent would react to it more naturally. Today animation just jumps to prebaked "got hit" animation.

Yep, and the punches and kicks don't even connect anyway...

I think that that is pretty pretty!

I noticed that everything is perfectly realistic except for the football...