Building an Animation Runtime and Pipeline / Maurizio de Pascale Ph.D, IO Interactive A/A

Since 2012 all Hitman games have been running using a modified version of Morpheme, the animation middleware. Unfortunately NaturalMotion stopped licensing their technology last year, leaving us on a dead end track. Luckily new approaches to runtime animation have emerged and matured recently. These techniques achieve better visual results than blend trees and state machines, while at the same time reducing the complexity and the amount of manual work to setup the animation graphs used in games. Pushed by the circumstances and armed with a strong belief in these new techniques we've started a journey to build from the ground up a new runtime and pipeline for animation to be used for all our future games. This talk details our efforts and learning so far. After a quick recap of the theory behind runtime animation, we'll share details and samples from an actual implementation.