Mana Games

[datarioniboii]

I was watching a video yesterday and the sponsor of that video was really special. It was a animation making AI which created an animation entirely based on a single video feed. Radical is a company which was doing this and for 8 $ a month you could create 3 min of animations and export them too in your desired format. So I think this incredible invention would have been amazing for manutoo, cause he can find videos on Youtube for players and just make amazing animations with this web-app. I hope manutoo likes it. That was all. Trying to help this game as much as I can.

[Rob92]

I was watching a video yesterday and the sponsor of that video was really special. It was a animation making AI which created an animation entirely based on a single video feed. Radical is a company which was doing this and for 8 $ a month you could create 3 min of animations and export them too in your desired format. So I think this incredible invention would have been amazing for manutoo, cause he can find videos on Youtube for players and just make amazing animations with this web-app. I hope manutoo likes it. That was all. Trying to help this game as much as I can.

I'm aware of those kinds of solutions, but it seems they are quite a long way away from being useful for tennis games at the moment...

This is an example of what it created when trying to capture Federer's serve, you should be able to see it in your browser;
https://getrad.co/scan/690356/

Not good ... Maybe in a few years as the AI improves, it will get more accurate.

There's another company doing the same kind of thing and there's a free alpha signup - DeepMotion Animate 3D, not sure if it's any better;
https://deepmotion.com/animate-3d

[manutoo]

Hello,

actually a few years ago I considered a similar system to do new anims : with the XBox Kinect, or even 2 of them to get better depth perception.

But actually, that setup was not accurate enough. It was not enhanced by AI, though.

But on the 1st video example playing in the background here : https://getrad.co/ ; I can see the feet are misplaced, so it's surely not perfect, plus price scheme is a shame (ie: forced subscription plus limited generation per month, or without limitation but then it gets quite expensive ).

Anyway, it looks cool and might work decently well for generic not-too-fast animation, else it might give what Rob92 pointed out...

For this kind of anim, I guess it'd need at least 60fps video, maybe even 120fps.

[Guest]

that was embarrasing. very bad. i thought it was good.

[Rob92]

The other technology from the same company I linked above (DeepMotion) looks like it could be useful for tennis games as well. They use AI so that the characters make physically accurate/balanced movements which they are using primarily to simulate the lower bodies/legs of VR characters;



I saw this and thought maybe a similar method could be used to control the movement animation of the character in TE, they have had an Alpha for their tools in Unity before.

There's a bunch of really cool stuff on the YouTube channel, like them using DeepRL for physics based characters performing basketball techniques.

Post from one of the developers saying it can be used in games where you need realistic character physics, not just VR;
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/commen ... text=10000

The alpha for it has ended by now and I'm not sure on their pricing, but they have a contact form to request a demo - I just thought this may have potential for sports games where physics based (or physically accurate) movement could be so impactful to the gameplay and improve the realism.

[manutoo]

It's my dream to have such kind of system for the movements, but seeing the videos, we are at best years away to get something usable in a tennis game, and only if they add specific support for it (eg: side steps).

What did Ubisoft for "For Honor" seems to be much closer of what would be good for TE, but it's a huge task and I can't do it on my own... (read : it might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in asset production and coder salary)

[Guest]

Well dreams can be a reality. Xsense is the best motion capturing for cheaper prices and I think that a GoFundMe will work on your case. Try it and if it fails, do not stop trying.

[Rob92]

It's my dream to have such kind of system for the movements, but seeing the videos, we are at best years away to get something usable in a tennis game, and only if they add specific support for it (eg: side steps).

What did Ubisoft for "For Honor" seems to be much closer of what would be good for TE, but it's a huge task and I can't do it on my own... (read : it might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in asset production and coder salary)

Yeah it's definitely not "plug and play" for a tennis game from the way the character moves in the VR videos, I thought it may be configurable to produce the types of movements you want - I don't know anything about it really beyond what they put on their YouTube channel and blog though.

I agree that For Honor was impressive with the way it used motion matching, to have that variety and fidelity of animation and remain responsive - other games (like recent tennis games) use 2-3s long canned animations that take away all user control that even if they look nice (most still look bad), they destroy the gameplay experience.

I've seen an implementation of Motion Matching in Unity, this same guy got an Epic Mega Grant for working on a similar solution for UE so he must be pretty good ;


Not sure if that's suitable, and I guess you'd still need tons of animations (preferably mo-cap) to feed into it so may still be expensive/difficult...

Ubisoft have some really cool research into animation technologies, this is another one where it's basically For Honor's motion matching, but then fully physically simulated by getting an AI agent to learn to copy the movements and self-balance by using muscles and still remains very responsive;
https://montreal.ubisoft.com/en/drecon- ... haracters/

Maybe by TE5, something like these will be feasible without a AAA budget .

[manutoo]

Guest,
like Rob92 said, once TE4 is out, I'll see if there's some point doing a TE5 for more visual improvements.


Rob92,
woh, this is exactly what I wished for !
The video you linked isn't that convincing (it doesn't look too smooth and the guy is constantly jumping all around ), but this one is much closer of what we'd need for TE :


Plus it seems the motion-captured animations are already in the package..!

I'll definitively ask the author if he thinks I could add a favorite direction to face (ie: the net), which is indispensable for a tennis game, to favor sidesteps and stuff like this. It probably already has something like this as it seems it supports strafing. I'll look into that next year, though (ie: when I'll work on enhancing further the animations). Plus I expect TE might need some additional custom made animations, at least because the player holds a racket.

Anyway, big thanks for having pointed that out !

[Rob92]

Glad you seem to like it and it may be suitable, would be awesome to see something like this for TE .

I found out about his work and thought it must be good when Simon Clavet, one of the Ubisoft researchers I follow (who worked on For Honor), tweeted him to congratulate his UE trailer;
https://twitter.com/profbof/status/1268508816582348800

His other tool also looks like it could be useful in TE and can be used standalone or integrated with his motion matching system (may save on required input mo-cap/animation);


It looks like this guy explains his products really well with videos/documentation and is active in his Discord server for any more info you might need .

A potential issue I see is that they require fairly recent versions of Unity (Strider needs 2019.1.14 or higher)... As TE4 and TEM2 have been in development for a few years, is it using an older Unity version? I don't know about any of the technical or licensing stuff around how easily a project could be updated.

Edit - This guy's assets also look interesting, he is an AI scientist at Electronic Arts now;
https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/22741

[manutoo]

Strider's idea is good, although it looks a bit jerky on the video, so I'm not sure it'd work well enough for TE4 or not. I'll give it a deeper look next year as well.

TE4 uses Unity 2019.4 so it'll be ok. TEM2 is on the older Unity 5.6, but TEM2 will receive only enhancements required for the gameplay (like the extra reach from the dynamic animation system), so I'd not put MM & the mocap anims into it...
I could have considered Strider though, as it's a more simple enhancement, but it's not indispensable so it's ok if it's not possible...

[Flyingitalian]

any updates on this?

[manutoo]

Flyingitalian,
I hope to give a try to Motion Matching within a couple of months.