AI Animated Game Characters

AI Animated Game Characters:

There is a huge demand in simulating fast and complex interactions that involve multiple contacts between a character and objects, an environment, and other characters, especially in computer games and films. For example, for basketball games, the players need to dribble the ball while making various movements with different foot-fall patterns to compete with the opponent characters.

To solve this problem, an AI project has been developed by researchers from University of Edinburgh and Electronic Arts. This AI can created animated characters that play basketball very naturally.

The project explores the opportunities of deep learning for character animation and control. It has been gaining popularity and has now become a stable & modular framework for data-driven character animation, including data processing, network training and runtime control.

Who can benefit from this project?

The project can be used for animating:

• Biped Locomotion
• Quadruped Locomotion
• Character scene interactions with objects
• Environment development for sports games

Demo:

Algorithm/Framework used for the project:

Developed using Unity 3D, Tensorflow, PyTorch

Research Paper:

This research paper focuses on physically-based character animation, where the characters are controlled kinematically using physical rules as constraints, or controlled by torques under physical environments, can be applied for synthesizing motion that involves fast, dynamic contacts.

Methods such as spacetime constraints [Witkin and Kass 1988] let users provide the contact pattern as conditions, and then optimize the motion using physically-based constraints.

Read in-depth about this project here: Local Motion Phases for Learning Multi-Contact Character Movements Research Paper

Installation Guide:

Code Coming Soon

Made By:

• SEBASTIAN STARKE, University of Edinburgh, UK and Electronic Arts, USA
• YIWEI ZHAO, Electronic Arts, USA
• TAKU KOMURA, University of Edinburgh, UK
• KAZI ZAMAN, Electronic Arts, USA

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