Procedural animation and Motion matching

Armory Engine General
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Armory needs first to get good physics, better logic nodes, better performance, better assets visualisation, animation states and blend graph and many more common features not available.

I don’t think procedural animation or motion matching are the priority :joy:

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It depends. Sometimes it is not quantity but quality that matters.

In addition, the import/export possibilities between tools can easily compensate for weaknesses.

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I can’t make a small arcade physics game with Armory because of physic bugs, the solution is i make it in UE4 , problem solved :smiley:

The workflow doesn’t matter so much here for a small game with few export/imports, it won’t compensate Armory issues that are blocking.

Back to discussion, Lubos is already fully occupied with new graphics and lot of issues from Github already, to be interested to work on new and very complex things that are too new among game development.

But we can keep the discussion for very very very later after Armory get a major stable release.

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Thanks for this interesting discussion @MagicLord.
Hoping that Lubos is a Go Fast to continue it soon :slight_smile:

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REMAINDER: Armory isn’t even in alpha.
It would be good though to implement but NOT now. Reason being if you are using that than game is going to be big, and as @MagicLord said It not even possible to create a small complete game(no offence to it) . It would not hurt to consider it as side note.

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Maybe we can use something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFJvRYtjQ4c
here github page https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation and this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlndIQHtiFw

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Thats good, there tenserflow support in armory, though never tested it. I think it would not take long to implement in armory.

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I can’t get to YouTube, so I can’t view those videos, but I’m really interested machine learning tools to make animation, modeling, AI, etc. easier and higher quality. A couple of really cool things I’m wanting to look into along the lines of getting real life objects/animations into games:

Creating 3D models from multiple reference photos:

Things that could possibly back an extremely cheap ( as in equipment cost ) motion capture system:

There is an Armory lib for TensorFlow.js now to.

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maybe less time than trying to reproduce things that already exist in other software and that ultimately do not give satisfaction for real applications ?

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There is alwasy a trade off , choosing baked animation vs real time calculated, like between real time lighting and hybrid baked and real time.

Is there some Armory demo about tensorflow ?

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Well, isn’t there value in using motion capture to create your video game animations. At least as a base. Maybe it isn’t a problem for a well trained modeler or animator, but I think it would help me a lot.

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Thanks @zicklag for links … I didn’t follwed last progress on it.
OpenPose is a very interesting way too.

And sure we have TensorFlow to do things and make experiments since 0.4 if I remember well.

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OpenPose look really good. It promising, I would be happy if it get implemented in armory cause i am not that good at animation and can suck big time.

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@zicklag this post was following the @BlackGoku36 one

Blockquote
REMAINDER: Armory isn’t even in alpha.
It would be good though to implement but NOT now. Reason being if you are using that than game is going to be big, and as @MagicLord said It not even possible to create a small complete game(no offence to it) . It would not hurt to consider it as side note.

so my remark was

maybe less time than trying to reproduce things that already exist in other software and that ultimately do not give satisfaction for real applications ?

and sure OpenPose is very interesting to test.

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I don’t know whether or not we need to get it implemented in Armory as much as a Blender plugin. And I’m not sure whether or not to try to implement it with the TensorFlow.js and write it in Haxe with the externs, or to use the OpenPose C++ library. :thinking:

I should probably create a new topic.

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I think we use Haxe as connector to python(blender) and C++(OpenPose).
I don’t know how to do it though.
Or write OpenPose in Haxe kha from scratch.

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Continuing the discussion from Procedural animation and Motion matching:

I think it would be great if we could get some kind of motion capture system into Blender that we could use for our Armory games. I’ve recently found some Machine Learning based solutions for recognizing human poses from single images or videos, which could make for an extremely economic solution for motion capture without expensive equipment or setup.

Both of these could be a potential candidate for creating a Blender integration for motion capture. OpenPose definitely seems to be more robust, but TensorFlow.js is easier to get started with and it might be easier to hack and tweak because of that. To bulid a 3D representation of a pose you probably need multiple images, but you might also be able to leverage the 2D pose to provide an estimated 3D pose ( I don’t know if that is possible or not ).

Here is the basic architecture I was thinking:

blenderMotionCapture

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I don’t think most lonewolf indies will spend time making animation capture.

  1. There is lot of free animation capture files, without needing you to capture animations.
  2. Procedural animation becomes useful, with some poses it generates the whole animation.
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I hope that this article will show you that we have already all the preliminaries bricks to do the job, that is video on YouTube, motion capture and Atrap.