Interested in creating high-quality character locomotion and other gameplay animation systems? Look no further. Epic Games has announced that its Game Animation Sample Project is now available to download for free.
Supercharge your development with this animation database of over 500 AAA-quality animations, complete with a fully functional character and animation Blueprint.
Whether you want to learn or just need a head start, this project contains everything you need to get a character up and running using our brand new Motion Matching toolset. And stay tuned—this is only the beginning. Epic Games plan to update this project with new tools, techniques, and animations in future releases.
The Game Animation Sample Project—under the hood
The Game Animation Sample Project showcases dynamic, fully functional animation systems that are commonly needed in games. Built using best practices, it can be used for learning or to help you kickstart your own creations.
For those working on AAA projects, the sample is a sandbox: a starting point for pre-production, learning UE gameplay animation features, and understanding Motion Matching best practices.
For indie devs, the sample provides plug-and-play locomotion, as well as hundreds of game-ready animations compatible with all UE Mannequins that can be used for humanoid locomotion in your own projects. You’re free to use all these animations with or without their accompanying animation Blueprints and retarget them to your own characters.
The Game Animation Sample Project comes with multiple Motion Matching databases. Check out the project documentation to understand the benefits of separating animations into multiple databases; learn why the Pose Search schema is set up like it is; and explore scenarios where the system might select a dense dataset with hundreds of animations versus a sparser set with less than a hundred.
Animation selection in the sample is mostly powered by Choosers and Proxy Tables. To address gaps in animation coverage, we use Pose Warping. The sample also includes world-class authoring and debugging tools like the Rewind Debugger, which enables you to record, inspect, and edit your motion databases to understand and improve your transitions.
Harness the power of Motion Matching
Motion Matching is a simple yet powerful way to animate characters in games. It continuously selects the best frame of animation to play from its motion database, aiming to closely match the current pose of the character as well as its past and future movement.
The system scales to the size of your dataset to reach your desired fidelity and uses Pose Warping algorithms to fill in the gaps.
Motion Matching is about more than locomotion—it’s a powerful tool for jumping, falling, and complex traversal (think parkour). Using 3D trajectory prediction, Motion Matching can produce seamless transitions with anticipation and long follow-throughs for realistic results.
Combined with a vast library of animation poses created from high-end motion capture data, the locomotion and traversal dataset in this sample project makes for a powerful new way to animate characters—including MetaHumans.