An automatic tool to facilitate authoring animation blending in game engines

Abstract

Achieving realistic virtual humans is crucial in virtual reality applications and video games. Nowadays there are software and game development tools, that are of great help to generate and simulate characters. They offer easy to use GUIs to create characters by dragging and drooping features, and making small modifications. Similarly, there are tools to create animation graphs and setting blending parameters among others. Unfortunately, even though these tools are relatively user friendly, achieving natural animation transitions is not straight forward and thus non-expert users tend to spend a large amount of time to generate animations that are not completely free of artefacts. In this paper we present a method to automatically generate animation blend spaces in Unreal engine, which offers two advantages: the first one is that it provides a tool to evaluate the quality of an animation set, and the second one is that the resulting graph does not depend on user skills and it is thus not prone to user errors.