High Performance Animation in Gears of War 4

David Bollo, August 2017

In this talk, we present three of the techniques that we developed to deliver high-performance animation in the Gears of War 4 video game. First, we present a “warp point”-driven system for dealing with character traversal through an irregular environment. This system builds on previous motion warping work and is over twice as fast as a more traditional blend space-based approach. Next, we introduce a novel approach to handling motion transitions that eliminates traditional blended transitions and replaces them with an animation post-processing step that is 60% cheaper to compute overall. Finally, we introduce a fast but effective heuristic for improving the quality of these motion transitions by automatically matching the locomotion foot phase between the transitioning animations.