This was published in 2018, but it’s a fascinating dual purpose use of neural nets. Firstly, there was a massively increasing issue with character animation. Character animation is quickly becoming highly complex as it has becoming more realistic. The problem compounds when you want to make sure you can do things like crouch and aim at the same time. Or crouch and walk across uneven terrain while looking left or right. You can imagine all the different kinds of combinations of motion that must be described and handled. This all started taking massively more time to develop by artists; but even worse it was taking up more and more storage space on disk and especially in memory space.

Daniel Holden of Ubisoft wondered if he could use a neural net to not only reduce the combinations they had to handle into a net but also utilize the inherent nature of neural nets to compress data. It turns out he could – and he presents what he found in this excellent presentation.

Links:

• https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025389/Character-Control-with-Neural-Networks