The Unreal Animation system:
- Proven animation toolset used in the best-selling Gears of War series.
- Skeletal animation system supporting up to four bone influences per vertex and very complex skeletons.
- Full mesh and bone LOD support.
- AnimSet Viewer tool for browsing and organizing animations and meshes:
- Add game-specific notifications at specific points in the animation.
- Tool for graphically placing "sockets" on bones to be used for attaching objects to the skeleton in the game, complete with preview.
- Preview "overlay" meshes based on the same skeleton (e.g. armor).
- Animation driven by an “AnimTree” - a tree of animation nodes including:
- Blend controllers, performing an n-way blend between nested animation objects.
- Filters to combine and blend subset of bones.
- "On Demand" node to play and control animations from UnrealScript code or via Matinee.
- Support for mirroring animations, such as authoring an animation set of a character in cover facing right while mirror the data in real time to obtain the left side.
- Data-driven controllers, encapsulating motion capture or hand animation data.
- Physics controllers, tying into the rigid body dynamics engine for ragdoll player and NPC animation and physical response to impulses.
- Procedural skeletal controllers, for game features such as having an NPC's head and eyes track a player walking through the level.
- Inverse Kinematics solver for calculating limb pose based on a goal location (e.g. for foot placement).
- AnimTree Editor allowing programmers or animators to create complex blends and controller setups and preview them in realtime in the editor. A connection editor makes this very user friendly for animators.
- Ability to easily add new animations nodes, bone controllers or modifiers.
- Additive animation with improved workflow including easy preview, auto update additive animation when the base or layer animation has been modified
- No restrictions on number of animations playing at the same time, number of blends, or post-processing operations.
- Group animations, synchronize all or a subset of them, handle notifications for the whole group.
- Morph target animation: allows the control of morph target blend weights from animation data, with support for material control as well. Morph animation can be authored in Maya and morph data can be exported via ActorX. Skeletal Animation can now control vertex and material animation, with preview in the AnimSet Viewer.
- Animation compression codecs: remove linear keys – very efficient compression algorithm, especially for cinematic animations; batch animation compression runs a select number of compression algorithms on all or select animation data, and picks the most efficient one.
- Different Animation animation blend types: Linear; Cubic; Sinusoidal; Ease In, Ease Out – can be picked per blend node, and per bone controller.
- Animation usage tracking: get stats on animations that are visible during the game. Helps tracks animations that haven't been used, and also see which ones are the most or least visible to the player.
- New node and controller types can be easily added for game specific control.
- Export tools for 3D Studio Max, Maya and XSI for bringing weighted meshes, skeletons, and animation sequences into the engine.
- Support for root motion. Use the animation's motion to drive character physics in the game.
- Animation that can drive a character's rigid body physics.
- Ability to mirror animations, thereby reducing the number of needed animations.
- Bone physics: bones can be flagged to have physics which will collide with other physics objects.
- Ability to use soft bodies and vertex cloth to deform skeletal meshes.
- Sockets that can be added to bones for attachments, particle effects, etc.
- Dual-Quaternion skinning support
- Trails (i.e. Ribbon or Sword) support from Animation Data via AnimNotifier
- New Animation Metadata System to control game related data from animation data (i.e. SkelControls or IK)
- Added 3-pass SkeletalMesh Compose and Twist bone controller, to make twist bones fully procedural, and work with IK controllers
