State-of-the-Art Animation
Unreal Engine 3 gives you complete animation flexibility. Organize animations and meshes with the AnimSet Viewer. Create AnimTrees to play within Unreal Matinee. Unreal Engine 3’s skeletal animation system gives support for up to four bones per vertex and allows for blending dozens of animations at once.
The Unreal Animation System
The Unreal animation system is a skeletal animation system that gives full control over every detail, every muscle and every bone. Make your world more vibrant and add more personality with detailed 3D animation modeling.
Unreal Engine 3 supports up to four bone influences per vertex, allowing for subtle nuances in all your scenes. Full mesh and bone LOD support is also built right into Unreal Engine 3.
The AnimSet Viewer tool will organize your animations and help you browse through your meshes. This gives you the ability to add game-specific notifications at specific points of the animation and allows you to place sockets on bones to be used for attaching objects to the skeleton during gameplay.
3D animation modeling is driven by an AnimTree, a tree of animation nodes including:
- Blend controllers, performing an n-way blend between nested animation objects.
- 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).
- Group animations, handling notifications for the whole group. Synchronize all or a subset of them.
- Morph target animation, allowing 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.
- Plus, there are no restrictions on the number of animations playing at the same time, number of blends, or post-processing operations.
Unreal Engine uses the FBX file format for importing content. This allows you to easily export your artwork from Max, Maya, XSI or your content creation package of choice.