Zardon

BU: The number of animations for player characters are increasing. Instead of hundreds of animations, are you looking at possibly breaking characters where you have more than torso and leg animations in some sort of matrix?

TS: For Unreal Engine 3, we rewrote the animation system. Previously, it was a channel based. Starting at certain bones of the hierarchy you could play one animation on the top, one on the bottom. Now we have a tree based animation system. You'll see smoother procedural animation blending many animation sets. We are using motion capture set up in our office and are getting really good data out of that. You are going to see a big increase in the amount of animation data and also the quality.

Nowadays, we are building characters with several hunread bones, including articulated fingers and articutlated faces. We have the capability of procedurally blending a lot of different animations. In Unreal Tournament 2004 we had ragdoll collision physics where you shot a character and he dies, we make him go to ragdoll mode then the physics engine carries on from there. With Unreal Engine 3, we can actually blend in and out physics based animation. It will be just another animation source for the hiarchy. If a player gets gets shoot in the arm it will go flying back, but then he will recover and continue animating on. Something we haven't been able to do in the past.

There'll be more intigration between hand created animation, physics animation and proceedural animation. Now days, all our joints have breaking strength in them. So if you actually shoot a character's arm with enough force it will break his arm off and go flying. You can pull arms or body parts off characters nowadays. It has some sick possibilities, but you can do it.

Full interview here