DataSet Baker V1 Alpha - HIP is in the works!!!!!

Now you might be asking why it’s named HIP, and unless you are from Canada you will most likely not know who I am going to talk about, but the motion matching editor versions are going to be named after Tragically Hip album names (the first one is self titled so HIP).

Anyways, in the last week I have gotten a lot done. I started work on actually figuring out the logic to get the trajectory out of the animation (and I don’t remember if I talked about this before but there were 2 ideas I had. 1 is I put the animation’s root motion through a lot more math to get a proper predicted trajectory just like how the input trajectory works. Or just sample the actual future, but then you would get problems like a 90 degree turn where the animation isn’t even anticipating it yet but the trajectory says it should be.)

I actually got really confused and stuck so I emailed someone. That someone is Daniel Holden, the creator of Learned Motion Matching (and he runs the website where I learned the first input trajectory math).

And WOW!!!! HE RESPONDED:

Hi Asher,

Sorry for the late reply, I have been travelling the last couple of days.

First of all I just wanted to say that it is awesome that you are looking into advanced animation techniques like these already.

(email removed for space) (i might put it in the comments if you want to read it)

I hope that helps!

All the best,

Dan

LIKE HOLY COW!!! I am talking to a LEGEND!!!!

Normal motion matching works as such: you got 2 trajectories, a predicted one from the input then a true trajectory from the animation, then you load all that animation into RAM and use a matcher to play the correct frame.

But what he made was use a neural network instead of the matcher and database WHICH SHRUNK RAM USAGE LIKE CRAZY (and I might have to get working on something like that sometime soon because RAM prices don’t appear to be dropping anytime soon).

Anyways, in the email he said that my second idea was actually right. The idea that I thought was wrong, but he says is just a sad limitation of it and nobody has figured it out yet (yet…).

So that will make life easier because I WILL BE ABLE TO FINISH THE DATASET STUFF HOPEFULLY IN A WEEK!!!!!!!

And to make that dataset I started messing around with Unity’s UI Toolkit and custom editors. So now I have several custom drop downs and then you can open the MOTION MATCHING DATASET EDITOR where you can define all of your animation clips and once I write the rest, be able to press the bake button. It will process every frame and then spit out a Scriptable Object or database.

Now hopefully writing the rest will be easier than writing the UI code because the UI stuff is powerful but not like normal runtime coding.