Pierre Schiller

UE 5.9 preview 1 now ships with a new plugin I worked on called AnimGenOffline (name might change) which allows you to guide animations at high level and use AI to generate the actual frames. This integrates that functionality into Sequencer. As initial plugin into this system we integrated NVidia's Kimodo. But the system itself is not limited to this. Basically any algo that generates pose data over time can integrate with it. You can draw splines and make characters follow them, type a style in text, set target key poses at certain frames, etc. You can pose your character directly with Control Rig and retargeting is all handled automatically. You can also type: "Use Kimodo to generate an animation of a drunk person walking forward and save it as an Animation Sequence asset in /Game/Anims/DrunkWalk". Weights still have to be downloaded from Huggingface (goes automatically after creating an account and read-only token etc). We're working on making that easier too. It can run on basically any PC, but for fastest generation you need a Geforce 3xxx series or better. And probably Windows only for now, although I haven't tried on other platforms yet. This is just the start of course! Worked on this with @FredNilsson Will show some videos soonish, or share some community videos.

UniRig Automatic skeleton and skinning for any 3D model, from SIGGRAPH 25 UniRig predicts a skeleton and skinning weights for a 3D mesh so it is ready to animate. It was built by Tsinghua University and Tripo. One model handles humans, animals and unusual shapes. You run skeleton prediction, then skinning, then merge the result back into your file. The authors now also point to SkinTokens, a successor that does both steps in one pass. github.com/VAST-AI-Research/…

What we are trying to do: Build an engine that’s more powerful than UE5, easier to develop in than Unity, and is the most efficient effective way to build with AI acceleration. The problem with having old systems and new systems side-by-side is the tendency to mix them, and then their interoperability becomes a giant tangle of blueprints and verse, actors and entities. We thought that side-by-side was unavoidable, but AI assisted conversion is now clearly way more effective, and will produce a way more manageable UE6 project than a hybrid, while making it way easier for us to simplify and improve the engine. We’ll be proving it out by converting Fortnite, the game with the largest base of blueprints in existence, to the new approach.

Arjun update only shifted some checksums! We're back in business, y'all! New to this update, joining Sean are Q, Makoto, Dudley, Ibuki, Ken, Necro and Hugo. Sean is beta, all others are pre-alpha - TONS of work to do. Looking for playtesters, DM if interested! #3Sin6