Anatomy of a Skeletal Animation System Part 3

This is part three of “Anatomy of a Skeletal Animation System”

Animation System Optimizations and Features

Here are some various animation system optimizations and techniques that you might find useful…

Multithreaded Animation Blending

If you are even mildly comfortable writing multithreaded code, this one is fairly easy to implement.

Basically every animated model that needs an update goes into a queue every frame.  (Things that haven’t been on screen for a little while could be exempt from the list so you don’t waste time on things that aren’t being rendered)

At some point in your main loop, you do the animation sampling / anim blend tree blending / etc work to come up with the final bone group. You do this by grabbing the first model in the queue, processing it, then moving to the next model.

Your main loop doesn’t continue until all of the models have been processed.

Now, imagine that you had other worker threads also grabbing models from the queue and processing them, and that the main thread will wait to continue the main loop until the queue was empty and all models had been processed.

TA-DA! You are done and have multithreaded animation blending. It can help A LOT, depending on how many hardware threads you have available for helping work.

Bias / Gain Curves in Anim Blends

With normal animation blending, it’s a linear crossfade from one animation to another.

Sometimes, an animator can make things look nicer if they have the option of doing non linear crossfading.   One nice option for doing this is exposing a bias and gain parameter to the blend in / out parameters.

Bias and gain are great ways of letting content creators create non linear curves for a variety of uses.  Ken Perlin did a lot of work in this area, but in “Game Programming Gems 2”, a guy named Cristophe Schlick presented some simplified, quick equations to calculate approximations of bias and gain.

I highly recommend checking that out and using them for this, and everything else in your game. Using bias and gain you can do things like have your camera move from point A to point B, but start out fast and slow down as it gets closer to B, giving it a nice organic feel to it, instead of a rigid lerp.  With bias and gain you pass in a % and get out a different %.  Real simple to use and extremely useful in every part of your game just about.

Here’s an interactive demonstration of the bias/gain functions I made. The source code for the functions are there too:
HTML5 Bias and Gain

Round Robin Anim Evaluation

There are some situations when you don’t need every model to have perfectly up to date animation data every single frame. One example of this is if you are simulating the game world on a server, where skeletal animation data doesn’t need to be perfectly up to date since network latency already makes it somewhat innacurate.

In these cases, one thing you could do is split the list of models you need to update into perhaps 4 different lists. Then, each frame, you only process one of the 4 lists, thus reducing your animation CPU load down to 25% of what it was. Quick and easy way to save some real CPU time quickly if you don’t need the most up to date animation data all the time.

Pose Sharing

Sometimes you have a lot of different models where many of the models are preforming the same animations – such as if you have a crowd of people in a crowded area.

One way to deal with this is to let some of the people doing the same animations SHARE their computed animation data.

If you are in a crowd, and there’s lots of different looking people walking all sorts of different directions, you aren’t going to easily notice that there are people who are using the exact same bone data, but facing different directions.

Going this route, if you have a group of 4 let’s say that all share the same bone data, you only need to calculate it for one person, and the rest of the group uses the data already calculated.

Less animations to sample and blend so you gain some CPU back.

Skeleton LODing

As things get farther away, or smaller, the smaller details are less noticeable. Because of this, you can “remove” bones from a skeleton as a model is farther away. I mentioned this briefly with facial animations, but the same is true of arm bones, leg bones, hand bones, etc.

You just have to make sure your anim system is able to handle LODing out bones gracefully (no popping) and efficiently (no excessive processing to get a lower LOD skeleton, it should just be a flag on the bones or something).

Runtime Debugging Essentials

Here are some debugging tools that I’ve found essential in debugging day to day animation bugs (popping, twitching, incorrect animations, etc).

Real Time Info On Screen

You really need the ability to show some kind of status on screen for a specified model. The info should show what animations are playing on which animation controllers, the current time of the animation controller, the playback rate of the controller, the state of the state machine, etc.

Using this, when you see a pop, you might see that for a fraction of a second, that an animation switches from one animation to another, then back to the first. From there you can go on debugging it further.

Timeline Log

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to turn on animation logging for a specified model. This way, you can generally log more info than you can on the screen in real time, and can also take your sweet time looking at very small intervals of time to see what went wrong and why.

Very useful.

Show the Bones

Sometimes you really just need to be able to look at the skeleton to see an issue more clearly, or be able to determine if the problem is with a model or the animation data.

Having a way to turn on bone rendering such that it draws 2d (unprojected) lines on the screen showing the bones of a specified model is very useful. Also sometimes it’s nice to be able to see the bones of all the animation data that went into the final blended pose, instead of just seeing the final blended pose.

Control Time Itself!

Lastly, sometimes it’s really useful to be able to slow down time to see a problem in greater detail. Rarely, it’s also useful to be able to speed up time. Having the ability to do both while the game running can be a really big help.

That’s All She Wrote

That, and MURDER I mean.

I hope you enjoyed these articles on the anatomy of a skeletal animation system. Drop me a line or post a comment if you have any questions or comments (:

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