This last WE on Saturday, I stopped again at GDC for my personal entertainment (essentially to see the Independent Games, the best of GDC... for me).
I wanted to see what is the status of Animation in games. It turned out that I found very few interesting things.
I only found in the Exhibition floor two middlewares and/or services :
They showcased something that is very similar to my tests I posted earlier... They told me their solver id more efficient when the amount of characters to IK-correct is high. They also show that their solver is for any kind of skeleton, as opposed to others who may focus on Human skeleton.
Unfortunately, I didn't see much and the demo on the booth wasn't very attractive (although I don't doubt they did an interesting work).
Autodesk "HumanIK"
Right before the end of the show, I discovered that Autodesk released a middleware called "HumanIK". This middleware allows you to do exactly what you need to correct animations to prevent human characters to badly interact with the floor or any other obstacles.
For ~$50,000 per project (if I recall correctly the price he told me), they propose few tools to setup the Character rigging for IK; a set of C++ libraries for those who want to integrate the middleware in their engine; a UE3 module that allows you to setup IK with UE3 graph editor.
The demo in UE3 was rather convincing. They also had another demo available that I really didn't like : the quality wasn't showcasing the expected result.
But I guess the problem was essentially related to an artistic choice, because the games using this middleware, like Prince of Persia and Assassins Creed (or here for another article) did a great job.
Now, this tool is a bit expensive and too much Human-centric.
NaturalMotion Morpheme was not at GDC... but I just wanted to mention that they also do some good work around this topic.
An interesting clue for me : asking people why IK corrections aren't so often integrated in games, the answer is always because it can easily be computational intensive if you get more than one character in a scene. Let's call the GPU for help (I will ;-) !
I found 3 talks dealing with animation and possibly IK (and Physics) : Avalanche Studios Just Cause, where they mix PhysX, IK and animation; Naughty Dog's Uncharted and EA's Fifa Soccer. I just attended Just Cause talk (interestingly, the physics integration was interesting but painfull)...
To conclude, I have the feeling that IK-corrected animation is out-there, but not broadly adopted. I also feel like this approach is going to be more and more adopted, now multi-core machines are commonly used; now that developers started to understand well PS3's SPUs; now that we have GPU-Compute available through DX11 and CUDA.
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