Kiaran Ritchie
@kiaran_ritchie
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Principal Animation Programmer at @EpicGames, working on @UnrealEngine. Retargeting / IK / Rigging specialist.
Joined July 2017
@tim_cook The symbolism of indiscriminately crushing beautiful creative tools is an interesting choice.
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@Johnie It's gone sentient and started having a long distance love affair with my wifi connected stove.
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Hear me out: . A game where you play a gnome wizard commanding a massive iron golem that you can clamber over for safety, repairs, or to reach high places.
Game Developer @Toyojiro3619 showcased a new Unreal Engine 5-made mechanic that lets one climb giant characters, Shadow of the Colossus-style. More demos here: #unrealengine5 #ue5 #unrealengine #gamedev #indiedev #gamedevelopment
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What is this rendering style and has anyone ever tried to do it in a videogame?
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@elonmusk This assumes centrism is most closely aligned with reality. Which may or may not be the case. I say, stick to optimizing for truth and let the politics fall where they may.
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You should follow Industria 2 because. look at it. But also:. This is your daily reminder that non-linear step frequency and movement speed is a huge underrated boost to animation fidelity. Real creatures don't smoothly glide around like an Unreal capsule; they lurch, bump.
new animations for our enemies🚶. added stumbles, proper foot placement and more dynamic attack swings!
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@notch A custom engine is a luxury. I've released two indie games on Steam. One using a custom C++ engine, the second on Unity. Engine development became too costly and distracting to maintain.
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Power IK is coming soon to #Unreal Control Rig! . Epic has really nailed this tool. I think it's going to open a whole range of animation possibilities from in-engine keyframe animation to advanced procedural runtime effects.
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Anyone else notice GenZ gamers don't really care about graphics? They grew up with richly detailed 3d worlds; it's nothing special to them. They like Minecraft and play Fortnite on Low settings so the "stupid shadows don't get in the way".
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Arc Raiders is a butter smooth #UnrealEngine5 experience with massive vistas, gorgeous lighting, incredible sound design and very satisfying animation. 70fps on a 1080ti with no DLSS. There is no magic wand for perf; Embark studios simply made it a priority.
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New "Meshtron" paper from Nvidia produces "artist-like" meshes from point clouds. This is huge for producing useable assets from scan data or text-to-model diffusion systems. Could even be a powerful retopo tool for artist modeling workflows.
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In this video I demonstrate #UnrealEngine5.4's brand new workflow to automatically retarget animations between common skeleton types. This tool makes it super easy to bring your animation into Unreal from outside sources. With just a few clicks, you can transfer animation
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Did you know #UnrealEngine's IK Retargeter can be used at runtime? . You can use a single animation blueprint to drive a separate skeletal mesh; even with different bone names, number of bones or proportions. Check out the docs!.
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Powered ragdolls now in #UnrealEngine 5.1. With full runtime control over motor strengths, limits, collisions etc. Build your own procedural behaviors like self-balancing, hit reacts, defensive postures, reaching, env interactions, secondary. it's seriously endless.
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#ControlRig in #UE5 has a new node called "Spherical Pose Reader" for secondary deformations. It reads a bone pose, and outputs 0-1 which you can use to blend a corrective pose. Here I am reading the thigh bone to do fake collision with the pouch.
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Animated tessellation and displacement on Skeletal Meshes in @UnrealEngine !!. This is truly something people have never seen in games before.
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New Klombo mythic creature in Fortnite is running #UE5's new Full-Body IK solver in Control Rig to stick all six of his feet to the ground!
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Discord is so much worse than traditional forums. Just a deluge of jumbled comments with everyone having 6 different conversations muddled up in the same thread. No nesting. Search sucks. Nothing is indexed. We're tossing all this data into the void.
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Palworld casually mogged the entire AAA industry. 3 million units in 48hrs. 800k concurrent players. "Very Positive" rating. Art:."most models and gun stuff done by some middle schooler who was working part time at a convenience store the devs went". Source Control:."We didn't.
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is the best image generator in terms of accuracy and coherence. It can make neutral pose models on a plain white background. Perfect for s image-to-3d model. As you can see, the topo is perfectly fine for a first pass. Textures
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i am begging you to stop making simple things hard
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@DanielcHooper Multi Layer Perceptron (1958).Garbage Collection (1959).Dijkstra's Pathfinding (1959). The late 50's was crazy.
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code duplication is actually not bad. It can decouple things. It's easy to reason about. 9 times out of 10 it's better than whatever idiotic abstraction we build to avoid it.
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This project demonstrates our current best practices for locomotion in Unreal. An incredible learning resource.
Remember we promised you a game animation sample at GDC 2024? It’s here! . Get up and running with Motion Matching in this project that includes hundreds of free AAA-quality animations 🏃♂️.
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The number of people discovering forward rendering like it's an ancient forgotten technology 😂.
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Did you know you can play animations on DIFFERENT skeletons in #UE5? There's a new feature called "Compatible Skeletons". If your skeletons share bone names and a hierarchy, you can set the Skeleton assets to be "compatible" and then you can share animations between them! 1/2.
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#UE5 has a brand new IK Retargeting system that supports both runtime and offline retargeting. Allows you to copy animation between any two skeletons regardless of bone count/naming/orientation, proportions or ref pose. Docs are forthcoming; let me know how it works for you!.
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is getting so much better. Last time I tried it, I was happy to get a blob in roughly the right shape. Now it seems capable of producing some really intricate forms while adhering to the prompt quite well.
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#UnrealEngine5.3 roadmap is live!. I've been working with @benoit_gad @chasescooper @hublan2 and others on the Skeletal Mesh editing tools. Edit bones and weights directly in the editor. We're aiming for a world class UX and we'd love your feedback.
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Unreal Programmers: . Did you know you can VERY easily expose your C++ code to Python? The same magic that exposes functions to Blueprint ALSO exposes them to Python. TArray becomes a python list, TMaps become dicts. Let your tech artists automate all the things!
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#OblivionRemastered is running on #UnrealEngine. Unreal is the perfect tool to breath new life into old games. Port the old C++ game logic and write some glue code to drive Unreal actors. Write a map converter and then art-swap static meshes to modernize. I hope to see more!.
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@Designatedkitty Kinda surprised we have seen more modern weapons vs medieval armies. Army of Darkness comes to mind.
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Today is my first day joining Epic Games! I will be doing animation programming for Unreal Engine with an emphasis on rigging tech and tools. I'm excited to work with the remarkable talent at Epic to continue molding Unreal into the gold standard for real-time animation.
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Coming Soon: New Power IK Walk node generates locomotion animation in a single node. Still early times, but I will be adding body inertia, running, foot height modulation, and better looking turn-on-spot. Supports uneven terrain and any number of limbs.
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There's something incredibly satisfying about a bunch of filthy casuals ignoring all conventional wisdom and JUST BUILDING SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT.
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#UE5 has a new Full-Body IK solver. Just to clear things up, this is not Power IK or the Jacobian solver in 4.25 but a brand new approach inspired by constraint solvers in rigid body simulations. 1/2.
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@Trodge1990 Remember cranking up the speed in software to like 24x and rolling the dice because high write speeds would sometimes just fail?.
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Programming got so much easier for me when I stopped thinking in terms of language features / patterns / libraries / architecture and started thinking in terms of data structures and functions that modify them. Load/modify/store. That's all computers do.
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It's time to start thinking about what your character pipelines will look like in a world with Nanite tesselation and displacement on skeletal meshes in @UnrealEngine.
Nanite Skinning (Skeletal Mesh Support) with Nanite Tessellation / Displacement is now working perfectly on UE5-Main branch two days later! Great work @gwihlidal & team, Going to enable insane things :D. #UnrealEngine #UE5 #UnrealEngine5 #GameDev
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Bookmark this list of #UnrealEngine rigging learning resources. It's maintained by @chasescooper and will be updated over time.
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If you do any kind of character dynamics in Unreal (cloth, rigid bodies etc) then this talk is REQUIRED HOMEWORK. Covers the current state of Chaos in UE 5.1; it's various tools and editors. Tons of tips / tricks scattered throughout.
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@thomasrice_au @Austen I feel sorry for her. At almost any other time in history, following the conventional wisdom and working hard would be rewarded. But succeeding in today's world requires thinking for oneself and applying skepticism to everything. It's not easy.
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I updated my tutorial on tuning #UnrealEngine's Full Body IK Solver with a new feature in 5.4 call "Sub Chains". You can now force the solver to leave the body unaffected until a limb is fully extended and requires moving the body to reach its goal.
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#UE5 is out! Here's the official docs for the IK Retargeting feature. You can use it to copy animation between different Skeletal Meshes; either by making new sequences, or at runtime by copying animation between two different Skeletal Mesh components.
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Nvidia's Diffusion Texture Painting uses a source image and diffusion in-painting to brush seamless repeating patterns over a 3d model. A lot of people get hung up on genAI because they believe it is only a slot machine. But the slot machines were just the first and most obvious
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There's an innocent "little" feature in Control Rig in #UnrealEngine 5.1 called the "Construction Event". It fires once when your rig is initialized and has the ability to create new rig elements (for later use). Procedural rigging is now in Unreal!.
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A nice example of how the new #UnrealEngine5.4 FBIK Sub Chains (on the left) can give you control over how much of the motion at the extremities should affect the body. You could do this type of thing with Stiffness settings but it's a mess to tune and needs more iterations.
#UE5Study.Control RigのFull Body IK解説記事に、UE5.4で追加されたSub Chainの記述を追記されたとの事です。有難や…🙏. 「ちょっとは体幹に影響してほしいけど基本は末端で解決してもろて」.みたいなケースに対応できる様です(度合いも調整可)。確かに多段IKやstiffness設定よりもお手軽。
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Unreal 5.4 is pushing hard on animation tools:.- Motion matching .- Layered Control Rigs in seq.- Auto Retargeting .- Modular rigging (not prod ready).- New gizmos!!.
Unreal Engine 5.4 is here!🔔. It’s packed with new features and improvements, including the toolsets we’ve been using internally to make ‘Fortnite Chapter 5,’ ‘Rocket Racing,’ ‘Fortnite Festival,’ and ‘LEGO Fortnite’ the successes they are. Check it out:
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Here's a short write up of condensed wisdom on how to tune the FBIK solver in Unreal Engine. It's a collection of tips on how to think about the various bone settings, and the solver itself to improve your odds of getting the results you want from it.
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Absolutely legendary. Time to build!
Epic Games Store will take 0% on the first $1,000,000 of payments we process per game per year (vs 15% for Apple), and 12% after that (vs 30% for Apple). Next month, we launch EGS Webshops for out-of-app purchases, as an alternative to in-app purchases.
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Do you know about "Choosers" in #UnrealEngine5.3?. They solve the problem where you want the same animation graph to use different animations depending on a gameplay context. No more bloated anim/event graphs just to support a new character state.
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@TimSweeneyEpic Not owning a single Apple product is the easiest thing in the world. And it just got easier.
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Single camera video-to-mocap is getting really good!. This is apparently straight out of and imported into #UnrealEngine5. Imagine how rapidly you could prototype motion and then clean it up with a layered control rig in sequencer.
QuickMagic様(@QuickMagicEmma)からライセンスをご提供いただいたので、簡単モーキャプ試してみました！. 左：ブラウザで動画をモーションに変換.右：UE5にモーションをインポートしたもの. 動画のモーションは一切の手直しをしていませんが、かなり良い精度でした✨. #QuickMagic #UnrealEngine #UE5
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@gran1te_mtn Cormac McCarthy and the Cohen brothers is a ridiculously OP combo. Like George RR Martin and Hidetaka Miyazaki on Elden Ring.
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@JSFILMZ0412 Lots of AAA stopped trying to develop their own level editors and leaned heavily into Maya integrations. I've setup quite a few myself. It ain't pretty.
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Saw this on a massive micro LED today at Unreal Fest running live on a PS5. The hype is real. It was jaw dropping.
We are Mega excited about this in particular 🔦. MegaLights, a new experiential feature in 5.5, enables artists to use orders of magnitude more lights. They are movable and dynamic, with realistic area shadows, and can light volumetric fog. See this capture of our live, real-time
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I've always found it intriguing how a physical puppet can create so much lively personality in a fraction of the time it takes to animate a digital puppet. Rediscovering traditional puppeteering methods could have a dramatic impact on the craft.
A little update on my kiwi puppet: Added forward movement (before I was physically moving forward to move the puppet, now I am using an xbox controller), running, stair climbing, fur/feathers and facial mocap.
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#UnrealEngine 5.1 is out now!. Tons of improvements to IK Rig & Retargeting:. - View both source / target skeletons & hierarchies.- Live Link right into the editor (from Maya, Xsens etc).- New IK adjustments, like stride warping.- Edit Pose overhauled.- Import Poses.- UX polish.
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Hear me out: a claymation style Sinbad game with Lumen/Nanite environments and motion matching on all the monsters.
3D Animator @geewhits gave @UnrealEngine's new animations a "stop-motion treatment", making them look like they came from Spider-Verse animated movies. See more: #animation #3danimation #unrealengine5 #ue5 #unrealengine #spiderverse #stopmotion
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In #UnrealEngine5.5 I added a new Preview Scene Controller type called "Running Instance". So in any anim editor with a Preview Scene you can pipe-in the pose of a skeletal mesh from any other editor or PIE instance. So you can use a Control Rig to pose your input character in.
We added the ability to paint weights directly in #UnrealEngine5 during PIE. Real time weight painting is a beast of a feature thanks in part to @kiaran_ritchie. #skeletalEditor #Controlrig .#ue5 #uefn #animation #rigging #maya
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Excellent tutorial here showing how to set up sub chains to force the full body IK to use a preferred subset of bones before affecting the entire body.
Quick example of why you should use subchains if you're using control rig & the FBIK node in #UnrealEngine . Full setup guide:
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@gdb I'll pay $40 if you remove the kindergarten-level content blockers. Makes it useless for creative writing and story ideation.
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Did you know you can procedurally generate Control Rigs that generate procedural motion?. We're automating the automation 🤓.
The Dragon from Forest Guardian in #UEFN has a completely procedurally built dynamic #controlrig. To animate him you can position the head control and he will follow the motion. Sequencer can then record this motion.
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@sama The bias is nothing compared to the overbearing censorship. Are there plans to provide a "Treat me like an adult" mode? I promise it can't hurt my feelings.
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Go from a raw skeletal mesh to animatable puppet in minutes with the new Modular Control Rig in #UnrealEngine5.4 . While this feature is still early, Epic aims to provide a wide selection of high-quality modules out-of-the-box to rig anything you want. From squids to forklifts.
unreal engine 5.4 new feature Modular control rig on a different character from the start, cool feature developed by @UnrealEngine I hope you all enjoy it. #unrealengine5 #controlrig #rigging #vfx #cgartist #ue5 #virtualproduction #modular #animation #TeachAnim #gamedevelopment
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#UE5 is poised to remove the rigging bottleneck in your animation pipelines. And we're just getting started!.
Control Rig and FullBody IK in #UE5 are nuts. 8 nodes and you have a working setup to animate in engine. You can then create linked Animations from Sequencer Animations and tweak them in engine! The workflow is ultra straightforward and I can't wait for this to be 'the norm'.
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@0x_dea110c8 We grew up with computers, complete with file systems and programming tools. They grew up in walled gardens mediated by touchscreens.
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Things that are only possible when you have a full rigging system embedded in your animation runtime.
Procedural State Transitions, within control rig. Based on bone weighting & COM shifting. Can be used at runtime but I'm wondering if this would be more useful as an animation helper within Unreal, something similar to Cascadeur's tools maybe.
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"We were so preoccupied with whether or not we could. " 😅🤣.
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New paper demonstrating novel view synthesis from a single image. The eventual conclusion of this line of research will be to have tools that allow artists to take their 2d concepts into 3d; using an AI to hallucinate occluded regions.
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@hashjenni That's "movie snow" and it happens 2 times a year. The rest is windy, frozen wasteland or filthy slush and overcast. Source: Canadian who is done with winter.
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#UnrealEngine's Motion Design tools are not just for broadcast graphics. Lots of cool VFX possibilities.
Made this thing using the new New Unreal Engine 5.5 Motion Design Cloner Physics. There is some crazy stuff under the hood here.
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#UnrealEngine 5.2 is out now. Substrate materials and PCG are huge!. Animators got some love to:.- bi-directional skeleton compatibility.- ML deformer samples.- IK Rig / Retargeter now fully python scriptable.- bug fixes and polish across the toolset.
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The secret is out. Our own John van der Burg (@JohnEMotionFX) is working on an ML deformer for UE5 to bake complex offline deformations into a runtime-friendly format. Still early days, but very promising!.
MLDeformer trained with the result of a Marvelous Designer simulation (green: with deformer, blue: same mesh without deformer) #ue5
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Reminder for people who use C++ in #UnrealEngine5:. "Live Coding" lets you see your C++ changes without restarting the editor. This is a massive productivity booster and it's ready to use out-of-the-box. It will re-instance UObjects/Structs to reflect new/removed properties!
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Vertex Block Descent is a newly published physics simulation method similar to XPBD but with better parallelization characteristics (it operates on each vertex in isolation). Considering the huge influence of XPBD on games, VBD could be a big deal.
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What is the next major innovation in gameplay?. People always talk about servers with 1000s of players or rendering whole armies. Basically scaling things up. But I think the biggest gameplay innovation we have yet to unlock is fully synthetic narrative design and NPC.
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"ML Deformer" in #UnrealEngine 5.2 encodes the delta between linear skinning and ANY arbitrary deformation. Reproduce offline effects like wrinkles, muscles, fat/bulging. To setup, import an alembic cache, train a network, and preview the results right in the editor.
The ML Deformer of UE5 has been used in Fortnite on two characters, one of which is the Hulk character. In 5.2 the performance has been optimized a lot, now being crazy fast. More about that later :) . #mldeformer #UE5.
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@ID_AA_Carmack Rigging programmer at Epic here. It's still the wild west for character animation and deformation. Constraints around runtime performance, and style ensure that most animation in games today is done exactly how it was 10 years ago. Unreal 5.4 has motion matching which is a huge.
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Game animators do the dirtiest shit sometimes. This guy was showing me how he fixes his hand contacts on a rifle animation and he just grabbed the wrist bone and translated it onto the gun handle and scaled it till the fingers touched. Like who needs IK?.
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The IK Retargeter is capable of some basic motion editing operations:. "Scale Vertical" on the root translation can add or remove "bobbing" on the hips. "Scale Vertical" on an IK limb can exaggerate foot height. "Rotation Alpha" can dampen any limb, like a swinging arm.
More IK Retargeting Magic in UE5. Following up on my last tweet - Here's another eg that I created to incl. in my YT video, where I'm able to generate multiple walk cycles on target rig from a single anim on the source. #UE5 #MadeWithUnreal #animation
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If you work in entertainment, you may occasionally feel like you don't have a "real job" that "matters". I struggled with this early in my career. But the truth is, entertainment plays a crucial role in society. Making people happy is huge.
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Check out the new Skinning Tools in #UnrealEngine5.4. I added a "component editor" so you can select vertices and set their weights directly. Great for rigid binds. We're going hard on the skinning toolset for 5.5. Stay tuned!. via @YouTube.
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Skeletal Mesh editing in #UnrealEngine5.5 is getting quite powerful. We're dogfooding it on Fortnite!.
The Pumpkin King currently on the #fortnite store was built and shipped using the Skeletal Editor in UE5.5. #controlrig #animation #rigging #skeletaleditor #ue5
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@tobi I don't think you'll find a single Canadian that can point to any of our services that have been improved by this. I would love to know what all these employees are doing.
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You can absolutely setup an IK Retargeter in #UnrealEngine that does not have any IK. It'll work fine and transfer the motion from your source skeleton. But when you add an IK goal to a retarget chain, it opens up all the IK adjustments as seen here:.
Fixing the hand placement on ladder climbing animations in #stormrite, made easy with #UE5's IK Retargeting! #gamedev
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Join us tmrw at 2pm ET for an Inside Unreal livestream. I'll be rigging a character using #UnrealEngine5.4's skinning tools; then bringing it to life using the new Auto-Retargeter. Come spam the chat with all your burning questions.
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Video area lights with Megalights 😍.
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@Austen It's not just that GPT-4o obviates the need for translation, but also that it can be used as a language training tool. You point the camera at stuff and ask it to speak the name in whatever language you're trying to learn. And you can have conversations with it.
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@joewintergreen Half Life used a lot of visual storytelling (show don't tell). The whole opening train sequence is exactly this.
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@resurrecti0ns It baffles me that people can't find utility in something unless it's perfect. Use it as a "suggestion generator" and verify what matters. You're still moving 10x faster.
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