Wednesday, June 26th, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

Video: new R&D work in Autodesk’s Project Geppetto

http://vimeo.com/68992813

Autodesk Senior Software Architect Michael Girard has posted a cool new video showing R&D work for Project Geppetto, the crowd-animation system recently integrated into 3ds Max 2014.

The four-minute video, which is described as research into ‘directorial character animation control’, shows a range of more complex animations being generated procedurally inside 3ds Max.

Goal-directed path following and interaction with props
The early part of the video shows animated characters walking along a set of successively more complicated paths by switching automatically through an array of turning states.

The second half shows goal-directed interactions with other objects: in this case, chairs and stairs.

The video only shows the control objects representing each one, not the actual mesh, but the way in which the character adjusts automatically to the position and orientation of the object is quite subtle.

A further brief clip shows blending between male and female walk animations.

No release details yet
So far, there’s no indication of when the research will make its way into a publicly available product. However, as one user comment on Vimeo puts it: “I want this. [I’ve] been waiting over 10 years for Biped to go to the next level.”