The Illusion of Motion: Making Magic with Textures in the Vertex Shader

In this 2017 GDC session, Tequila Works' Mario Palmero presents ways to use textures in vertex shaders as a cheaper alternative solution to established methods, and present a new technique for animation pipelines that bypasses the CPU and enables animators to increase bone counts dramatically.

GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

[NeilRoy]

Interesting ideas. I thought he was fairly clear in what he said, I certainly understood it. Considering English is obviously not his native language, he done better than i would. Anyhow, yeah, food for thought, great ideas here.

[mehdi]

This is amazing! Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with us

[getrekt]

THANK YOU SO MUCH Tequila Works and Mario Palmero!

[cupsster]

Very nice talk! I appreciate this on was true to 'developer' part of whole conference as lately there are a lot of trash talks that does not have anything related with actual development process itself and just repeat most obvious stuff we all know for ages ( eg marketing, or spending good 1/4 of talk just talking about presenter ego and life since childhood to now).. So thank you again Mario! I enjoyed talk.

[wbahnassi]

"Skinning with AniTextures" from the book ShaderX4 (2006), has a full description of how to do the stuff mentioned here (including some of the "Future Work") in implementation detail with working code and HLSL shader samples.

[gyakoo]

For everyone complaining about his language problems, try to put you in his shoes. Not your native language. Probably the first time he speaks in public. Subject is complex and it's crowded. Lack of sleep due flights. It's hard to work and speak when it's not your native lang.

[ChristopherDrum]

Presumably one could encode bone position for various linguistic phonemes, the mouth shapes required to produce those sounds, then do the color blend to morph between any two phonemes to generate a kind of on-the-fly lip-syncing? Use, a unique texture for each spoken language and maybe that could fulfill typical use-cases on many low-budget projects.

[talchyr]

can't wait to deep fry an animation

[DangerRangerous]

It's like visually encoding DNA but for animation instructions.

[adrawdesign]

incredible !!! thank you for share this <3

[ThomasLaverne]

Very nice talk! I'm not sure any compression technique such as PCA would give good results here because 1) you would suffer from imprecision 2) the cost of applying the inverse pca ( two matrix multiplication) might be prohibitive... Anyway additional level of compression like storing floating point differences from one master bone to a child bone might help?

[davidmurphy]

Bet you could do the vertex texture animation to bone transform with a Discrete Fourier Transform. That way to can just process it and feed in the bones. It would be better than feeding the animation because the initial start condition would have a periodicity which exactly replays the animation from the initial wave conditions.

[xrsxrsxrsxrs]

How they transform simulation into bone animation? ( I only hear about a solver at 15:46 but not the name of the software)

[Shsou]

While an animation is running (with texture), and then it surprisingly collides with something, is it possible to change the texture at runtime to make the animation fit the new situation?

[rendermanpro]

Nice, but.... so whats big outcome from baking to bones/skinning from the second part? Looks like more "when I have nothing else to do" and inventing a wheel for non really existed problem...

[stenfeio]

Any folks know what methods they used to bake the animation data to texture?

[rducsfi]

so this is how devs are able to animate hundreds of objects on the screen without killing framerate. impressive

[Foxtrop]

baking animation to a texture to remove the cpu from the process, genius

[filipzawadzki]

What's the difference if it's a texture or other matrix file? That doesn't make sense why this is called texture as it isn't used to make graphics anymore but for animate objects.

This is for everyone expecting the world to speak native English (referring to man asking in 28:12). I was living in the UK for almost 4 years and this kind of awkward situations makes my blood boils. English language is not the belly button of the world. Did you know that in 2020 there are more Spanish native speakers than English?? And the world keeps spinning, yes it does) so you don´t have to expect everyone to speak perfectly. If you ask someone for something and he says "Sorry", it means "Could you repeat I´m not native like you, DO YOU MIND?". If you come to my country (Spain) you will learn to say "Perdón, ¿puedes repetirme despacito?" and if you don´t get it either second time you will understand these kind of uncomfortable situations.