Unreal Engine 5.4: Animation Deep Dive | GDC 2024

Get an in-depth look into how we rigged and animated LEGO® Fortnite in Unreal Engine, and how we reinvented Fortnite Battle Royale’s locomotion with Motion Matching. This talk will show the tools we’ve developed and share details on the content we’ve built, including the transition to Motion Matching on a live title, how we landed on the animation style within LEGO® Fortnite, demos of our minifig rigs and highlights of the benefits to animating in Unreal Engine to allow for no ‘round tripping’ for quicker iteration and testing.

[medhue]

In the game we are working on, I have rarely needed to go outside of Unreal to do anything. It's not something I expected, but it is quite nice to do everything in the engine.

[MrYoungfly]

Sooo is it just me, or did the new animation features just kick the door down and strut into the room like they own the place? Mic drop. lol. Remember the days when our jaw-droppingly gorgeous characters moved like they were secretly part of a robotic mime troupe? Straight winter Olympics. Those days are gone, folks. I'm over here practically vibrating with excitement, itching to get my hands on these updates. I mean, throwing a punch or swinging a sword that reacts like it's part of a dance with physics? That's not just an update; that's breathing soul into our creations. Huge shoutout to the Unreal Engine wizards – you've outdone yourselves. I'm sending you all virtual hugs and a mountain of gratitude. My heart (and my characters) are doing backflips of joy!

[internetbard]

The fact that this tech is being made available to anyone virtually for free is mind blowing to say the least

[SonnyBear]

Been dabbling with UE5 lately. Thanks to all the forums and tutorial videos for helping me understand this crazy tool, one feature at a time.

[SirWade]

Such great new features and fun insights into the production! I'm going to make soooo many tutorials on all of this.

[UnrealRealism]

I cant express how excited I was for UEs announcement of 5.4 and the updates / features especially the 500+ free animations . Super cool!

[post]

Motion matching is such a cool tech. Thank you guys for your hard work. You are unreal!

[i.sebastian.c]

Maya it's history now, Autodesk should take notes what a real feature means. And it's free for starters!

[SpikeTheSpiker]

@24:45 you've been able to hot reload animations and anim blueprints while pie is running since 4.24. This isn't just exclusive to this new anim sequence stuff, if you edit an anim, export and hit reimport on an anim sequence while PIE is running, it will fetch the new animation during runtime. It's funny how so much old cool stuff isn't documented and the new UE devs are slowly rediscovering these things

[Shrooblord]

SO EXCITED FOR THE NEW ANIMATION TOOLING!! What a time to be alive!

[ermilburn]

I can't get one quote out of my head: "just coming off the Collision event on the Fortnite team". Collision was in June of 2022, although the update containing it had been out since mid-May, so that would mean that they only had a year and a half to put this all together. This is just incredible.

[albertkim]

That was amazing. Motion Matching will completely democratize access to amazing animations

[illyay]

Whoa! I was also doing that dynamic additive layering system in my own game. Makes it so you can have a weapon holding pose that's also affected by running animations instead of leaving the upper body stiff. Mine was kinda simple in comparison and just figured out an additive spine pose. As an added bonus, I also had crouching for free since the upper body would lean forward due to the locomotion pose leaning forward.

This motion matching tech is insane. I spent years trying to tweak my character's animations and I think this will just finally solve locomotion and make it look super smooth almost for free, and with just about any arbitrary set of animations.

[jiiiiim_xyz]

Constantly mindblown.. Thankyou! Maybe one day I'll also be able to actually understand a fraction of the things your talking about :)

[gamejamreject]

yeaaah baby been waiting for these features to finalize

[sjyoo]

Sometimes, I feel the techknowledge is super fast like this announcement so I am little bit afraid to accept and learn the new features because it takes time to be familiar, even if I have many experiences and skills with other softwehres. However I am excited to be able to handle these fantastic features with my project soon so I am willing to accept it my best

[playbyan]

The new gismos is looking great, I hope when it is released it will be a builtin feature.

[dmosier]

This is really cool! I’d love to learn how to fully rig and animate in Unreal and not need Maya. But man, you can tell these guys are not comfortable talking to people! 😮

[ArthurMorgan-kp]

If we get physics-based animation in unreal like in Cascandeur I am switching to Unreal only.

[JikeWimblik]

With that nanite technology you have clever compression lossy and equivalent arrangement or lossless and approximation. You can also carefully use grain where the ai and the graining are tuned for efficient degraining. If you want to add generated content that can work with grained set to generated mould this can be dynamically tuned more GPU less nPU to less GPU more NPU ect for an object or landscape aspect.
An extended nurbs to nanite with ai trained on the nurbs version with the grain ideally positioned for the ai detail upscale reduction system would be good for 5.6