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This in-depth article looks into the process of creating the foundation of a motion-capture driven animation system. In particular, it covers the details of annotating walking / running cycles, how to interpret and model the motion of the skeleton root, playing back animations in space, as well as lining them up so they can be concatenated and blended correctly.

In this masterclass, William van der Sterren goes over the whole process of acquiring annotations for a level automatically, from finding a set of waypoints that describe the level by filtering out low quality waypoints and keeping the best, to connecting them together for tactical path-finding, as well as movement annotations. A whole section of the talk is also focused on area clustering, or the process of creating a an extra layer in the navigation hierarchy to support things like squad behaviors and reasoning for groups of soldiers.

In this 2h30 session, Phil Carlisle and Alex Champandard discuss the programming details behind behavior trees, and hierarchical logic in general. Two major approaches are covered: the first implementation relies on modular behaviors that get updated regularly in a polling fashion. Here, all the control flow and memory management is distributed. The second approach is rather more centralized with a scheduler responsible for executing behaviors, and a blackboard that stores the task memories. The relative merits of each solution is discussed and analyzed.

In this session, Mikko Mononen discusses his experiences and presents 5+1 pitfalls that developers fall into when designing game AI for shooter games. The talk discusses avoiding complex solutions when possible, not necessarily simulating characters and their brains accurately, striving towards believable behaviors rather than realistic ones, embracing special cases rather than mimicking the elegance of physics simulations, not constraining design to the capabilities of a path-finder, and taking into account player expectations during design.

This report looks into the process of creating useful annotations for terrains, whether manually by designers (and provides tips for helping the process go smoothly) or automatically using algorithms (with advice for how to approach the problem). In the second part, terrain representation is discussed in terms of finding the balance between a generic solution that supports a variety of reasoning tasks and special-case data-structures. Finally, reasoning with the terrain representation is discussed for individuals as well as groups.

In this talk, leading animation researcher Michael Gleicher takes a tour of the field of motion synthesis, locomotion and character animation. In particular, Mike discusses ways to improve I.K. using local warping around the constraint frame, implementing a skeleton based on point clouds that allow for a little stretching to overcome I.K. problems, interfacing between AI / Animation interfaces by taking into account steps and natural paths while planning, and finally using path-editing to avoid the expense of motion clips and blending where possible.