This presentation introduces Motion Matching, an innovative new approach for creating high quality, fluid and complex character movement. The team adopted a declarative animation philosophy, where instead of placing small animations in a big structure, they place small structured markup on top of long animations. This manual markup is necessary for logical information that can't be inferred automatically, like attack types and defense stances. For navigation, they don't have to manually organize transition animations like starts, stops, and turns. They just capture 5 or 10 minutes of a person running around and import it directly into the engine.

At runtime, they continuously find the frame in the mocap database that simultaneously matches the current pose and the desired future plan, and transition with a small blend time to this other place in the data. The resulting motion is almost indistinguishable from a raw mocap sequence, while being responsive enough for comfortable control. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Both Newman and Margenau also emphasized the new system that allows character movement to seem more realistic than ever: motion matching.



“It’s this crazy science fiction stuff where you take just hundreds and hundreds of animations of like walking forward and turning or whatever, and you put them in this huge bucket, and then based on what the player is trying to do or what an NPC is trying to do, it pulls from that bucket, sometimes two or three different animations, and blends them together to make this totally seamless thing,” Newman explained.



“The motion matching technique is used by other studios, but we've kind of taken it and put the Naughty Dog spin on it because responsiveness is always a huge thing for us,” Margenau added. “So we've taken it and kind of built on it and made this hybrid thing of the responsiveness and quickness of something like an Uncharted game, which is pre-existing and incorporating this very fluid, very realistic animation that still communicates those real stakes.”



“Previously all the transitions had to be done by hand, so if you slowed down or turned a corner or something, someone had to manually code ‘ok, I'm turning this corner.’ But now this system basically handles the whole thing,” Newman said.



"Honestly, when we flipped the switch on this, we all just gasped,” he continued. “I think, right now, because the whole demo looks so next gen, it's almost kind of lost in the general level of quality. But I think if you look at how Ellie moves and how the NPCs in this game move versus Last of Us 1, it’s wild.” Click to expand... Click to shrink...

I guess most of you have seen that utterly ridiculous The Last of Us part 2 E3 gameplay demo by now. Maybe some of you are arguing its authenticity which I can understand. The seamless animation looks practically like one continuous motion like if everything was recorded end-to-end in a giant motion capture studio.Its a leap-frog in gameplay animation & interactivity that we haven't seen for many,years and it's just brilliant. Personally I would argue it's the hardest frontier in game development to advance within and it's really thrilling to see what Naughty Dog has managed to achieve here.Now, there is another thread already on ResetEra by chris 1515 discussing a frame-by-frame analysis from a senior animator peer within the industry which I highly recommend: link gamerman also wrote up a summary of the same video analysis here who did that frame-by-frame video analysis speculates thatis one of the core techniques powering The Last of Us part 2 [].Another person who has pointed it out isNow, Kristjan Zadziuk is actually a very notable person in this regard as he presented the break-through at GDC 2016 with the panelAt the time he was still working at Ubisoft. Now, the theory behind Motion Matching has been around for a while but that was among the first public demonstrations of having it implemented in software (colleagueapparently also talked about this at Nucl.ai in 2015). It is worth noting that, was the first person that began initial explorations into the technology following the completion of that game and he has held his own presentations including this very explanatory pdf. You can see Zadziuk's complete presentation here:The panel description for what Motion Matching is:Here's Naughty Dog confirming it directly in an interview with IGN. Excerpt:Ubisoft's(2017) was the first game to take this into use, also EA's UFC 3 (2018), and now we are seeing Naughty Dog jump in with both feet having completely re-written their animation system after releasing Uncharted 4 in 2016. Now with motion matching seemingly at its core and I'm sure many other hard-earned aspects as well. The Last of Us E3 2018 demo speaks for itself.