An Animator-Friendly Chain Simulator for In-Game Animations at Blizzard Entertainment.

At Blizzard, the Animation department produces character animations which get evaluated in our video games by the game engines. These joint-based skeletal animations are mostly produced from motion capture systems or by artists using DCCs like Maya. However, to animate the accessories of a character like cloth and hair, artists prefer to employ simulation tools to achieve physically correct motions. Our artists explored a few existing solutions (e.g., Maya’s nCloth) to simulate these accessories, but were either limited by the difficulty in setup requirements, or were unsatisfied at the amount of time it took to get visibly acceptable simulation results. So, we developed a custom joint-chain solver inspired by various publications. In this talk, we will detail some of the existing solutions that were evaluated and present their limitations. Then we will illustrate our approach that helped overcome those limitations and extend the capabilities. And finally, we will discuss some use cases of our solution using our production characters and highlight how our artists benefited from employing the simulator.