Creative Motion Matching (MxM) Animation System for Unity (Released-beta)

MxM v1.6b has been submitted to the asset store for review. If you want it now, its available on the MxM discord server for verified users.

If you have purchased MxM but are not a verified user on the Discord server yet, be sure to join and send me (Avindr) your invoice number and I will give you verified status.

 

Hey, just a heads up. Animation Rigging does work with MxM. There's just something you have to do first because Unity doesn't have animation graph sorting until 2019.3 resulting in the rigging updating before the motion matching. See the main MxM thread for details: https://forum.unity.com/threads/bet...tion-state-machine.685489/page-2#post-4875449

 

I've created a standalone demo that showcases a lot of the features of 'Motion Matching for Unity'

Here's a quick introduction:

Download and try it out for yourself.

Happy to field any questions that come from the demo.

A few things to note:

• Assets shown in this demo are not included with MxM
  
• Source code for the 'gameplay' side of this demo is available for all verified users to download from the discord.
  
• The demo is just one way you could implement game-play with Motion Matching for Unity. There is a lot more that you can do with it.
• I haven't put any parkour in this particular demo. Might add some vaulting later.

 

Some new debugging tools coming with 1.8b next week.

You will be able to record all animation over a time period. Then you can pause your character, inspect all data from the MxMAnimator at any point in the recording. You can even rewind your character to those recorded points so you can see exactly what is going on.

This is a vital step towards the end of beta. Getting close now.

Here's a sneak peak.

 

Good stuff!

 

Greetings Ken,

this tool looks really good!

My two questions are:

1. I'm looking for an animation system for my NPCs, to add strafe and pivot movement depending on if they have focus on something. Does this asset work with NavMeshAgents (or simulated input in general) out of the box?

2. To cut down the amount of animation files, it would be helpful if I could i.e. play draw/sheath/aim animations on top of any kind of movement animation. Does MxM support layered animations with masked bones?

 

Hi, answers below.

1. MxM is a generic animation system. It doesn't handle movement unless you specifically set it to use root motion and warping. Therefore, just like with Mechanim, you can attach your character to a character controller that uses NavMeshAgents without a problem. However you will need to manually generate a trajectory that follows the the NavPath for the animation to match appropriately.

This is actually a planned feature for full release coming in a few months. It will basically be an alternative 'Trajectory Generator' script component to the one that currently ships with MxM.

2. MxM has a full layer system. The motion matched animation playes on the base layer and you can add masked layers over the top with Unity's built in AvatarMask asset. You can even use mechanim for upper body / layered animation if you want.

 

Thanks for the info! Just to make sure I understand correctly. Mecanim doesn't care who sets the parameters in the Animator Controller. I just attach my Locomotion script to the AI which sends the NavAgent velocity x y to the animator blendtree parameters and that's about it. Is it as easy as that in MxM?

 

In the same way as Mecanim, MxM doesn't care what informs it of it's parameters and trajectory. However, until I add the nav generated trajectory component it's not quite that simple that as MxM relies on a predicted future trajectory to automatically pick animations without a state machine. I'll post here when its available.

 

Updated the quick start guide to better match the current state of MxM. The User Manual will follow suite shortly.

MxM v1.8b is more or less ready to ship. However, I'm holding off until I have updated the User Manual.

For all those wanting to know when MxM beta is over and the price increases: MxM v1.9b (Update after next) will be the last beta release of this asset. After that the price will increase. I'm expecting this to take roughly 2 months but I will keep everyone updated if that changes.

Also just a reminder that there is no upgrade cost from beta to release.

 

Alright, can't wait to try it out!

 

Dev Update video for v1.8b (Debugging Features) which is available on the Discord for verified users and has been submitted to the asset store for approval.

 

Hi Kenneth, so I bought this fine asset and am trying to figure out how to make it steer NavAgents. I know something is in the works but I couldn't resist and started fiddling.

I duplicated MxMTrajectoryGenerator.cs and had a look at the trajectory code. I found some lines that obviously needed to be changed. So I replaced this line:

Code (CSharp):

1. m_inputVector = new Vector3(Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"), 0f, Input.GetAxis("Vertical"));

with:

Code (CSharp):

1. m_inputVector = navAgent.desiredVelocity;

and replaced all 'm_camTransform.forward' instances with '(navAgent.steeringTarget - transform.position);'

Now the agent walks (quite jittery) around obstacles and straight to the target position (Yay!) but then overshoots.



I surely didn't completely grasp Motion Matching yet. I guess I somehow need to tell the agent to "match" it's position to the destination point when close, right? I guess I'll watch the rest of the tutorials for now, that might give me ideas.

And any advice is very welcome.

 

Oh nice. Sorry I missed this post somehow. Looks like you've done a pretty good job with the NavMesh trajectory generation so far. There are a few methods to achieve this:

1. The first is your method where you've changed the input vector to point towards the next path in the navmesh. This works better for slow movement but you would have to make sure at least that the input vector * max speed never exceeds the distance to the final point (to avoid overshooting). Also it will result in very jittery cornering.
2. Run the trajectory generation as a scalar operation only (so just maxSpeed instead of inputVector * maxSpeed) and then constrain the trajectory to the path.

It just so happens that I implemented (at least a first version) of method two this morning and it will be included in MxM v1.9b which will be coming very soon. You can see it in the works in the video I will post soon.

Ultimately the final results also depend on your animations, configuration and calibration. navpaths like to make sharp turns so it's useful to have 45degree and 90degree plant animations in your set instead of arcs.

 

Motion Matching for Unity v1.9b will be coming very soon. This will be the FINAL beta build for MxM. This means that the asset price will increase for subsequent updates if you haven't already purchased. Many people expressed a desire to know in advance when this was going to happen so here is your warning. You can probably expect between 2 - 4 weeks between v1.9b release and the full release (v2.0 I suppose).

Watch the following video to see what's coming.

Following v1.9b I will be shifting my focus from feature development onto the following for a while:
- Remaking video tutorials
- Improving the demo scene (the included one)
- Providing implementation examples
- Integrations
- Bug fixes & cleanup

 

Hi Ken,
It's such a relief to see navmesh movement being implemented. And it already looks quite good! I like the first method a lot because despite root motion/stop animations the character perfectly arrives at the target point. I'm eager to see how you coded that! I wonder if the jump warping system could be used for navmesh link transitions?

Anyway, I watched this: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023280/Motion-Matching-and-The-Road
And now I'm really convinced that Motion Matching is the future.

Keep up the good work!

 

Cheers. I think both methods can work well provided you have the right setup and enough animations. The character stopping exactly on the spot isn't inherent in either method, I think I just had the second one configured wrong in the settings. Just depends on a case by case basis I guess.

Regarding off-mesh links. I think it is absolutely possible to use events to traverse them. I don't really have too much experience with off-mesh links but it seems like a logical progression.

That video you linked is the video I watched a few years back which motivated me to make this asset in the first place. If you look at 'The Last of Us Part 2' you can see what a AAA studio can do with motion matching and high quality mocap and it's pretty insane.

 

In the standalone portion of the demo, with the knight, it sure looks like the animation whenever he's walking around or running is jittering a whole lot. Is that real or just the recording software or Youtube encoding?

 

It's my camera setup. Which does that sometimes randomly for some reason. Might have something to do with my post effects as well. If you look at the model and actual animation in the scene view there is no such jitter. It's the same character as that AI test I was doing in the other scene

 

Motion Matching for Unity 1.9b is now available to verified users on the Discord channel. I've submitted it to the Unity Asset store and it should be available there as well within a few days.

I am in the process of updating the existing demo scene for the end of beta or rather v2.0. 1.9b contains only the very start of these improvements. For the best experience in the demo going forward, download cinemachine and post processing stack v2 from the Unity package manager. MxM and the demo scene will work fine without them but you just won't have camera follow / control or post processing in the demo scene. The choice is yours.

 

Greetings Ken, thanks for the great update! The Asset Store version is already available!

Little issue: All scripts on the 'CM_ThirdPerson' prefab and also on the one on the Robot in the demo scene are missing with "fix all compile errors"-message, so I created a new project, imported Mathematics, Burst and Jobs, added MxM 1.9b but scripts are still missing/not loaded on CM_ThirdPerson and the 'cm' child object and I'm not really sure what scripts to attach apart from ExampleDemoInput.cs. Would you mind telling what goes where?

I'm on the latest Unity beta build by the way.

 

So as I mentioned above, the new Demo scene uses Cinemachine and post processing v2 Unity packages. You should only get warnings, not errors, if they are missing and the demo scene should still work but just without the camera and post FX functionality. I'll add this info to the Quick Start guide. Unfortunately Unity has not allowed us to set dependencies yet in the package manager for asset store assets which is a pain.

Are you actually getting full on errors? If so you might have warnings as errors turned on. You can either download those packages or you can delete CM_ThirdPerson, its just the cinemachine camera. On the MainCamera you can delete the PostProcessing Behaviour and the Cinemachine Brain (last two scripts).

The scripts on the robot should all be fine, if they are missing then it is related to Unity beta which is not supported. I only support released versions of Unity.

I'll download the package from the store and test it. May have been an upload issue, because I tested this before submitting and it was fine.

 

Sorry about that, I overlooked it somehow. So I went back to Unity 2019.2.9f1 for now. I deleted and reimported MxM, downloaded all the packages and it works perfectly. No errors, no warnings. Just one thing:

When controlling the demo character, if I hit the spacebar when standing still or in transition, this error pops up, (doesn't happen while the character is 100% running):

After that the character is stuck, frozen or keeps moving clamped to its last direction.

EDIT:
If I hit the "Pre-Process Animation Data" button on the existing demo preprocessor, it tells me "You have a composite with no animations in it..." (which is not true, visually) and right after I hit Ok another message pops up "You have invalid animation data in your preprocessor...". No console warnings or errors. Then the Save File prompt appears and I can save the AnimData no problem.

If I create a fresh PreProcessor and AnimData and try to re-preprocess, all works fine, so it's really just the demo preprocessor.

 

What about total count of agents. Can this system handle bulk volume. I suspect not. Any numbers on that?

Many thanks

 

would be cool to see a new stress test on the latest build showing 100-200 agents running kubolds mocaps like in the standalone demo.

 

Hey sorry for the late response. I've been out for a couple of days.

I accidentally left an animation out of the latest build. I added a mirror of the jump flip animation but forgot to put it in the upload folder.

I will be hotfixing that asap.

 

The system is surprisingly fast and gets a little faster with each update. The pose search is multi threaded with Unity Jobs and uses Burst so it's quite fast indeed. Currently sitting somewhere between 0.03 - 0.1ms on the main thread depending on your CPU. On updates where the database isn't searched (customisable) it only consumes roughly 0.01ms of main thread time. On a 4core i5 system It takes roughly 0.02 - 0.1ms of worker thread time.

Last time I tested, I was able to run about 200 agents a little over 30fps. Keeping in mind that at this point the animation isn't even the bottleneck anymore, it's actually Unity's character controller and skinned mesh renderer that are taking up so much compute time. I'll have to update this benchmark because I performance has improved significantly since that time.

If you are talking about true bulk animation with 1000s of agents then Motion Matching is the wrong solution. The point of motion matching is high fidelity, and you're better off with a dedicated bulk animation system for that.

Motion Matching isn't exclusive though, you can use different animation systems for different characters.

I'll see about doing this for release. I'd say it's gotten about 8x faster than that last test I did. However, I don't think that necessarily means 8x the number of characters because the bottleneck is actually the UnityCharacterController and the SkinMeshRenderer which compared to MxM update takes far more time.

 

HOTFIX for this is available on the discord channel for all verified users. I've also submitted it for approval on the Unity asset store.

 

Gotta say, I love this system! The more I use it, the more burdensome it becomes to use Unity's animator for relative complex things. While playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey I realized what a magical little thing the trajectory is and how they use it to do so many clever things, like making the ai jump out of your way, even in curves, if the trajectory hits them, or very smooth overtaking manoeuvres, or takedowns/blocks/attacks at the right angle, it's just marvellous.

I also have a suggestion: I'm currently working on my little NPC movement system and set up a preprocessor, then later on I decided I want to tag all walking animations, so I can limit the NPC to walk only (Don't know if that's the best way to do it). So I had to go back into the processor, tagging every single walk animation. I realized this can get very tedious especially when using cut clips.

What I'd like to do: Add a tag to or give a name to a Composition category, so I can create nice and tidy movement categories like Crouch and Walk and disable/enable them inside the controller on the fly, so there would be no need to tag every single clip.

I hope that makes sense.

 

Cheers, I'm glad you are enjoying it. So the composite category tagging was recommended to me recently by another user, so now it's defiantly going to be a feature in v2.0. Always happy to add QoL to the pipeline

 

Here's a sneak preview of the automatic vaulting example that I am working on for v2.0 release. With MxM's animation warping tech, it just doesn't matter what the size the object is, you can vault over it in a believable manner, provided you have appropriate vaulting animations. Also, while this is an example script, it's also going to be pretty full featured. I adapted it from the vaulting system used in Horizon Zero Dawn.

I'm going to add a lot more vault animations for more variation. Initially the system will handle the following kind of manoeuvres:

• Vault Up
• Vault Over
• Vault Off
• Vault Over Gap

I may also be able to get some automatic wall running / interaction going which should be fun.

 

Well i have no clue whatsoever how to use this but it looks awesome so i bought it in the current sale just to support your work. Maybe down the road this could be married with some of the popular character controlers. Can't wait to see how MM will progress. Keep up the good work!

 

Thanks for the support

 

I've decided to provide another minor update before v2.0. v1.91b has been uploaded to the Discord channel and submitted to the Unity Asset store.

It includes the WIP vaulting system example in the demo scene which I have been making for v2.0 release.

 

I am trying to import but I keep getting "The type or namespace 'IJobParallelForBatch' could not be found". Now I know this is because I haven't pulled in the Jobs package but I cannot find it anywhere. Not in Package Manager nor in the Asset Store. Where did everyone get this package from?

 

It should be in the package manager. Sometimes it bugs out and and doesn't show everything. What version of Unity are you using?

Make sure you get all the following packages:
- Mathematics
- Collections
- Jobs
- Burst

If you want the demo scene camera to work you also should get the Cinemachine package. Otherwise it's not necessary for the core system.

In v2.0 of MxM there will be an installer which will install these all for you automatically so hopefully that will help in the near future.

 

Just a heads up, MxM v2.0 will be released on Friday 15th November. v2.0 marks the end of the beta period which means the price will be increasing after release.

 

Grats on the v2.0 milestone! I'm just waiting for the new tutorials for v2.0 and then I'll start trying to get this working on uMMORPG.

 

Great! I'll be looking forward to it.
Watching past a few videos, setting it up is not something automatic but involves different kinds of manual labor.
I still have to get my mind to wrap around the new way but a quick question pops into my mind.
Is UCC (probably the most sophisticated character controller out there) integration is something out of a question?
Or show some tutorials on how to port animation from an existing controller? It will be great for users who are already using Mechanim style animation.
If not, perhaps show how to coexist with Mechanim animator and start working with MxM by adding additional animation. This way we can gradually port animation stuff to MxM.

Thanks.

 

Thanks, that sounds pretty cool. Once I've updated the tutorials, hit me up if you have any questions relating to the internals or if there is anything I could do to make an integration easier.

The process is less or more labor intensive depending on your animation set. With mocap shot for motion matching, there is a lot less setup. With cut clips there is more but once you get your head around it, it's faster to setup than a state machine with the same fidelity.

Regarding controllers, nothing is out of the question. However, there are a lot of them out there and I get requests for integrations all the time. Since the asset has been in beta up until now, I've been focused on the core product. However, following release I will look into integration more. Just so you are aware, MxM is an animation system, it produces animation just like mecanim, so it really shouldn't make any difference to a character controller. The trick will be getting the character to tell MxM what it's trajectory should be and also interacting with MxM rather than Mecanim.

Mecanim and MxM can run side by side on the same character already. You can fade between the systems and you could even use Mecanim for masked / additive animation if you so desired.

Also note that the existing tutorials are very out of date. MxM has rapidly evolved over the course of the beta. I'll be re-doing all of them pretty quickly following release so that should be helpful.

 

Thank you very much. As Mechanim user, I would be very much interested in how Mechanim and MxM can co-exist. I plan to do basic locomotion, like walk, run using MxM and special event motion on Mechanim first. I think that's probably the easiest path. Or please let me know what would be easiest way to migrate to MxM. I'll be looking forward to the new tutorials.
Thanks.

 

Oh, btw, I have a question in networking games.
For Mechanim, you usually send just position and animation parameters. Then, you will interpolate the position. Root motion doesn't really work in a network environment and this always leads to skating animation for network characters. However, in MxM, you can just send the target position and MxM figures out the trajectory and the correct root motion animation to reach the target. This way, network characters will not skate anymore. Do you agree?
This is one of the main reasons why I want to use MxM. It's about time to get rid of skating.. ^^
I think you can sell more MxM just based on this fact.

I guess the cost is that you will have to calculate all network character by MxM I expect it would handle up to 100 characters with a reasonable frame rate.

Thanks.

 

How can, or can this be used to interact with other agents, e.g. if they get too close a hand animation is used to block the other agent from bumping into each other, that sort of thing, some kind of collision detection perhaps, or is it a case of adding own colliders to trigger events/animations?

 

I'm not certain Motion Matching is going to be a magic bullet for this particular problem. Worth noting that Motion Matching doesn't require the use of root motion at runtime. Root motion is required in the source animations for pre-processing but at runtime, it's completely up to you how the character moves.

Some online games that use motion matching, like For Honor, do not rely on root motion, instead they use other tricks like Controller Decoupling, and Foot-locking to hide any foot sliding. It also helps that they have highly responsive and fast moving mocap which can react to player input very quickly.

Getting rid of foot sliding in this case is a balancing act of matching your gameplay movement to your animations.

In an online game I would sync and interpolate both the position of the character and the entire 'desired trajectory' + any set tags (kinda like mecanim properties). This is just my guess though, I haven't been able to try it yet.

In it's current state it won't do this automatically. You would have to trigger it yourself by detecting the future collision. At the moment, MxM characters are only concerned with themselves. Contacts are detected and conveyed to MxM through an external game-play system.

Automatic matching of the surrounding environment is the next level in motion matching and potentially a future feature. However, it is extremely complex to get this working in a generic and performant way, so I wouldn't expect this feature anytime soon.

 

Happy to announce that MxM v2.0 [RELEASE] is now available on the Discord channel for verified users. I've also submitted the update to the Unity Asset Store and it will be available when my Unity overlords find it in their grace to approve it.

Once approved, the price will automatically increase as previously mentioned. However, because of this, approval may take longer than expected.

 

Hello, I got this asset today. However, the IJobParallelForBatch interface cannot be found, resulting in an error. Do you have any solutions?

 

Sounds like you are missing the Required Jobs/Collection packages from unity package manager.
Did you follow the installation instructions? There are a bunch of dependencies needed to run MxM

 

Oh, Thank you. It's working.

 

Just started using your asset, looks kinda good and kinda buggy at the same time.
Do you know how to solve these issues (I've not modified the example scene) seen in the video:
https://mega.nz/#!LiBgVAab!YSKDTYBOHct9kNAB94prLkHaZDhEnlEooBGbH0dDrEI
- Character runs on level ground, but changes y-position a bit.
- Character floats in the air after obstacle
- Movements don't feel that smooth

I haven't captured an example, but sometimes the character flies in the air (~3 meters) just after changing y-position due to an obstacles. Not sure if it's the reason, but it seems the y-delta is applied twice or something. The character "runs up the air" then falls due to gravity a second too late.

Thanks in advance.

 

i guess these issues are not about motion matching. its just an example controller.