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.