Motion Matching - My Thoughts [UE5] 

As a solo dev I'm planning on scenes with a couple hundred characters on screen and had no idea about the performance issues, so thanks for highlighting that!

Motion Matching seems good for midsize/large companies where you’ll have one person/team dedicated to animation, but on a solo end it would be a death sentence in terms of development time

So one thing about motion matching is it doesn't need 500+ anims to work. You want to think of it as a framework you build upon vs producing a huge volume of anims. Basically you don't need 50 blend anims between run forward and both L and R directions etc. You can use traditional techniques to fill in the gaps. Epic had a stream where they had 7 base animation sequences in the system and it looked pretty decent. Another advantage is the states that power it can be easily replicated. Things like IK/FK are expensive to replicate because the IK drivers are traditionally based upon world position, so you have to lerp between server ticks the position of the drivers; with this system the baked animations are present on both clients and so you only need to replicate the state changes to reproduce the results on clients. So there is a huge advantage there. I agree with you on the Only Up ALSv4 comparison. We will see a multiplayer parkour racer in less then 6 months that is just all male characters in street cloths using 100% this anim library. I think overall though its a really powerful system that will benefit people going for a more Tomb Raider esq style movement system for the main character without needing massive anim scripting work or advanced knowledge of how to do it.

They are adding nanite for skeletal meshes in 5.5 so I'm curious to see how it will work in terms of performance.

dense data sets are kinda the nature of the beast with motion matching. more often times, it's benefits (insane fidelity and workflow simplification) outweigh the shortcomings (learning curve, some inflexibility, performance with many characters, etc.). Additive layers are probably the solution for different "styles" (assuming one doesn't want to recapture all 500 anims) but you can get a ton of mileage out of additive animation these days. Overall I think bringing motion matching to the masses will only be a good thing moving forward (no pun intended)

I think the performance isseus are not from the motion matching technology itself. In one dev-talk the developers talked about how they had to optimize the whole system to be possible to get it into fortnite without to much performance impacts. Also they talked about the challenge how they where able to integrate it into existing characters with defined motion. It was a really prioritised goal and I think they developed a good work around. Also I think in future there will be a more cooperation with "motorica". So maybe in future you only have to define movement styles and get all the needed animation for motion matching out of a motorica plug-in. I think there is big potential in future also and especially for solo devs.

Excellent information and opinion. I agree with you entirely. I think that we'll see a lot of newer indie devs, or people with specific single-player projects, who use and package with this. I think for those of us who are making multiplayer games/are already into our projects, probably not for us. The idea is nice! But I mean, I do all of my animations from scratch in Blender because of optimization for my game with multiplayer. Reason being, just like you've mentioned, for each of my weapons, or at least genres, I need new animations. So I have crouch, walk, jog and run/sprint. Doesn't sound like a lot until you take into count forward, backward, strafe left, strafe right, diagonal left fwd, diagonal right fwd, diagonal left bwd, diagonal right bwd. Then take into count my aim offsets for the head/torso to follow the mouse in those states (additive). Now take into fact the items I animate the player holding: one handed weapon, one handed weapon with offhand, one handed weapon blocking and blocking with offhand, then two handed weapons, two handed weapons blocking, then bows, then crossbows. So just for my one handed weapons I have forward, backward, strafe left, strafe right, diagonal left, diagonal right, and those all in crouch, walk, jog, run/sprint. So 8x4=32. 32 animations for my one handed weapon. Hmmm, what about unarmed, with offhand, blocking, two handed, blocking, bow, crossbow...? I have 224 animations, roughly. Finally you add other states like jumping and swimming, as well as emotes, like sitting, waving, sleeping... You can get all of your animations for a humanoid rig up to 500 sure, but they will be more optimized and run better in a multiplayer game. If you were to take these 500 animations and then add weapons, etc. you're talking about thousands of animations. Crazy. I can't imagine using this. Does look beautiful though. Good luck with an open world map with structures, foliage, water, niagara effects, npc's and their pathing, weather, music, and keeping a good frame rate. Yikes! Sorry for the rant. Don't even get me started on AI assets.

I mean, if you hadn't been following it, the guy that created ALS is working on this project. General updates will be with major releases, so don't expect a lot to change between now and 5.5

Implementing custom animations and states into a setup like this would be like jamming your fingers into active industrial machinery to add extra pieces.

Maybe use motion matching only for the player character and the rest of the NPC use blend space. Since it's the player character that switches motion a lot and the main focus of the camera.

I feel like you probably wouldn't want motion matching on NPC's and you'd still get all the benefits of the motion matching on the character the player is looking at the most without too much of a performance hit.

It just feels like another tool epic is creating to make larger teams more likely to move over while also increasing the outside appearance of asset flips which will help the image of unreal engine long term, but I feel like it's just going to turn into another buggy experimental plug-in that never gets updated and is ultimately forgotten about by epic.

Motion Matching was used in The Last of US

I know that animation naming convention! it's nice to see Caleb (ALS creator) continuing ALS through epic, 👏🏻

As impressive as motion matching is, I don't see it being too useful unless you're heavily utilizing mocap (which Epic did). I researched motion matching a bit ago and used Lyra's locomotion animations (about 20) to test it out, the character had obvious stuttering because there was simply not enough data. If using traditional workflows, I think that creating enough animations to have the movement look natural with motion matching is not worth the time sink.

Thanks! This was helpful. I didn't have the time to dig into this project but wanted to know what you revealed here. I had my suspicions so I just shelved the testing. I knew it was immature tech that would need time to be made more optimal, but this answered most of the rest of my decisions on when/where to use it. For me, at least for now, this is at least a year away from being of use to my purposes. It's nice flash, but as you said most solo devs won't find it useful outside of very specific game types.

Motion matching is best for realistic, hi-fidelity art styles and makes authoring animations sooooo much easier for those situations. The performance can be improved substantially with less dense data sets, using tagging systems and potentially down the line using machine learning models to pare down the datasets further, and as you mentioned, shifting the searches onto a thread or even the GPU in the case of the ML approach. The bigger issues with motion matching in indie studios is the relative lack of control over the chosen animation, which can make a designer's life difficult at times but I think this can be offset through more extensive usage of all the new rigging tools and layered control rigs that dropped with UE5.4.

My thought exactly was that. “Imma just take the animations thank you”.

A natural downside is, you need a tons of animations. If you are a solodev like me, I cant provide 100 animations for all states maybe...5. So I either take these and dont change any of them or I dont use the system at all.

Commenting for the algorithm. I love your tutorials, you helped me learn tons about physical animation! Also thank you for this vid, I am still using 5.3 and do not want to update to 5.4 so I haven't been able to check motion matching out lol. I was curious if there were any animations I may want to "borrow" from it, but it doesn't seem like it is actually 500 unique different animations, like interact animations etc.

Motion matching is a good tool for a very specific niche. (and obsolete with the animations through AI that are already present although they are not yet refined.) I still prefer to combine mine with additive and semi-procedural animations. achieving practically the same results but with 12 animations instead of 500. And the best thing is that since it is procedural it reacts to any surface, while with motion matching I would need another 500 more. But, it's free! There really can't be much to complain about.

If we could use the paths of all these animations, and combine it with something like motorica, we might be about to get a ton of variations out of this.

as someone who really dont care about visual side of game that much ill be using this for sure. Its free realestates . Sure, the animations look generic and they have no personality, but they look great, way way WAY better than anything i would bother making/setting for the game anyway i watched the UE showcase they had about it, and im looking forward to the future of this, what we see is, from what i understood, BETA of what the system is supposed to be since they didnt had much time

Hi, agreed on the 500 animations remark, am having the same exact thought. The AnimBP values aren't ThreadSafe, possibly one reason why your FPS hit below 30? Also, someone did a comparison between 50 ALS and 50 GASP (Game Animation Sample Project) characters and concluded that GASP, in terms of performance wise, is better than ALS. So I'm guessing the second reason is PC specs? On my end, I have RTX 3800ti and only in GASP I keep getting the "streaming pool size" error. Eitherway, GASP isn't complete (as decribed in the Read Me found on the map), so yeah. ✌

Yeah I'm not a fan of motion matching, using blendspaces is easier and you can still get really good results. Also I exported the walk and run animations into another project and using the basic Foot IK makes the legs do weird shit while walking up slopes I tried to edit the offsets and it did not really help. My quick fix was to turn off foot IK while moving but in the end I will probably just use different animations. If anyone has an idea on how to fix please let me know.

I have been (and still am) blown away by motionmatcning ever since experiencing it in the last of us 2. I reckon if you’re making something that style (no large crowds, etc etc) you could make a great looking game with a great story… with terrible AI voice acting lol. But seriously, I love this stuff and I can’t wait for it to continue fleshing out and becoming more user friendly

i wonder where the perf drop is coming from, if its from skel mesh nanite is coming for that soon too. if its from char bp ppl should limit the number of motion matched chars in their games for now

They've been using this in fortnite for at least a few months now (maybe 2023?). I'm not sure the performance hit hypothesis is valid.

With sprinting don't you just speed up the animating and its been tested, animbps chug more motion matching is very performant unless you have a custom way to calculate animations

They can do it on GPU with compute shaders and it will be much performed i think

True and Real Charlie... some of these new UE5 systems... while cool and all, look a little too complex to implement for a small team or a solo dev.

I've been working with motion matching since it came out and i use vary few animation in conjunction with orientation & speed warping & foot locking and I get better results than ive ever gotten with any other method and my anim bp's are extremely small in memory.. this "example" is not a good example in my opinion but I understand why they do things like this.. Idk it takes a lot of playing around with it to understand what you NEED, and like i said I've been playing with it for a long time now so I just wanna say, dont look at this example and just write it off.

waiting for unreal 5.5 so we can finally have that sweet sweet nanite on skeletal meshes

Yeah it looks great, but I have the feeling that it's supposed to be the most complex (and best) result you can get with motion matching. I've seen videos about it before this sample project, as they released the motion matching functionality with 5.4 a few months ago, and it was much much less complex to work with it. It was literally just taking some animations (like the Lyra example animations) and throwing them into a database. It looked decent, but you still do get some foot sliding, which is why I suppose they added stuff like the animation curves for the speed, foot speed, position etc ... I'm really curious how the performance of the basic motion matching setup is.

Something I don't necessarily like about this is that smaller developers are "forced" to use this, which will cause a lot of games to feel the same. Obviously developers aren't actually forced to use this, don't get me wrong - but now, devs looking to create their own locomotion solution will be at a time disadvantage. Sometimes it's nice not to have an existing solution for something so important such as player animation, because that's how you get games with varying identities

I would have rather seen a more comprehensive blendspace, where instead of now needing 500+ animations to make a comprehensive motion blueprint, instead we could use the same 8 or 16 or 32 animations, but the blend space does more comprehensive 'tweening, to programmatically create the seamless motion that looks like we're seeing here. Personally I'd rather create a _set_ of characters with _unique_ motion, rather than one character with really blended motion (if I were putting that much effort into creating animations). It looks like the predictive algorithm is very good, but I feel (based on your analysis) that the animation could have been done in a better/more efficient way, that would suit more [smaller] studios. Thanks for taking a dive into this one, I've been wanting more information since it came out (but haven't had a chance to dig into it myself), and I can now see it's only partially what I thought it was.

I'm using motion matchint since Unreal 5.1, the diference is that this one is the complete version of what i was using The real problem is the performance, they should make something about the Game thread, an easy plugin to solve all the problems of game thread, unfortunately i have to use at max 15 A.i(NPC) on scenario or the fps will drop below 60 fps

oh you decided to show up thanks

Just from a visual standpoint, there's something about the movement that I don't like. Definitely sticking to Advanced Locomotion System

I wanted to try motion matching but 5.4 runs insanely poorly on my very good rig. Takes 1-3 seconds every time I try to PIE. Also constant hangups on basic things like clicking on blueprints or moving around the graph.

I use ALSv4 and I'm happy😂

It's a great system for singleplayer games. But the issue i have with this is that you need to use root motion for motion matching and thats just a nightmare to work with in multiplayer projects. State machines will not work properly with it so you would have to handle it all with montages which seems insane to me. (Atleast that's what everyone said so far) This might work for short fire and forget montages but for the consistently triggered movement stuff it's hell and also fills up the network bandwidth because you have to replicate it all.

Really loved your thoughts on this. Feels like the only real sober take on this system tbh.

How much space is it going to take?

You mentioned something in the start I found curious. You think Nanite is expensive? How come, good man? I'm asking as a scene builder, and I use Nanite often and I see performance increase usually. There are exceptions of course, and I was just wondering what your experience was :)

I’m sticking with learning ALS at the moment. MM is also too incomplete. Maybe in another year.

Can you elaborate why you have mixed feelings about Nanite? Like a full blown video? From my tiny amount of experience [and a lot of reading] it seems like just almost always the best choice [apart from translucent stuff].

For people like me, I don't recommend neither the animations or the system itself for FPS games. I am no expert by any means but let's be honest, those animations weren't made for FPS and you just better off with a blendspace both in performance and simplicity matters, as in FPS games the hands movement is more important than legs or body, so in my opinion, if you really want to create something with lit you can use it but if you want to ship your game, just use blendspaces. Charlie didn't mention this but i wanted to mention in case anyone needs this

Why do I have the feeling, in this second hundreds of LLMs are feed witht hese 500 animations, so companies will just generate them instead of actually letting their last animator making them?

Thanks you so much for this video, you saved me hours of investigation testing this, motion matching is completely useless for VR as it is now, that performance cost is unacceptable and I could only see this being used for the NPCs and stuff which is precisely not a great scenario for this system.

Blendspaceded base Based anim bp

Can't wait for twitch streamer slop games that use this 🙃

But can it walk down stairs or a slope or stand on a sphere without breaking its ankles.

It's cool, but no indie developer will use this. They added it for big studios.

To be honest, I'm not a fan of the side running 3:06 to left or right ... it looks so unnatural, it only fits in a tennis game. :) Many games use the 8way run (not sure what's the correct term of the movement that was invented for Crash Bandicoot), that makes the motion matching almost useless.

Watchu know bout 6D blend spaces???

Always awesome when my favourite Unreal Chad user posts !!

Damagemask tutorial when?

activate windows lol

"These animations are only useful for the thing they're meant to be used for" seems like an odd criticism.

As an indie you need to pick your battles. Motion matching looks like a losing one.

As usual with unreal another "great looking and easy to works with thing watch this tips tutorial and you learn to use it no time" will turn out that will not work outside suggested use much. If you want to make something different, because that how creativity works, you will struggle.

Firstly, anim blueprint performance analysis is totally made up. You can't just look at the FPS and say "well this thing is slower then this thing, so this is bad". And then you're comparing one of the hardest anim blueprints and literally two node blueprint. Of course it is going to run faster, what did you expect. Secondly, you're not animation bound, you're skeletal mesh bound and movement bound in this case, because their update are MUCH SLOWER IN general, then animation update. Please learn unreal insights (little recording button on the right-bottom) so you can actually understand where performance issue is.

That performance test is not really a fair shake. I’m sure you didn’t use more than 10 animations in the blend space setup. If you were to disable majority of the anim in the database those numbers would be pretty much identical. You basically just compared 2 people walking the same distance but one of them was wearing weighted clothes. Of course the guy without extra weight will get to the end faster

oh no no, i love all your videos but this one should be removed HAHAH

I don't see ue5 being a good tool for indie devs at all. There's just too much kafaffling in it.