EA Wants To Use AI for Smoother In-Game Animations With Yet Another Patent

EA is among the leading gaming publishers leading the charge into adopting the new dawn of AI tech into its entries. It has published yet another patent that seeks to automate a huge facet of in-game character animations using AI. The company talks about using a goal-driven animation system that wants to smoothen character animations by automatically creating the movement between the starting and ending points of a pose.

The goal-driven animator 102 is a system and/or method (e.g., as defined by computer readable instructions) that generates transition animations (e.g. intermediate animation frames) based on a current pose and a real-time goal (e.g. target pose or target animation).”

The patent dubbed “GOAL DRIVEN ANIMATION” will handle the transition animations of in-game characters by using the newly proposed system. EA argues that it becomes increasingly difficult to handle the possible transition animations of all the in-game characters. The quality of these in-game animations can also be time-consuming to assess manually. In the end, tweaking transition animations near real-time can be quite a hurdle.

EA has published the patent to automate this tedious step and dynamically generate transition animations using AI tech.

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[It can enable] the creation of animation transitions that are as dynamic as the gameplay in which they can be used. The transition animations are based in part on a path through the game environment (referred to herein as a ‘trajectory’) that is calculated between a current pose and a target animation pose.”

The Goal Driven Animation system by EA can be used to improve transition animations on the spot; for example, a sports game with a bundle of players that uses a lot of animations at every turn. Characters playing with a ball in a FIFA entry would require tuneable, high-level control of animations. It would also be vital to iron out the errors in the created transition animations. The newly patented system can achieve all this using AI.

There is a lot to the legal document, as it is filled with technical aspects. All in all, we can expect EA to utilize this system in fast-paced entries like its FIFA franchise in the future. The giant conglomerate has also published similar patents in the past, including one to replace motion capture tech by using AI to create in-game character animations. It also secured a system to automate the animations of in-game character models.

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