GTA 6 Animation Technology: Deconstructing Rockstar's Advanced Character Locomotion System

How Rockstar's Advanced Game Engine make's the world feel alive

The trailer for GTA6 has dropped and unsurprisingly it looks fantastic.

In my opinion, everything you see in the trailer looks amazingly consistent and authentic. Why is that? Just have a look at this beach scene for example.

Source: Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1

You can see a large number of unique virtual characters performing a variety of activities. Given that the screenshot is truly in-game, how is it possible to create lifelike animations for such a large group of people without creating and recreating an insane amount of unique digital assets?

Since GTA5 was originally designed for the capabilities of the PlayStation 3, of course, we can assume that the new hardware can build even more immersive virtual worlds.

source: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/ps3-vs-ps5-in-numbers.290587/

But it can’t be only the hardware.

In this patent, Rockstar is outlining a system that can procedurally generate character animations. In this post, I will delve into the different components and functionalities of their procedual motion method with an epic side-eye on applications for trajectory planning of robots and if Rockstar Games’ approach might lead to an interesting solution to train robots realistic movements.

Introducing Procedual Motion

To recap, in traditional systems, each character (of character type) needs to have an animation tree covering various scenarios our character might encounter in-game.

Just think about how idle → idle to walk → walk → walk to idle in themselves are already 4 different animations not counting transitions between those animations.

Below is an example of Naughty Dogs - The Last of Us Part II which has one of the smoothest animations to date.