Principal Animation Programmer @epicgames on @unrealengine. Previously anim tech lead at @amazon and other places. I like coding, investing and gaming.
Joined May 2015
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Here's a screengrab of the sections of the ML Deformer presentation in the State of Unreal stream that shows it in action.
It shows an approximation to a full muscle sim that takes 1 minute per frame normally. Also does cloth approximation. Running live on PS5. #mldeformer #ue5
UE 5.9 preview 1 now ships with a new plugin I worked on called AnimGenOffline (name might change) which allows you to guide animations at high level and use AI to generate the actual frames. This integrates that functionality into Sequencer.
As initial plugin into this system we integrated NVidia's Kimodo. But the system itself is not limited to this. Basically any algo that generates pose data over time can integrate with it.
You can draw splines and make characters follow them, type a style in text, set target key poses at certain frames, etc. You can pose your character directly with Control Rig and retargeting is all handled automatically.
You can also type: "Use Kimodo to generate an animation of a drunk person walking forward and save it as an Animation Sequence asset in /Game/Anims/DrunkWalk".
Weights still have to be downloaded from Huggingface (goes automatically after creating an account and read-only token etc). We're working on making that easier too.
It can run on basically any PC, but for fastest generation you need a Geforce 3xxx series or better. And probably Windows only for now, although I haven't tried on other platforms yet.
This is just the start of course!
Worked on this with @FredNilsson
Will show some videos soonish, or share some community videos.
The Unreal Engine 5.9 MegaJam Preview is here!
It’s the first Unreal Engine release built primarily with agentic workflows and opens up a few new Experimental features: check out Unreal MCP’s expanded toolsets, work with AI coding agents directly in Editor, explore AI-assisted content creation, and run your projects in a browser.
This isn’t your typical Unreal Engine Preview, but it’s ready just in time for the Epic MegaJam.
Invite your agents and start experimenting: epic.gm/ue-5-9-preview
Just a little headsup: there are some python issues in the preview 1. You can work around it by pasting the errors in an AI agent. But will fix that for preview 2 of course. Also if you have a Geforce 5xxx series generation on GPU will fail becuase the engine ships a too old version of PyTorch which isn't compatible with that. We're also working on that.
Bit rough around the edges still lol :) But will be fixed!
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John van der Burg retweeted
We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy.
Don't believe us? Test it out for yourself in Preview:
launcher.epicgames.com
Some strong tents! Now coupled simulation, so cloth interacts with cloth and other objects.
This ain't realtime btw. I guess next would be tearing/damage on the tent. But I first need to optimize it some more.
First subtle cloth sim results with self collisions and collision with objects, and some wind simulation and ropes.
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Working on some more physics stuff. Building a little tower of London inspired scene that will involve some trebuchets firing projectiles.
The simulation will be pretty advanced on this one. Aiming to include fire, smoke, destruction, fluids, realistic material bending, mud simulation, cloth sim and damage and more, all in a coupled simulation. That's the goal at least, and not realtime. Just the goal, not fully realized yet :)
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Some initial destruction with Pinata. All is dynamic, so no pre-fracturing. There is also some stress calculations to make stuff collapse when it should.
Little disclaimer, this is of course not the average game scenario. This is like worst case 4000 boxes on a pile. That doesn't happen often in game. So this might make Chaos look worse than it is of course.
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Some more improvements. This runs over 24000 cubes at over 100 fps, none of them are sleeping. It's running on the GPU now, but with sync back to CPU/RAM, which is of course a bottleneck. But this is now basically running instanced static meshes in UE, but simulation done on the GPU in compute shaders.
I can do a 100% GPU sim too which will allow way more objects. But with read-back it feels more 'real'. More experiments coming up soon :))
Need moar cubes! Tens of thousands of them! :)
Sorry for the blurry mess, I think something with the motion vectors not updating. Every cube is actively simulated and generating contacts. Trying to take another approach and got some first results.
Much faster performance. Data oriented design with full SIMD now. I think its like 4x faster than before.
Still need to get my multithreading faster and some more optims. But from my profiles in some tests it was now on par with Box3D and PhysX and Jolt performance wise (need to try different tests and Pinata has way less features of course). It is about 2x as fast as Chaos physics in the test I ran (using UE 5.6).
I noticed some parts of Chaos are very slow. I might try optimize that as side quest sometime at work lol. Already got several side quests though :S
I guess I'll check multithreading performance next and try to optimize that.
Further stability improvements. Added some initial optimizations. Still have to do bigger optimizations though. This is also a bit worst case, all in one big pile :)
Have to test in a shipping build also to see if that makes any difference. Will do some design changes soon to make it data oriented for better perf.
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John van der Burg retweeted
Unreal ftw @EpicGames
Spent a bit more time on my hobby physics system. Now the contacts are a lot more stable. Still a bit swingy with big stacks of boxes though, so have to see if I can do more there :)
Also some more constraints so that i can make a swinging wrecking ball kinda thing.
Contact generation is now improved and caching some things etc for more stability.
Will probably do some optimizations soonish to make it more data oriented.
Bonus crash at the end as well :)
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John van der Burg retweeted
Wild AnimGen Example project just appeared on Fab.
It trains ML based animation controllers directly in #ue5 and evaluates them at runtime. Sample project includes a retrainable player controller and a pretrained NPC controller with wide style variety and prop support. Unfortunately, NPC one seems like not editable.
I guess this gives some idea about where anim systems are currently headed.
#gamedev #gameanimation
John van der Burg retweeted
GASP 🫢 The Game Animation Sample Project is back with a brand new update for UE 5.8!
Grab it today and prepare to get physical with new physics, motion matching, interaction, and Control Rig features and more: epic.gm/gasp-5-8
Predicted this would happen.
Experienced engineers are higher in demand. And there will be less experienced engineers over time as many switch to management or retire.
Maybe the new seniors will just be ones that shipped things using Ai but don't really have the lower level experience.
I guess that will be the new reality later on.
Nothing wrong with that. Basically just the end of a generation, just like we have less and less people now that know how to write high perf code. Just another step above that.
The AI boom is creating a generational divide in software jobs:
US software developer employment for those aged 22-25 has declined -23% since November 2022, when ChatGPT was launched.
At the same time, the 26-30 age group has seen a decrease of -5%.
By comparison, employment among software developers aged 41-49 has risen +18% over the same period.
This creates a 41 percentage point gap between the youngest and one of the most experienced groups within the same profession.
Meanwhile, early-career workers in the most AI-exposed jobs have experienced a -16% decline in employment relative to less-exposed occupations and more experienced peers since November 2022, even after adjusting for firm-specific shocks.
By contrast, employment among workers in less AI-exposed fields, as well as more experienced workers within the same occupations, has remained steady or continued to grow.
The AI revolution is wiping out entry-level tech jobs.
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John van der Burg retweeted
I’m happy to announce the release of a new open source 3D physics engine called Box3D. I’ve been working on this project for a few years now, but it represents over 20 years of experience writing physics engines for games. Read more here: box2d.org/posts/2026/06/anno…