Tools
The AnimForge toolkit
Runtime animation components for Unreal Engine and pipeline tooling for Maya. Each entry below links its demo video and the engineering notes behind it.
01 · Shipping
DLS IK Solver Node
A damped least-squares inverse kinematics AnimNode. Where CCD twists and FABRIK drifts near singular configurations, DLS regularizes the solve — the damping term trades a small amount of tracking accuracy for unconditional stability at full extension and near joint limits.
The error term is computed in axis-angle space via the rotation log-map, the same formulation the engine's Physical Animation Component uses internally for its orientation drives — which makes solver behavior predictable when the two interact.
- Solver — damped least-squares with per-chain λ control
- Error term — axis-angle (log-map) Jacobian error computation
- Stability — well-behaved near singularities and full extension
- Integration — standard AnimGraph node, LOD-aware evaluation
- Platform — Unreal Engine 5, C++
02 · In development
RBF Blend Space
Unreal's blend space assets stop at two dimensions — the Delaunay triangulation and barycentric weighting they're built on doesn't generalize past 2D. Real gameplay parameters don't stop at two: aim yaw, aim pitch, lean, speed, stance.
The AnimForge RBF Blend Space node interpolates sample poses in N dimensions using radial basis functions with cardinal interpolation, clamp-and-renormalize negative weight handling, and top-k pruning to bound runtime cost. The core solver is a standalone, engine-independent library — built for portability to Unity and custom engines from day one.
- Dimensions — N-dimensional input, past the stock 2D ceiling
- Kernels — Gaussian and polyharmonic, per-asset selectable
- Weights — cardinal interpolation with clamp-and-renormalize
- Runtime cost — top-k sample pruning with bounded evaluation
- Portability — standalone C++ solver, engine adapters on top
03 · In development
Ragdoll Stability Stack
Getting into ragdoll is easy. Getting out — cleanly, on time, without jitter —
is where projects burn weeks. The stability stack is a set of layered, drop-in
ActorComponents that own the full ragdoll lifecycle.
RagdollStabilityComponent drives a
BlendingIn → Active → Settling → BlendingOut → Done state machine with
impulse-accumulator contact detection and rolling-velocity settle detection — because
native physics sleep is not a reliable settle trigger. A companion joint-drive layer
adds per-joint orientation targets with independent swing/twist gains.
- Lifecycle — explicit state machine, Blueprint-assignable events
- Settle detection — ring-buffer velocity window + hard timeout
- Contacts — impulse-accumulator based, filters resting chatter
- Joint drives — per-joint targets, separate swing/twist gains
- Integration — pose snapshot & blend logic built in, Chaos physics
04 · R&D
AnimForge WarpViz
Motion Warping decisions get made in Unreal, but animation gets authored in Maya — and animators can't see what warping will do to their work until it's in engine. WarpViz closes that loop.
On request, a pre-configured Unreal evaluation level natively evaluates the warp targets and returns the warped root trajectory and pose trail back into Maya as a transparent animation layer overlay — the animator sees engine-accurate warping directly in their authoring viewport. Snapshot request-response, not fragile per-frame streaming.
- Direction — bidirectional Maya ↔ Unreal bridge
- Evaluation — native in-engine warp evaluation, exact parity
- Overlay — warped trajectory + pose trail as a Maya anim layer
- Architecture — on-demand snapshot evaluation, no streaming loop
- V1 scope — root motion trajectory visualization
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