Crowd Anim Blueprint

Crowd Anim Blueprint was designed as solution for driving the animation states of a crowd with high enough performance to animate thousands of crowd members while still maintaining a familiar workflow.

High level overview of how Crowd Anim Blueprint goes from a familiar ABP setup to efficient execution for the crowd

Crowd Anim Blueprint makes use of the existing Animation Blueprint (ABP) system in Unreal to author the animation setups for crowd members. This allows animators familiar with ABPs to customize their own animation logic with no programmer intervention required.

There is then a custom compiler that generates an efficient custom bytecode representing the ABP created by the animator. The bytecode generated is optimized for execution on the GPU with efficient encoding to minimize the complexity of the data processed by the compute shader.

Finally, this bytecode is executed on the GPU to evaluate and update the animation setup for every crowd member. By running on the GPU instead of the CPU, it’s able to process all instances in parallel and reduce the time spent on the game thread.