Bend Studio Next Game Will Use Motion Matching Tech For Seamless Animations

Muhammad Ali Bari March 24, 2023

The next game from PlayStation’s Bend Studio will take advantage of motion matching technology in order to deliver seamless animations.

According to the LinkedIn profile of Principal and Lead Technical Animator at Bend Studio, Alexander Manresa, the studio will utilize motion matching technology to implement more realistic and seamless animations in its next title. Previous games to use the technology include Ubisoft’s For Honor, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2, and Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx.

Manresa’s job description as Lead Technical Animator states that he was involved in the roadmap feature development for motion matching workflows between May, 2022 and March, 2023 on an unannounced project. He has been involved in animating, implementing, troubleshooting, and playtest tuning various player and NPC motion content. He also served as the R&D Anim look dev and product driver for establishing team workflows, pipeline consultation and managing animation leadership initiatives during his 11 month period of work at Bend Studio. He had also worked at the studio as a Lead Animator between April, 2016 and October, 2020.

Previously, it was reported that Bend Studio is likely to be using Guerrilla Games’ Decima engine for its next project, and that it will be an open world game. Game designer Mathew Seymour’s LinkedIn profile states that he has been working with the Decima engine for the development of Bend Studio’s next title.

The unannounced project is said to be targeting “Cinematic-Quality” Facial Animation, 3D Audio, and possibly online multiplayer. The LinkedIn profile of Senior Staff Technical Artist, James Sathre mentioned integrating Shotgun-Jira in the studio’s development pipeline and working on next-generation lighting workflow tools. Regarding the game being open world, Bend Studio had assigned a senior lead designer, Ron Allen, to work specifically on the open world and mission design component of its new project.