Untold Engine v0.22.0 — Animation, Character Deformation & Performance

[untoldengine]

Untold Engine v0.22.0

Untold Engine v0.22.0 is now available.

This release introduces a major new animation and character deformation stack, including pose layers, compute skinning, Reach IK, morph targets, muscle simulation, and ML-driven deformation.

It also includes significant performance improvements to scene and .untoldpack loading, along with fixes across scene lifecycle management, rendering, threading, and Blender exports.

Animation & Character Deformation

v0.22.0 introduces the foundation for a much more capable character animation and deformation pipeline.

• Pose Layers provide the composition layer for character poses and deformation.
• Compute Skinning moves character skinning into the compute pipeline.
• Dual Quaternion Skinning (DQS) and Direct Delta Mush (DDM) provide higher-quality deformation options.
• Morph Targets add support for blend-shape-based deformation.
• Pose Drivers allow poses to drive additional deformation.
• XPBD Muscles introduce physically based secondary deformation.
• ML Deformer support provides a foundation for learned character deformation.
• Motion-capture seam handling is integrated into the deformation pipeline.
• Reach IK allows individual chains to target positions in world, model, shoulder, or ground space.

Together, these systems establish the foundation for more advanced character animation and deformation in Untold Engine.

Performance Improvements

This release also includes several optimizations aimed at reducing redundant work during loading and rendering.

• .untoldpack files can now automatically build LOD chains for their models.
• Each .untold model inside a pack is loaded only once, even when referenced multiple times.
• Repeated models are written to a pack only once.
• Metal mesh buffers obtained through MetalKit are now read once instead of once per draw.
• Entity transforms are registered once when loaded instead of redundantly.
• Objects projected to less than one pixel in height are excluded from the frame.

These changes reduce unnecessary asset loading, memory work, and per-frame processing, particularly for scenes containing repeated models.

Scene & Rendering Fixes

Several fixes improve scene reliability and correctness:

• Scenes can now contain more than 20,000 entities.
• ECS components are properly released when entities leave a scene.
• Streamed scene roots remain correctly attached to their hierarchy.
• Converting an entity into a light preserves its existing transform and hierarchy.
• Fixed a data race between Scene.assign and readers of the same slot.
• Fixed material shading issues involving normal maps, emission, and reflections.

Blender & Export Improvements

The Blender export pipeline also received several improvements:

• Exported assets are now kept inside their own asset folder.
• Glass materials export more faithfully.
• Blender's default bump heights are preserved correctly.
• Failed texture writes are tracked per export instead of persisting for the entire Blender session.

Documentation & CI

• Updated the engine architecture documentation.
• Added documentation around actors and locks, including frame benchmarks, a lock census, and concurrency rules.
• Documentation-only changes now skip unnecessary build, test, and lint workflows.

Looking Ahead

v0.22.0 significantly expands Untold Engine's character capabilities while continuing the work of making scene loading, rendering, and engine infrastructure more efficient and reliable.

The new pose and deformation architecture gives us a foundation to continue building more advanced character systems without coupling those systems directly to the animation or rendering pipeline.

As always, feedback, testing, and bug reports are welcome.

Thanks to @miogds for helping improve Untold Engine with these great PRs.