GTA 6 Animation Retargeting Should Melt Supercomputers, But Runs on a Series S?

You may or may not have heard of GTA 6’s animation retargeting. Either way, it’s a total game changer for GTA games, and though it’s not a new concept, the way Rockstar is using it is special and will change a lot.

I’ll look into it a little deeper as we go through the article, but first, let’s frame things up, shall we?

What is Animation Retargeting?

Animation retargeting is a method of animation that just about every modern 3D game uses to some extent these days, especially for games with advanced character creators that let you adjust height and build. Every game has a set of animations, and when you change a character’s form, these animations have to adapt accordingly.

This is often achieved, as in games like Skyrim or Cyberpunk 2077, by stretching or compressing these animations. I’m no expert, and I don’t know exactly how this works, but it can sometimes lead to weird stretching or other jank that we, the players, often miss because of first-person perspectives.

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This features in RDR 2, as well, but it’s all hard-coded to avoid any weird animations. Arthur will only have so many animations to code in, but what about the NPCs? RDR 2 used blended traditional animations mixed with a physics simulation. The animations are coded by Rockstar, but the physics simulation is called Euphoria.

Together, the animations and the physics engine help to create the realistic character movements we see in RDR 2 when someone gets shot, shoved, or even run into by a train or horse carriage. GTA 6 is set to surpass this, but we’ll look at that in a moment.

Let’s take a step back, first, to GTA 5.

What Came Before?

It’s crazy to say that the last GTA game came out 13 years ago. Naturally, the landscape was very different back then, but did you ever notice that almost all NPCs shared a similar frame? Important characters had distinct builds and heights because their animations were essentially hand-coded. But NPCs, being randomized, needed one or a few sets of animations to apply to a huge variety of them.

The same is more or less true in RDR 2. GTA 6 aims to change that significantly.

How, Exactly, Will GTA 6 be Different?

GTA 6 is set to feature a huge variety of NPCs, with a huge variety of body types, heights, and clothing. Try to apply a rigid skeleton system as in RDR 2, and that’d result in floating, awkward stretching, clipping, and a host of other issues with immovable objects (like the street) and characters alike.

So what GTA 6 does is target various animations and impacts in real time. So, when a man of considerable bulk gets shot, for example, he doesn’t stick his hand inside of his own body to apply pressure to the wound. Instead, the NPC “checks” to see where the wound is and dynamically reacts to it.

In my mind, that sounds like the game is going to run calculations basically every split second to see where things are and how they should be interacting with something. I know enough about computers to understand that this would give us about 5 frames per second if we’re lucky, before inevitably melting our console.

Instead, Rockstar is using a series of highly complex math “tricks” to compute all of this, and a master set of 600,000+ animations (double that of RDR 2).

I still don’t fully understand exactly how it all works, but it boils down to this: every NPC, object, and even weather event is now able to dynamically interact with the world in the most natural way, without any janky stretching or other oddities creeping in. As someone who grew up in the 90s, that’s blowing my mind.

I wish I could explain it even better, but at this point, we’ll just have to wait and see how this actually looks in-game. Having a fully dynamic world still feels impossible to me, and I still don’t know how GTA 6 will run on a base PS5, even at 30 fps.