AI4Animation VS SplineMesh

Hi all, I've been around this scene since 2014 and we've seen some incredible mods over the years. If anyone is familiar with the AI scene recently, you may have came across a paper called DeepPhase which allows for fully procedural, unique animations in realtime. It's a long shot, but is anyone here familiar with the animation pipeline for Skyrim - and whether it would be even feasible to implement this paper into the game? This is just theorycrafting or spitballing an idea, but I'd love to have a discussion here!

character motion being the same old animations, just done/interpolated better

the only advancement I know of which got close to be implemented in games is https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation (I think Sebastian worked with EA or some other big company at some point) - still haven't played anything using this though

Here's the paper for one of them: Phase Function Neural Networks. In the paper you can also find names of other algorithms and look up their associated papers. The reason I single out this one is because the author also uploaded their original Unity implementation.

(bonus: here's an excellent and comprehensive gdc talk from ubisoft going over their tech and how it helped them address the insane complexity in their assassin's creed games. second bonus: the guys that did that basketball demo in the 2 minute papers video have their work in a github repo, if you're feeling spry)

I would suggest to search Github as well. A 5 second search turned up a good handful. One of which looks useful: https://github.com/methusalah/SplineMesh

There's a ton of procedural spline mesh generators. https://github.com/methusalah/SplineMesh in particular is very good.

Is SplineMesh the tool that you're using?

A keyword you may want to look into is Spline. A spline will help you define a curved line, which you should then be able to move the ball over. (If you don't want to code it yourself, maybe SplineMesh can help you out)

it's open source. you can pick it apart and use it as a starting point, adapting pieces of it to do what you need it to do. or you can just use a simpler bezier curve lib and add the dragging mechanics yourself. This lib seems to build road like meshes easily.