Surface Navigation

AI-Powered Navigation for any Geometry

Surface Navigation provides a groundbreaking AI solution that's custom developed to automate NPC and agent navigation across complex, three dimensional surfaces, like walls and ceilings. Kythera AI received an Epic MegaGrant to develop this unique offering in response to industry needs.

Now, games studios can easily and cost-effectively create characters and vehicles that move on and around the surfaces of 3D terrain, with any orientation. From creatures creeping up walls, to magbooted astronauts clambering outside space stations, an assassin scaling a building or a bottom-dweller navigating an underwater cavern, studios can instantly realize unique designs with AI powered Surface Navigation.

NAVIGATE COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS FOR UNIQUE GAMEPLAY

Kythera AI's tools ensure characters and vehicles move smoothly on and around the surfaces of any 3D environment, allowing for greater immersion and unique gameplay.

Creating a navigation system that can handle any complex surface, in any orientation and arranged into any shape requires a whole new approach. Implementing a robust, efficient solution using the current tools available is a huge challenge, even for AAA studios. Kythera AI’s unique Surface Navigation gives studios a complete solution that makes it easy to create realistic agents in complex environments.

STREAMLINE YOUR DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN

Surface Navigation provides an automatic solution that eliminates the need for manually-intensive hand-scripting. Level Designers no longer need to use animation, cinematic or blueprint tools - saving countless hours of development time. Surface Navigation meshes are designed and manipulated just like conventional Navigation Meshes, with no extra training required. It also integrates with Unreal Engine’s Behavior Trees and Environmental Query System- so your studio can incorporate Surface Navigation into your workflow instantly. It is flexible enough to seamlessly integrate with other game mechanics ensuring consistency and responsiveness in any context.

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SIMULATE REALISTIC MOVEMENT IN 3 DIMENSIONS

With Surface Navigation NPCs can move around freely on 3D surfaces with lifelike effects. Our path-following API efficiently informs you about the path ahead, so you can anticipate sharp transitions, such as from the ground to a wall, and animate accordingly. It also helps you smoothly adjust orientation as your NPC moves between surfaces with different orientations. Our AI powered Surface Navigation ensures your NPCs keep their grip, staying fixed to your planned surface however fast you might take the corners.

OPTIMIZE PERFORMANCE

Other approaches to surface navigation often rely on raycasts and other expensive physics queries to probe the environment ahead. These methods consume extensive CPU resources as your characters move, limiting the number of characters you can use while maintaining an acceptable frame rate.

Kythera AI Surface Navigation processes the terrain in advance and as it changes, avoiding these expensive queries and allowing for efficient pathfinding and pathfollowing, efficiently reducing runtime CPU costs. Surface Navigation takes complex terrains and makes them efficient to navigate, without compromising performance.

BUILD AND DEBUG INTUITIVELY USING POWERFUL TOOLS

All Kythera AI products allow you to build sophisticated NPCs and come with robust debugging toolsets to easily eliminate unexpected behaviors.

Our AI features integrate fully with popular game engines, enabling designers to create, edit, and debug complex NPCsin an intuitive, straightforward way. View the full Kythera AI toolset here

Book a discovery call to discuss how your team can create unique game play with Surface Navigation.