Star Wars: Galactic Racer is built around machines moving at extraordinary speeds, pilots with wildly different anatomies, and crashes spectacular enough to reward players for taking risks. That creates a difficult animation problem: every movement must reinforce the vehicle’s physical behavior and the player’s inputs without distracting from hazards hurtling toward them at up to 700 km/h.

To learn how Fuse Games handled that challenge, we spoke with Animation Director Andy Miller, whose career spans more than two decades of gameplay animation, cinematics, trailers, and commercials. His previous credits include Need for Speed Rivals, Heat, and Unbound, three Battlefield games, both modern Star Wars Battlefront titles, and cinematic work for projects including Halo 4: Spartan Ops. That's quite the resume.

In our interview, Miller breaks down a pipeline involving Maya, MotionBuilder, Xsens suits, MetaHuman technology, Speech Graphics, Unreal Engine, and rapid previs, along with less conventional references such as Burnout footage, animal documentaries, Drive to Survive, motion controllers, and sock puppets.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is out now for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is built around speed, danger, impact, and the fantasy of racing through the Star Wars galaxy. From the animation team’s perspective, what were the main pillars for making the game feel fast, physical, and authentically Star Wars?

Andy Miller, Animation Director: With open cockpits, eclectic character roster, and split-second gameplay, our two key considerations when approaching animation for gameplay are prioritizing game feel and authentic characterization. We design our animation systems to feel responsive and directly tied to player input, giving the player clear feedback and a direct physical response from their actions.

We also need to ensure that intuitive feedback applies to our wide roster of characters that feel authentic to the Star Wars galaxy. This means supporting a wide variety of differently sized and proportioned characters with some unique traits, such as multiple limbs or dangling tentacles. Our goal is to make each character feel unique and immerse the player in that Star Wars experience.

Racing games often rely on physics, camera work, VFX, and audio, but animation still plays a huge role in how vehicles feel. How did the animation team collaborate with design, physics, and handling teams to sell acceleration, drifting, boosting, collisions, and recovery?

Andy Miller: Our animation systems are directly tied to the vehicle physics and controller input. We work closely with other crafts to provide details such as acceleration, steering input, impact direction, and of course, crash state. This data drives our layered animation system that combines a variety of animations and poses designed to reflect the physicality of the vehicle directly on the pilot. This is clearest on our speeder bikes, where the response of the rider is a clear indicator of how hard the vehicle is leaning into a corner, or how well they landed a jump, with bad landings providing bigger impact animations. Combined with VFX, camera, and audio, this all provides a really visceral experience.

The game features multiple types of racers rather than only classic podracers. How did the team approach animating different vehicle classes, silhouettes, engines, parts, and motion behaviors so each one felt distinct at high speed?

Andy Miller: With a varied cast of characters and a range of vehicles they can pilot, we had some unique challenges to ensure they could all believably pilot each craft and still provide consistent player feedback. We start with a shared Animation Blueprint across all characters and crafts that defines the base logic of how we convert vehicle physics and player input to various poses, blendspaces and animations.

This includes the base pose and idle animation of how each pilot would sit at rest on the grid, but extends out to how they would respond at speed, lean into corners, or how they would react when crashed, pounding their fists against the craft controls. We then create a child version of that Blueprint where we can replace specific animations and poses per character that are unique to them. That’s how we can ensure the player feedback is clear and consistent, but also allow for unique character traits like Sebulba’s whiskers buffeting faster in the wind as he picks up speed, or little Biddy Blas’ legs hanging off the bike as he leans into corners.

Star Wars vehicles have a very specific kind of physicality: they can be futuristic and strange, but they still need to feel mechanical, weighty, and handmade. How did that influence the way you animated vehicle components, engine movement, suspension, damage, and impact reactions?

Andy Miller: All credit for how the vehicles feel physically and elements like dilating engines, loose flappy panels, or parts detaching on impact belongs to our extremely talented physics engineers, technical artists, and VFX artists. Animation were involved in initial prototypes and previs to help develop some of those characteristics, but all of those systems are driven dynamically in the final product, providing the wide variety of experiences that really shine especially when battling and crashing. For instance, our very first pod in early prototyping was animated with a skeleton to give the impression of two powerful engines pulling in slightly different directions and dragging the pod chariot behind. I’m very glad to say that our physics engineers took on that difficult three-body problem and made something that is much more dynamic and responsive than a purely animated system could provide. Especially when those parts detach and inherit those physics when crashing, sending all the parts scattering in exciting ways.

Because Galactic Racer is a high-speed arcade racer, players need to understand crashes, takedowns, close calls, hazards, and track readability almost instantly. How did animation help communicate danger and feedback without overwhelming the player?

Andy Miller: Sometimes the challenge is to not do too much. We had a lot of fun making unique animations for our characters when there is less cognitive load for the player. For example, each of our podracer pilots has unique wrecked-out animations of them banging the controls or holding their faces in frustration, moments when the player has less input as they've already crashed, and of course all of the characters in the paddock have their unique animation sets that reflect their individual personalities as they engage in conversation with each other.

But when the world is hurtling past at 700km/h, animation needs to focus on the key feedback of control and response. We have made little details like your character also looking back when the player uses the rear-view camera, which I think is a nice touch that gives players a sense of connection with their actions to their chosen pilot, but adding anything too large or characterful while also navigating the track hazards, battling with rivals, and triggering abilities can cause a distraction and detract from game feel. As with all things, we have ideas, we prototype them, and we follow the fun. Those that add to the experience remain in the game.

What kinds of references did the team use when developing animation for Star Wars racing: film footage, previous Star Wars games, real-world motorsport, stunt footage, aviation, hovercraft, Burnout-style crashes, or original internal tests?

Andy Miller: A typical character's animation set would start with a reference sheet – who is that character, what are their traits, are they angry, happy, fidgety, stoic, etc. We'd work with the narrative team to define anything from their background that may influence how they move and hold themselves. Maybe they were once an assassin like Sen, or a trust fund kid like Kestar, or in Biddy's case, a former model. We'd then gather photo and video references, identifying similar archetypes or species from the existing Star Wars galaxy we can use as inspiration that feels correct for that universe or going broader to real world inspiration.

The political drama of motorsport paddocks from shows like Drive to Survive was incredibly useful for fleshing out our dramatic archetypes, while animal documentaries were useful for some more raw characteristics and anatomical inspiration. We can use as inspiration what feels correct for that universe or go broader to real-world inspiration. The political drama of motorsport paddocks from shows like Drive to Survive was incredibly useful for fleshing out our dramatic archetypes, while animal documentaries were useful for some more raw characteristics and anatomical inspiration. We can use as inspiration what feels correct for that universe or go broader to real-world inspiration. The political drama of motorsport paddocks from shows like Drive to Survive was incredibly useful for fleshing out our dramatic archetypes, while animal documentaries were useful for some more raw characteristics and anatomical inspiration.

Staying true to Star Wars authenticity, we have a variety of animation pipelines depending on the character and how we'd expect them to be portrayed in other mediums such as film or TV. For instance, for humanoid characters that are likely to be played by actors with practical makeup, we take a performance capture approach. Many of the characters in our game are played by talented members of the development team, auditioned to match the varied personalities of our game cast and captured in the office using Xsens mocap suits, giving us great flexibility and iteration during production. Less humanoid characters such as Hibi, our 4-armed mechanic, or the racing legend Sebulba required a more traditional key-framed animation approach where we can push their physicality further, using direct reference from his animated performance in Episode I.

Andy Miller: Then for our exotic vendors Ori and Per, we took inspiration from the puppeteering approach seen in Solo, where the Danzikan species had their first on-screen appearance. Prototyping the base of their performance with motion controllers and reference from sock puppets gave that base authenticity for our animators to refine. Regardless of approach, all of our animations went through an iteration and polish phase. Our talented partners at Rekindled Studios developed rigs that provided animators with consistent functionality, but with the ability to support the unique cast and the varied anatomies. They also supported with export tools that ensured there was a fast and efficient turnaround between working on an animation in Maya, then within seconds having it running in the engine. We always aim to get our content into the game as early as possible, test it in context, review with a priority of player experience, refine, and review again. The faster and more often we can repeat that iteration loop, the better the game experience becomes.

Where applicable, we will enter a previs or prototyping stage where we can test ideas early and fail fast. Crashing is a good example of previs you want early to align on a vision, as it involves so many crafts. This can help focus efforts from camera and VFX to audio and UI. We often start with ripomatics, using existing footage from motorsports, films, or even our previous games like Burnout to set the tone and parameters of what we'd like to discover through previs.

Then during previs, we can experiment quickly with simulated wrecks, animating chunks and using simple geometries or stock FX to illustrate debris, animating cameras that follow the action, and creating edits that add more drama. But an animated crash locks you into one version; the magic happens when the other crafts take that vision, turn it into dynamic systems, and through their own iteration turn all the dials up to 11 and find even more fun, which turns into the cinematic spectacle we have delivered for Star Wars: Galactic Racer, where crashing is the reward for pushing as hard as you can. Even seemingly simple interactions such as "how does the player interact with a shop" benefit from a quick previs mockup to align on lots of systems like: do we walk up to a breadcrumbed NPC shopkeeper, or is it an interactable screen, will the UI be diegetic or in menu space? Previs and rapid prototyping can provide answers quickly, while also being discardable stepping stones to much better ideas and systems.

What software, engine tools, mocap/keyframe workflows, simulation systems, or custom animation tools were used on Galactic Racer, and were there any animation-specific challenges that came from building such a fast game?

Andy Miller: We are primarily using off-the-shelf software with some in-house tools to make production more efficient. Maya is our primary animation package, allowing us to create custom rigs easily via the mGear rigging framework. We use Xsens suits for motion capture in-house, where we have several of our talented development team stretch their thespian muscles and embody many of our paddock personnel. MotionBuilder is also used for processing those initial motion capture solves, as it handles multiple takes and large data sets extremely well before sending edited data to Maya for polish. For facial animation, we are using Metahuman rigs as a base technology that our talented partners at Rekindled have managed to extend to our alien species as well. This allows us to use several methods of content creation, including Live Link recordings of our own faces via mobile devices. For the paddock, we have several thousand spoken lines that also required some flexibility and iteration late in the production. With Metahuman rigs, we were able to use Speech Graphics software to quickly process audio to face animation, setting physical and emotional parameters per character to give them all a believable performance with short turnaround. Our talented Technical Artists created export tools that allowed us to quickly apply and export animations through Maya into Unreal, giving us the ability to update full motion sets or hundreds of lines of dialogue in a few minutes.

Andy Miller: In Unreal, our systems were all designed bespoke to our game requirements. Supporting a varied cast interacting with a large variety of vehicles required close collaboration with our vehicle, physics, and technical art teams. Creating systems that were driven by the physicality of the vehicles and responded to player input, while supporting bespoke animations per character and making sure any parts like hands and feet are attached when they should be, using IK, Sockets, and Animation Curves. The sheer speed and distance traveled per millisecond of our vehicles did present some problems to solve for when attachment points are updated, ensuring the animated pilot could keep up with the physics simulation of the vehicle. Thankfully, people smarter than me were able to figure that out.

But the biggest challenges in our animation space were an ambitious scope and a small team. That's where having efficiency in production, a fast iteration-to-review process, and a focus on what matters most to player experience were essential to our success.

Andy Miller, Animation Director at Fuse Games for Star Wars: Galactic Racer