Animation workflow
polycounter lvl 4
I'm currently working on a game that requires multiple walk cycles and
combat animations to be made. And although I do technically know how to
animate and export everything I need I want to ask a couple of questions
before I end up in a deadend.
I'm using 3DSMax with a custom rig that does exactly what I want it to do, but till now I only needed to export test animations. One or two per character max. Now that I need way more I was wondering how animators organize their animations. Because I can only put my clips in the timeline sequentially, remember what range they are in and mark these ranges in (in my case) unity.
But what If I realize I need to add 10 frames to an old animation, but theres not enough buffer between takes? Do I really need to move my whole timeline and reevaluate my timings in engine? Does it really come down to good planning? I've seen that 3ds max CAT can use layers. But Im not using CAT. Should I?
You get my confusion I guess. Everything else about game developing instantly hints at ways how you can optimize it. But animation managment looks really counterintuitive to me. Maybe Im missing something.
Tutorials online only show you how to move keyframes. I need to know what to do If I want to add a new slash animation into an array of 20 attack anims and I dont want to put it at the end of the timeline because how the hell do I keep track of this.
Also thought about instancing my character and keeping an instance per anim category. One for walks, one for attacks etc. There has to be an established way though
Happy about ANY input
I'm using 3DSMax with a custom rig that does exactly what I want it to do, but till now I only needed to export test animations. One or two per character max. Now that I need way more I was wondering how animators organize their animations. Because I can only put my clips in the timeline sequentially, remember what range they are in and mark these ranges in (in my case) unity.
But what If I realize I need to add 10 frames to an old animation, but theres not enough buffer between takes? Do I really need to move my whole timeline and reevaluate my timings in engine? Does it really come down to good planning? I've seen that 3ds max CAT can use layers. But Im not using CAT. Should I?
You get my confusion I guess. Everything else about game developing instantly hints at ways how you can optimize it. But animation managment looks really counterintuitive to me. Maybe Im missing something.
Tutorials online only show you how to move keyframes. I need to know what to do If I want to add a new slash animation into an array of 20 attack anims and I dont want to put it at the end of the timeline because how the hell do I keep track of this.
Also thought about instancing my character and keeping an instance per anim category. One for walks, one for attacks etc. There has to be an established way though
Happy about ANY input
Replies
With 30 or 40 cycles on the same timeline it can become quite hard to manage. Have you considered just saving out a separate file for each anim? Then you can just iterate and not have to worry about managing the frame numbers start/end, the first/last dupe frame, or fixing the out-of-range curves at the first/last frame of each cycle, at least not all in the same timeline.
I usually create a simple UI that displays a list of whatever animation files are in a particular folder, click the file and it loads the animation. I suggest learning some maxscript it will really help you as you animate. You can get some great workflows going and really speed up a lot of tasks.
This is a huge help! Thanks for the hint. I just need to establish a proper workflow with this because it looks easy to mess up. Obviously I need to select ALL bones of the skelton before I hit load. Maxscript will certainly come in handy here.
Thanks again guys, I can move on from here