Getting into game animation... what path to follow?
Hello everybody!
I'm new here and is there a better way than starting "What software should I use" thread to introduce myself?! :poly114:
Actually, this isn't really the beginner's thread as I'm 33 and previously experienced in 3d. What I'm new to is 3D animation for games in particular. I have some experience with 2D/traditional animation.
About a decade ago I was quite active in 3D archviz, modeling and rendering almost exclusively. Using Lightwave and Max (Viz actually, while it was still around). During the last 5-6 years archviz scene kind of disappeared and so did my involvement with professional/freelance 3D.
In the meantime I got into game-development, worked as game designer/producer and got some insight into game dev scene (which I love, mad I know).
Then I became a dad, and my 2yo got heavily into cartoons (might be slightly influenced by her dad). For the past year or so I've been watching Disney, Pixar stuff DAILY - now how awesome is that for "reference material study"!8)
I could probably dance away all Mike Wazowski moves right now if someone is interested. No?
Finally, I came to the conclusion that some kind of synthesis-of-skills is in order and that I shall pursue the hobby of animation for games.My goal is to eventually do freelance work in game character (or prop) rigging and animation.
Stricltly that. No modeling, texturing, just specialized rigging & animation of low/mid-poly assets. Is there a freelance market for that stuff?
I've done some analysis on software I might need. I already got Lightwave, but it's animation and export capabilities are kind of limited. IMHO, Blender is more appealing than LW for animation right now.
Then there is the dynamic duo: Max & Maya.
I did archviz rendering in Max previously (last was ver.6 I believe) and tried Maya at home.
TBH, I'm not particularry fond of either package. Max (to me) has very cumbersome GUI and workflow and Maya, while it's gui and workflow are amazing IMO, has certain layer of "perceived complexity" over everything. Don't know how should I explain that, but stuff that in Lightwave takes 3 mouse clicks to complete, in Maya seems to take 13 mouse clicks and three wipes of object history... And Maya's modeling was horribly and unbelievably unstable last time I tried it. I actually couldn't believe that LW's decade old modeler worked better than Maya2012 for polygonal modeling.
But everywhere I look it's always Maya for rigging and animation. There are sh#*load of tutorial materials for Maya. Both books and video. There are online animation schools for Maya...
Max seems kind of limited in rigging/animation department, tutorial wise that is.
And online tutorials are all that I can use, since I can't really go to school or be an intern right now.
Is it feasible for a individual to do part time study of rigging and animation in Maya or Max? I'm asking from a technical standpoint, I'm aware of the complexities of animation in general, this is just software-wise.
I'm new here and is there a better way than starting "What software should I use" thread to introduce myself?! :poly114:
Actually, this isn't really the beginner's thread as I'm 33 and previously experienced in 3d. What I'm new to is 3D animation for games in particular. I have some experience with 2D/traditional animation.
About a decade ago I was quite active in 3D archviz, modeling and rendering almost exclusively. Using Lightwave and Max (Viz actually, while it was still around). During the last 5-6 years archviz scene kind of disappeared and so did my involvement with professional/freelance 3D.
In the meantime I got into game-development, worked as game designer/producer and got some insight into game dev scene (which I love, mad I know).
Then I became a dad, and my 2yo got heavily into cartoons (might be slightly influenced by her dad). For the past year or so I've been watching Disney, Pixar stuff DAILY - now how awesome is that for "reference material study"!8)
I could probably dance away all Mike Wazowski moves right now if someone is interested. No?
Finally, I came to the conclusion that some kind of synthesis-of-skills is in order and that I shall pursue the hobby of animation for games.My goal is to eventually do freelance work in game character (or prop) rigging and animation.
Stricltly that. No modeling, texturing, just specialized rigging & animation of low/mid-poly assets. Is there a freelance market for that stuff?
I've done some analysis on software I might need. I already got Lightwave, but it's animation and export capabilities are kind of limited. IMHO, Blender is more appealing than LW for animation right now.
Then there is the dynamic duo: Max & Maya.
I did archviz rendering in Max previously (last was ver.6 I believe) and tried Maya at home.
TBH, I'm not particularry fond of either package. Max (to me) has very cumbersome GUI and workflow and Maya, while it's gui and workflow are amazing IMO, has certain layer of "perceived complexity" over everything. Don't know how should I explain that, but stuff that in Lightwave takes 3 mouse clicks to complete, in Maya seems to take 13 mouse clicks and three wipes of object history... And Maya's modeling was horribly and unbelievably unstable last time I tried it. I actually couldn't believe that LW's decade old modeler worked better than Maya2012 for polygonal modeling.
But everywhere I look it's always Maya for rigging and animation. There are sh#*load of tutorial materials for Maya. Both books and video. There are online animation schools for Maya...
Max seems kind of limited in rigging/animation department, tutorial wise that is.
And online tutorials are all that I can use, since I can't really go to school or be an intern right now.
Is it feasible for a individual to do part time study of rigging and animation in Maya or Max? I'm asking from a technical standpoint, I'm aware of the complexities of animation in general, this is just software-wise.
Replies
I forgot to mention, I'm also an architect by trade. All the ArchViz scene is rather region specific and basically in the last several years, at least in my part of the world it has become I-will-pay-you-peanuts-and-need-it-done-till-yesterday situation. Not a healthy work environment... but enough of that.
Thanks for your overview of learning sites. Animation Mentor/iAnimate are kind of far-away goals. I would like to dig into the matter first to see if it will stick, as you said.
Regarding Digital Tutors, I've watched a few of their animation tuts and it's exactly what I (think I) need but they seem rather restrictive when it comes to downloading the videos. Learning material is essential to me, and it's even more essential to have tutorials/books available for offline viewing on iPad etc. When you're parent to the little ones, bathroom and kitchen are much better learning environments than the living room computer.
Do they have the option for subscribers to download stuff?
I've checked out Gnomon (they have digital download option) and a friend let me have his old Gnomon Intro to Maya DVD's. I guess they're from 2003/04 era. It's still Alias Wavefront there. Would those be useful for starting out with maya today or has the workflow changed a lot since then?
Other site I found is CGcookie/BlenderCookie. Athough mostly Blender related, their material seems to be exactly what I'm looking for and it's totally download friendly.
TBH, if I had to decide right now, based on what I know, I would probably go down the Blender/CGcookie route as it seems like contained, rounded and cheap! solution. But I'm afraid that down the road there will be walls to hit (there are always walls!) and I'll regret it then.
Honestly, I would go for Maya. Most major studios in the game industry use both max and maya. Max for modelling, maya for animation. The ones that only use max, from my understanding, they dont care if you dont know max, as long as you can animate. If you can prove you can animate, they dont mind training you on their software. It wont take long and skill transfers over.
Maya is hands down better for animation.
My suggestion to you.... enroll for iAnimate. Seriously. I'm in the games course right now. I work full time, and spend probably 5-10 hours a week doing it. I do have experience before hand, so I am probably quicker than others that go through the course, but I am able to pay for it as I go, through my biweekly pay cheques, rather than saving up to do it.
Even though I went through traditional college for 3 years, focusing on game animation, and have been working in the industry for 1.5 years at a small studio, I have learned so F'ing much in the past 10 weeks, it's rediculous. All the instructors are people who are currently working in the industry. Animation mentor is not only more expensive than iA, it's also all recorded, rather than live crits, so you cant ask questions at AM and really figure out what your instructor is talking about. Plus, iA actually has a game animation focused class, rather than focusing on film (which they also have).
If you don't have experience with 3d animation, they`ll ask you to do their basic course first, which is a lot of ball bounces and what not. But don't be fooled. That course is 100% needed, and will teach you the all that you need to succeed.
Also, at iA, you get a free copy of Maya for 13 months....
Honestly though, if you are serious about getting into game animation, stay away from blender and stay away from Lightwave. You may not like max or maya, but the industry doesnt care what you like and what you don't like. They use Max and Maya. Period. Why waste your time with another program when you could spend the time learning the programs they will use in the industry? You can get a free trial, then you can either buy it, go to iA and get it for free, or find another way to get it online.
Also, I dunno what you're talking about with the whole 12 mouse clicks and delete history 3 times for Maya. You can model some amazing things in Maya. Yes, its more difficult than Max, since max has some pretty cool tools, but you don't want it for modelling, remember? You want it for animation. You can't get easier for animation. You move the control where you want it and press "s". Or, you turn on auto key and just move the control. No pressing anything else.
TLDR: Suck it up and get Maya.
They are both roughly equal on most of the major things with a lot of overlap there are some subtle differences where people who model tend to like Max and people who animate tend to like Maya. Most of the time people fall in love with what they first use and stick to it hardly questioning its workflow and methodology... which can be a real drag on a persons speed.
I've used Maya off and on over the years and for the past 4 years I've been animating and modeling in Max, it's what we use at work so everyone uses it, our games are heavy on modeling and light on actual kinetic motion, there is a lot of character dialog so Max for animation works pretty well.
Some history on Max:
For the past few releases Max has been working on their modeling tools and realtime viewport driver which is great if you work on materials and like realtime lighting. But for animation you normally don't give a crap about that fluff and the max viewport has ground to a hault when you scrub the bar, especially with the curve editor open... which is an animators right arm...
Max does have a very easy to learn UI that doesn't require much customization to use effectively. Maya gets to the same level once you customize it and often that means buying paid-for scripts just to raise it to the level of Max (for modeling and rigging). All of the tutorials you need to start are included in Max and the help files are actually extremely helpful, so its very beginner friendly. With Maya you get used to it and deal with it and eventually figure out a way to customize it.
Max also has a few great rigs that come fully assembled, very little technical knowledge required to get a character moving. Biped and CAT are crazy easy to work with and you can practice animation with the rigs themselves, so that removes a giant headache from a new animators life and allows them to focus on the important aspects of animation. It allows you to ease into the technical side of things rather than have to learn two diametrically opposed disciplines at the same time.
Maya kind of lags behind in this respect, you have to do all of the rigging yourself or troll around for free rigs, which are normally easy to break and often don't suit your needs perfectly. You end up having to learn the technical side and do your own rigs to get what you really want. Also a lot of the free rigs are geared toward feature films and not necessarily games.
In Maya studios its pretty common that an animator will have to do the rigging also, the same is true for most Max studios but the advantage is that you can use very trusty, tried and true rigs that are built with a "click/drag". If you build it, you have to fix it when it breaks... In max they rarely break because they have been tested and relied upon for years.
Maya has some great features and they've come a long way on the animation front, mostly by not lagging the viewport like a mother fucker when you have the curve editor open. They added quaternion skinning which is only available in max with a paid-for script but its built into Maya now which is great, it mostly gets used in film but will make its way over to the next generation of hardware provided microsoft and sony don't go bankrupt or take giant leaps backwards, (quat skinning helps with the reduction of the candy wrapper effect).
Maya now has HumanIK which has a lot of potential, it works just like motion builder with the rig building and animation re-targeting. It's a little buggy but if they keep working on it, it will be a great tool, especially for studios doing mo-cap. I prefer motion builder/HumanIK to biped but its a very close race and the bugs in HIK can easily make it a deal breaker over the stability in biped.
So far two studios Naughty Dog and Epic have managed to get biped like features working inside of Maya which is great but it took a full time technical artists to achieve that... and not every animator has that kind of knowledge or access to those rigs.
Max's rigs handle mo-cap prefectly and have done so for years, a lot of the HIK features bring those features to Maya. Most of the time if you're working with mo-cap, in games, it would have been Max/biped or Motion Builder and now that Maya has the HIK option people will probably start using it more and more, but it is still pretty easy to lean on biped for most things and with the addition of CAT you can do a lot of non-bipedal rigs pretty easily.
A word of caution about the two camps...
Most of the Maya guys will rave about Maya and run down Max, but they haven't really touched Max and they run it down because they really don't want to take the time to learn it, even though learning it would really help out their Maya experience. Most that do use max for an extended period of time, end up liking Max and miss a lot of its features when they go back to Maya, but you never forget your first love.
So... Maya, decent viewport speed, pretty much everything you need for animation except for the rigs which you have to build from scratch...
So... Max, out of the box easy to learn with built in rigs and great modeling tools, craptastic viewport speed for animation. If they ever sort out the viewport speed I can stop beating my monitor with my keyboard.
Is this in the wiki. This is probably the best thing I've seen in the Max vs. Maya discussion.
I've started with Max, and I'm now working with Maya. A lot of this is pretty on point (I get lost in Maya sometimes...)
I started using maya and the curve editor and what not makes a lot of sense. It's very easy to just copy/paste keys and the flow of everything is great. However, max's biped has it's benefits. The import/export of animation and what not is very easy in biped and you can use layers for your animations which is pretty awesome.
I haven't used maya in a while and I'm not sure how well the import/export works and if there is a similar layer technique but last time I worked with maya that part was a bit messy. There are some very annoying disadvantages to max's biped and those are the keyframes. You can't just delete a key-frame in X or Y (or was it X and Z) direction without it automatically deleting the other as well. There is also the whole free key, planted key, sticky key thing which is just different and weird according to all other animation programs.
These are my experiences though and in case I'm wrong you can feel free to tell me. If you feel that both of these two programs are a hassle, you can always go for motion builder.
The only thing that is weird about them is the naming otherwise they behave just like every other IK system out there, albeit in a much more streamlined fashion that reduces rig clutter. So far I have seen two Maya studios (Naughty Dog and Epic...) recreate this functionality and it took two amazingly talented tech artists to pull it off.
Traditional rigs like what you find in Maya, will have 2-3 separate systems:
- FK Forward Kinematics, for joint rotation.
- IK Inverse Kinematics, for sticking the hands to things or planting them in world space.
- Skinning bones, that blend between the two systems. Most of the time FK are the skinning bones but not always, it depends on who put your rig together.
Biped has all three of these systems built into the same pieces.
You can position an arm by garbing the arm and moving it, or you can rotate the same joints, all without having to snap or blend separate systems. The snapping and blending is sometimes so convoluted that animators will stick to one or the other and not use them together like you can on biped.
Planted keys
These are used like IK and come in two forms.
- Regular planted key, which sticks that particular joint into world space.
- IK targeted key, you can set a target and have it stick to that, like the handle bars on a bike.
Sliding keys
These are typically used when working with the feet. It allows the the joint to move while maintaining it's independence from the Center of Mass. It enables the foot to slide along the Y plane while the COM moves up and down, it keeps the feet grounded and keeps them from coming off of the ground or poking through it.
Free keys
These are used when you want to unstick, unplant or 'free' the hand or foot.
Note: Planted keys can help you get things in the right places even if you don't plan on using planted keys in the final animation.
For example if you wanted to make a character sit...
With Biped you turn on planted keys on the feet, and lower the COM into the right spot. Pretty much just like a person sitting down.
With FK, you rotate each of the leg joints through several operations, then put the whole rig in the right spot, sometimes adjusting the rotations as needed to finally get the feet in the right place. The final pose is the same it just took more work to get it done.
With IK/FK blending, you do the same thing as biped only you have to snap your IK to your FK then turn on IK. If you want to rotate you often have to snap your FK back to your IK and blend back to FK so you can rotate. All of this snapping and blending drives people nuts, and you just don't have to deal with it on biped.
This was made by just moving the COM forward, setting a planted key pivot in the heel, then moving it to the toe, next a sliding key would allow it to maintain its up/down position while it slides back (if this was an in-place walk cycle).
If you like motion builder, you will love humanIK, its Motion Builder stuffed into Maya.