How to "organise" animation sequences?

deolol

Hi there, I'm wondering what is the most used or most effective way to organise animation sequences. for example idle, walk, runs etc. for use in a game engine or to "copy and paste". I havnt had the opportunity to do it yet and when I consoted my tutor he said animation layers are really bad and troublesome.

Do you really just do them one after another in one single animation?

How do you get those cycles in a game engine such as unity?

Thanks.

Froyok

There is multiple technique to make animation (at least in maya).

One is to use character set, making your animation with it and then save all your keys as a clip (see the trax editor). These clip can be exported and imported in maya. Personally I hate character sets, so I don't use them.

Some other do a bunch of animation inside the same maya scene, but I think it's hard to track them in the end. Having one scene per animation is easier to save and share it later. My own way is to make my rig in a scene, and then make a new scene per animation with my rig referenced. This way I can update my rig without destroying the animations.

deolol

Is that a normal technique? To save multple files out with animations? Thanks for the input anyway, i thought there was a more normalised technique

What about importing animations to a game engine though? Would you have to import all the models in ?

Froyok

deolol wrote: »

Is that a normal technique? To save multple files out with animations? Thanks for the input anyway, i thought there was a more normalised technique

What is normal ? What is not ? To be or not to be ?

Well, I can't tell you if what I said is the average method for animators, I'm not an animator myself, but at least it's the most practical method : easy to manage, easy to share.

Imagine two animators working on the same character, if the all the animations where in the same file, it would be hard to merge the new animations.

deolol wrote: »

What about importing animations to a game engine though? Would you have to import all the models in ?

What do you mean by all the models ?

For a game engine, most of the time you need to import firstly the character with its skeleton, and then its animations. For UDK for example, you have mostly one FBX file for the character, and then multiple FBX for the animations themselves.

Pola

During a game production where I studied one team shared a skeleton/rig with several models, animations were done in separate files I think with character sets to merge into one using the trax editor for export, each additional character also had animation layer on top of the first characters animation as well to save time.

Being that it was a student game production I'm not sure if that is a good way to go about it, it allowed for multiple people to work on animating along with going back making iterations quickly and exporting animations again for the game engine. Would love to know what actual animation workflows are like in the industry.

lancemaker

i work with maya and unity. I make all sequences in the same scene on maya. Then i write it down in a notepad file and send it to the programmers. If they dont want to bother i make all connections(namings and clips) inside unity myself.