Working with Multiple Animations

Bartalon

I'm conducting some research to help with a personal project. I am interested to know your personal preference when working with animation source files. If you don't directly work with them, feel free to answer for which method your colleague or studio uses.

This next part isn't necessary for my research but I would also be interested in a short explanation of why you do it the way you do it, whether it be personal preference, efficiency reasons, tool integration, you've been doing it that way since forever, etc. Maybe it'll spur some interesting conversation.

Thanks guys!

GlowingPotato

Nice thread.

So, i'am working in a project where the main character will have a lot of guns and wearables (boots, legs, gloves, hats, etc).

Since each gun will have a different animation, like reloading and the way the character holds it, i gonna make every animation in a separated file, and split lower body animations from upper body animations, then we gonna merge the two parts in the game.

So whenever we want to tweak an animation or add a new gun, we just need to open that animation or create a new one from the base character.

monster

Master files work okay if you are working alone. But if you are on a team you need to seperate them so multiple animators can work at once.

If we use Maya we usually reference the master rig. So any rig updates are automatically updated.

GlowingPotato

Hey monster! I would love to learn more about referencing the rig. Do you have any resource that i could look into ?

EDIT: humm i found this -> http://www.3dfiggins.com/writeups/mayaReference/

Bartalon

Lots of votes for split files. Does anyone works like this even when working as the only animator, and why?

Bruno Afonseca

Personally I find it much easier to deal with in separate files, I find it cleaner and easier to work on, no need to be moving animation clips or frames around and whatnot.

I've never tried referencing a rig though. Has anyone tried that in max?

GlowingPotato

So as monster pointed out. Ia'm trying the reference rig thing. And all i can say it is AMAZING! Such a simple thing that helps a lot.

Need to tweak the rig ? No problem, all animations will be working after the edit. Simple as that. And for us that work with animation in separated files. You just need to tweak the rig once in one particular file and done.

monster

@GlowingPotato, that's the same tutorial I followed for referencing rigs. The only issue I had was when exporting to the game engine I had to write a little script to remove the namespace and another that puts it back. (It was a little more automated than that.) Or else the bone names don't match.

@Bruno, There is no referencing in Max for animation. xRefs are lame, and can't be animated. But with Biped's BIPs and saving XAF files it's easy enought to transfer anims. To an updated rig.

@Bartalon, in general it's just easier to work with for characters. If I'm working on a simple object like an unmanned Turret or an animated building, I'll do it all in one file.

Bartalon

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Hopefully I can get some more votes and comments coming in.