Rapid Animation for games - Is it possible

Judgement45

Hello Polycount community, 

I'm hoping someone with MAYA animation skills could help me find the resources I'm looking for. 

I am not a character animator and have zero experience in this. However, I'm hoping to find some resources that can show me a quick and dirty method of animating for rapid game prototyping. Every tutorial I've found so far is a rather lengthy series of videos that frankly haven't just shown me a quick simple method of rigging and animating. I know there is a very high level of skill to proper animation and many different components and best practices, but I am more looking for just a proof of concept type prototype. I also do not want to just go and purchase pre-done animations/characters because I do want to understand the basics of what I'm doing.  

Basically, if I were to have a day, maybe two, to animate a simple character (think minecraft geo) with a walk, run, crouch, and jump cycle how could I get this done if at all? 

What are the macro steps to having a complete character with animations into an engine like Unity or Unreal? 

It may be the difficult thing for me is to understand what the end to end process is. Any help or guidance is much appreciated

Thank you in advance. 

rollin

I just give you the basics starting from Blender but you will probably still need to watch some videos

You start with your model
You build a meta rig with symmetry editing enabled (if applicable) 
You build a rig of it automatically e.g. with Riggify (@ blender)
You skin your model to the rig
You build some animation sequences by moving and keying the helper objects of the rig
You export your model with the unanimated rig
You export the animations separately or in one file 
You setup the animations from the imported file(s) in your Engine   
You build some kind of animation-driving-system like mecanim in unity
You are done

I guess every step would require at least one video to watch / tutorial to read. But some probably even more as I really rushed through it here

oglu

Take a look at Mixamo.
We used those anims as base for our latest game Marz Rising. 

Alex_J

Judgement45 said:

.....(think minecraft geo) ....

For a character like that, is rigging even necessary? You would just be moving some rectangles back and forth, no?

Judgement45

@rollin thank you for the quick replay and summary of steps. 

@oglu I appreciate the resource. That looks like it may work for rapid prototyping. 

Mark Dygert

Almost every animation can be broken down into a series of key poses and you can use that handful of poses to rough in a lot of things.

So for example, a walk cycle can be as few as 2 poses (left contact / right contact) but typically lands somewhere around 4 (left contact, right passing, right contact, right passing) or 8.

 


Keep in mind that half of the walk cycle is a mirror flip of the first half. 

With poses in mind you can quickly get through a lot of animations with not much work. In general poses are a great way to get the animation roughed in and blocked out. It helps you get the timing right so you can also rough in animation systems. You do just enough poses to get things functional but you don't spend your time polishing curves, doing overlap or offsetting keys. It will look fairly robotic as it tweens between each pose but that's the point.

Figuring out what poses make an animation work can take some getting used to, but the more you do it the easier it is.

Some kind of pose library manager really helps. I really like https://www.studiolibrary.com/ for Maya.
It also handles mirroring poses and animations.