Animating 2 characters together?

Fordy

Hi All

If I am animating, say a fight scene between 2 characters, would it be best to roughly animate the first character from start to finish and then add and animate the second one

I mean you wouldn't attempt to do them both together would you?

MoP

Umm... personally I'd think you'd *have* to do both together... otherwise you don't know how one is reacting to the other?

This sort of thing would probably benefit from a little storyboarding and planning - draw out a few really "key" frames, set pieces you want to build the rest of the fight around.

Then what I'd do is place both the characters in their poses at that point in time, and move to the next point, set their poses there... then after a few main sets of that, you will have your entire animation time "blocked out", as it were. Then you can go in and add more keyframes between these main ones to refine the movement.

I don't see what the sense would be (in a fight scene anyway) of having one person grappling with invisible air, then import the other character only to find that it doesn't fit, or looks silly.

Work on both at the same time, step by step - start out rough, then refine. I think that's the best method.

Fordy

Hi Mop

Storyboarding was what I was thinking for this. I can get the rough sequence down for the first character, then, again only roughly add the second character in and animate it to react to the first character.

Finally go through and refine it as you suggested.


Cheers bud!

thomasp

anyone seen animation books/tutorials that cover these kinds of interactions? and also, how do they handle it in film where there's the whole animator-per-shot vs. animator-per-character issue where you don't want to have animators switch "personalities" - like in ff:spirits within where animators were assigned to specific characters?

i own a few animation books and i've never seen a recipe for handling this, not even in disney's "illusion of life" where they show a lot of footage from such interactions.

e_x

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i own a few animation books and i've never seen a recipe for handling this, not even in disney's "illusion of life" where they show a lot of footage from such interactions.

[/ QUOTE ]

They talk a little bit about it in "Illusion of Life". If I remember correctly, they started by having one animator do one character and then hand it off to another animator to do the other character. They found that this didn't work very well and from then on they let one animator do both characters since one person can have a better feel for the entire scene.

I would definately animate both characters at the same time. My suggestion would be to do some very rough "pop-throughs" of the action to get your timing down. Monster's Age of Empire's 3 has a very good example to follow. Download his Interlude 2 Story Reel - WMV link and check it out.

aesir

The key is storyboarding the motions, the scene, the camera angles etc. Then going in with your 3d program and posing out the characters. Then go back and work on the inbetweens.

Fordy

Thanks for those links. I noticed in one of the videos, he was just using bipeds for the storyboard...is it possible to do the animation first and then add meshes over the bipeds or has he saved the animation for each biped and loaded it into a fully rigger character mesh and Biped (im not explaining this very well)?

I mean, he hasnt done the animations twice has he?

e_x

You could work everything out with bipeds, then save the .bip files and then load those onto your fully rigged characters no problem.

MoP

For a fight scene, I'd wanna use a proxy mesh instead of just the bipeds (unless your actual meshes run perfectly fine in the viewport - ie. game-res models), just so i could know how wide the limbs are and such, so that grabbing and wrestling wouldn't clip weirdly or otherwise look odd.

Fordy

Thanks everyone for the replies, I know where im going now!

Downsizer

I use floating event points along a time line (just colored cubes for reference), and animate one character at a time. Typically the action character can be seperated from the reaction character in a fight scene. The action character is almost always going to have forward confidant motions so there really are'nt any forces altering his movement other than impacts.

So 2 cubes in 3d space, red for first punch impact, blue for secondary kick. Action character animates first attacking the red block, then attacking the blue block. This is just to sketch the motion and environment coverage the character will take. Some people like to use a 2nd biped, but I find that distracting and resource hogging on some machines.

For obstacles i use proximity cube meshes etc. So I can focus on making one characters movement as fluid and detailed as possible without having to catch the other up. I'm done..

Fordy

Thats certainly a differnt way of doing it, something to look into.

While im here I forgot to ask, can you link bones into the Skin modifier like you can with Physique, you know for say a cape for instance?