Tutorials for Animating in Games?

keres

Hi guys,

I'm quite fluent with both 3ds Max and Maya. I can animate stuff around a timeline; it's easy enough to set key frames. However, one thing I cannot figure out or find any kind of documentation on whatsoever is how someone can skin/rig/animate a character for use in a game.
This is very annoying for me, because it's one of the only puzzle pieces of the game development process that has eluded me for a very long time.

Would someone mind posting a link to a confirmed amazing tutorial on how to do this? What I'm looking to learn is how you can take a mesh (of a character, or whatever) that has just been modeled and textured, and turn it into the final product.

Note: Epic has their human skeletons in .max files for animating characters. This crashes the program when I try to open it, and I'm wanting to learn how to make such a thing from scratch.

Thanks a ton, guys. Happy new year to all of you!

SpeCter

It depends on the engine how animations are handled.
Some can use skinning some morphing some both.
Normally you can define in the exporter which keyframes belong to which animation, like 0-30 = Idle,31-61 = Walk etc.
And you have to look for things like how many bones can influence one vert. I think in most engines it is 4 bones per vertex.

One thing to look at would be the tutorials inside of Max.They give you the basics of rigging and stuff.

keres

I was thinking that you specify the range of keyframes for the animation, but didn't know for sure. Maya has that "trax" thing, and I didn't know if anyone used this.

Thanks for the reply. I'll see if I can get these help docs to tell me anything

Eric Chadwick

I added a couple links for the Unreal rigging tech here, might help...
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryAnimation#Rigging