Average number of animation frames in modern characters?

Lord McMutton

I ask because the main character for my current project has about 1300 frames thus far, and Messiah (The animation software (Which kinda sucks)) is crashing all the time because of the number of frames. Is this more than the usual amount these days?

winternights

do you mean movie character? for 1300F it is around 54 sec, this is sound to me for short movie I dont know... , but for game animation character it has usually looping type of animation. I had to do some loops animation for a real time movie, so average frames I had up to 100 frames per character. Hope this helps.

cheers

thatanimator

do you mean that when you place all the animations after each other in the timeline, you get 1300 frames? and that you have to do this because the game engine that you're using prefers all the animations in one file rather than several short animation files?

would that be the reason why you're saying frames rather than amount of animations?

I have no idea what a average number of frames would be for a modern character..
and to be honest, can't really give you a correct number from any recent game..
the only one I can think of of the top of my ass is the old Prince of Persia Sands of Time, which was boasting with around 5 or 700 animations for the prince. that is fairly small potato now days though I believe.. but then again, thats counting the amount of animations and not the total length of all of them put together..

don't see why you would count like that really..

but Im gonna go ahead and - without anything to back this up, and just pulling an answer right out of the sky, say that 1300 frames is probably a fairly tiny number and would probably just barely cover your basic navigation animations, walk/run/jog-starts and stops, turnstarts, loops, turns..whatever.. it would probably add up to around 2-ish thousands if you'd do it the way I'm imagining it atm...... again, I have nothing to back this up with rly :P

Shadownami92

Sounds like he might be using it all on the same timeline and having the exporter used to divide up the timeline into the specified frames for specific actions. Overall I wouldn't really count the amount of frames per the whole timeline as much as the amount of frames per seperate animation.

And for that I would say just animate between 30-60 frames per second. Just keep the rate the same for all of your animations.

If it's freezing up I would suggest trying to find another way to import the different animations for the same model if possible.

Ace-Angel

Split up animations at key movement are better idea if your software keeps on crashing and games in general.

Mark Dygert

1300 frames doesn't sound like a lot to me. At 30fps that's roughly what 40-45 seconds? I guess if its a bunch of 30-60 frame cycles it might seem like a lot but I deal with animating 2000+ frames in 3dsmax timeline and the characters are often in some semi-dense scenes. I haven't used Messiah before so I'm not really sure what it can handle...

Is it that the model and rig are pretty heavy on the scene too? Maybe lightening the visual load would help? Have you thought about using an optimized stand in version of your mesh. I've seen people create hard bound mesh proxy objects that don't have complex skin weighting but still visually represent the model accurately enough.

Also a lot of apps have trouble scrubbing through a lot of frames quickly, does it crash when you have all 1300 frames visible in the timeline? You might need to display smaller chunks so it doesn't have to process so much when you move the time slider. I have to do that when I work on 50,000+ frame scenes. I wrote a maxscript that helps navigate the timeline based on the sound files loaded into max. I don't know if something similar for Messiah exists or if you could do something similar?

monster

Yeah, in Max I've worked on files with over 3500+ frames of animations. But I recommend splitting the animation into separate files.

Mark Dygert

Also can you animate in something else? Maybe MotionBuilder? Maybe import the animations into Messiah and export from there if you really have to?

gsokol

Ive had to do several couple minute-long animation clips before with 10,000 frames or more. I've never really had an issue with this before. Was Mocap animation fed through MotionBuilder.

Even in max I've worked with several thousand frames before and its been fine.

Just curious...are you talking about bone rigged animation? Or vertex/blendshapes type stuff?

Lord McMutton

Since you said the amount of frames shouldn't be the issue, I took a look at the large sum of object that make up the character. And then I realized that I could just combine them all and it'd be exactly the same.

All of the armour bits are separate objects, so I thought it'd be easier to have them separate so I could just attach them to the proper bones in the rig whilst having the body on multiple ones for deformation and such. But with the way Messiah works, it makes no difference.

That did, in fact, relieve the burden somewhat, although I'm not sure if the crashes will persist since it hasn't been that long. We'll see.

As for the animations themselves, I've got them all on a single timeline, and am splitting them up in Unity, which seems to work just fine. Would having them all as separate files really help anything?

Z!Rk

1300 frames in 1 file should make the editor crash
And on the single/multi file issue; I use both, depending on what type of animations i'm making.
Multi files give me more flexibility when i need to extend the animations.
Single files make it easier for me to make animations blend into others, and for exporting from directly from the tool/editor.

Keep in mind, I mostly work on portable (NDS/PSP stuff, and inengine animation layering is something I cannot use, so I have to do all the blending by myself

Z!Rk

1300 frames in 1 file should make the editor crash
And on the single/multi file issue; I use both, depending on what type of animations i'm making.
Multi files give me more flexibility when i need to extend the animations.
Single files make it easier for me to make animations blend into others, and for exporting from directly from the tool/editor.

Keep in mind, I mostly work on portable (NDS/PSP stuff, and inengine animation layering is something I cannot use, so I have to do all the blending by myself

Valandar

Heck, back when I was modding for Freedom Force (the superhero RPG/RTS), a typical character had more like 3000 - 3500 frames, and that was back in the early/mid 2k's.

Giometric

Marshal Banana wrote: »

As for the animations themselves, I've got them all on a single timeline, and am splitting them up in Unity, which seems to work just fine. Would having them all as separate files really help anything?

Well it might help if your animation software really is struggling on the 1300 frames. But as others have said that isn't likely to be the issue since 1300 really isn't very many at all. Unity does allow you to import the rigged character in one file, and then each animation for that character as separate files, but I think just making optimizations on your rig like you've mentioned you're doing will probably be more helfpul. It'll probably run better in Unity too.