Animation advice needed
Community Forums/General Help/Animation advice needed
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| I am currently working on my game, which is being made with blitz3d and I need some advice for making better animations. The animation program that i'm using is Fragmotion and I was wondering if any of you guys know any techniques that would be used to create smoother and more lively animations. Any help at all would be apreciated. thanks. Last edited 2011 Last edited 2011 |
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| Hello. My 2¢: Some people animate their characters very badly but think they're doing a good job; they can't critique their own work, and that's a very important artistic skill needed to achieve production quality - so consider yourself lucky to be noticing that your animation didn't quite reach there yet. It's very hard to do convincing animation because there are many subtleties that are missed when you are animating. It comes down to your sense of motion. If your judgement is out of place, you won't get a good animation - sometimes it's hard to get a good sense of motion on things you don't have a clear understanding, so, one of my recommendations is to record (with a digital camera) the motion you want to see, and then go frame by frame in the video seeing which parts of the object move and how much. This is extremely helpful. Once I had to animate a character swinging a sword so I recorded myself doing it, with the exact same speed and body expression I wanted to achieve. Make sure to be aware of all the animation principles that some professionals at Disney have listed (the longest description of them are usually the best). The good thing about them is that they make you think about how you'll tackle the problems, they make you look analytically at the motion you're trying to convey; this gives you much better results, and sharpens that sense of critique I mentioned above. They are very important. As rare as materials like this can be, seeing experienced people (professionals or not) animate also gives a reference on what you should be doing, because you get to see not only the process but also the result: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL-vucZAiHE As with modelling, you can always learn something by looking at animated meshes from professional games (even while you play). You'll see what you can do in terms of mesh animation, what solutions the animators and programmers chose. I was especially amazed at how expressive the characters from the Kingdom Hearts series were; seeing the game art in a special viewer I could see that all the models used for the cutscenes were much higher poly than the ones for the gameplay. So things like eyebrows, eyelids and mouth had many nuances of expression possible - this of course due to the bigger polygon count. This sort of experience will also make you realize another important aspect of animating for games: sequences. You need to manage and list all the different sequences every character is supposed to have, and at list mark somewhere (even if in your mind) how these sequences relate to eachother. Don't just open the software and start animating - like with the rest of your game, you need a design on your animation, a plan. What are all the sequences you'll need, what are the character's personality traits or handicaps that would influence his moviments (even if none)? what is the sequence you'll be working on now, etc. Last edited 2011 |
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| In general: a) Make clear & strong poses. b) Get timing correct. c) Add character and performance. Repeat until it looks ok. You should use references and many useful things to analyze motion (stopwatch, video references, photo sequences, real life people / animals moving around, etc) Principle of animation is time and space, so play with those. And just for fun, do some bouncing ball excercises. |
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| I would suggest to use motion captured animations. There may be some tools to apply some of the thousands of free MoCap files that can be found online to a character mesh. Even if everybody says "don't", and while it is true that it isn't so easy to apply the Mocap Data to B3D meshes, nothing beats the realism of it. It may be worth to take some time and do the required hacks. At least the code to write animated B3D can be found in the archives. And there are really thousands of free Mocap Data files. https://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/cmu-bvh-conversion This may help to apply animation to meshes: http://www.animeeple.com/store/854c50e6-e891-102b-b2d0-7f16f0736ece Probably Fragmo can do it too. I used to save some hundred files and I will try to use them the sooner or later. Until now I prefered to buy some characters with MoCap animation and then edit them until they fit my needs. (gamecreators.com) This probably won't work for every game. Mocap is however in every modern game and it's extremly hard to get decent animations without Mocap Data. |
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| Since MoCap was mentioned, take a look here: http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/ That library has already been converted to variious formats, including 3DSMax and MotionBuilder: https://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture MotionBuilder itself is also worth a mention - it uses various muscular and physical simulations to create realistic movements, which can be used both to create animations from scratch, or more helpfully for the lazy (yay!) to link various MoCapped animations together in a natural fashion (simple tweening isn't that great). Remember too, if anyone out there is a student, they can get MotionBuilder, 3DSMax, Maya etc. for free: http://students.autodesk.com/ So there's quite a lot of stuff for speeding up the creation process. |
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| Something simple that I'm not sure was mentioned, which can be helpful (I've found) is to 'practice' the motion yourself with your own body. For example, if you've played sport(s) such as baseball, squash, tennis or other games where you hit an object with another object it can be helpful as you can run through the motion yourself, and get the idea of where the legs are positioned, how the hips and waist move and the motion of the upper arms and wrist. Reference images and motion capture are good too, but as said - practice the motions with your own body - it may look a bit odd to anyone watching but is helpful. |
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| You could set up two cameras, and record your movements from the front and side. You'll need to sync the two cameras, so you can compare the side and front poses. Once you do that, open up your animation program and use it to position the parts of your model, similar to your body. Might help more? If your really clever, you could attach colored circles to yourself, and get blitz to read the positions of these, each frame and construct a list of data from that. |
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| That's exactly what I plan to do since decades! Some problems: when you walk, the camera will not move with you, so the angle will change. It's ok for things you do stationary, like shooting or jumping up, but walking and running is a problem. You could film from a greater distance, then the angle won't be such a problem, but the resolution will also be much lower. Not only the angle is a problem, but also the size when you walk towards the second camera (human is getting bigger the closer he gets). If you got one of those electrical walk home trainers that are allowing to walk on a spot, this could be a solution to the problem. Or one of those electrical stairways in shopping malls and airports - tho, maybe looks a bit weird if you record the walk of your zombies there... For the Synchronitation of the two cameras you can use a slowly blinking flashlight that can be seen by both cameras. |
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| BTW here's a resource of some great material, by a man who never really get the reputation and honor he deserves for actually inventing motion pictures: http://masters-of-photography.com/M/muybridge/muybridge2.html http://www.zeno.org/Fotografien/A/Muybridge,+Eadweard Very useful stuff, esp. for making animations. Last edited 2011 |
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| Some problems: when you walk, the camera will not move with you, so the angle will change. It's ok for things you do stationary, like shooting or jumping up, but walking and running is a problem. Treadmill. Anyway, another great resource is http://www.3d.sk/ Not free, but it is specifically aimed towards 3d artists and game developers. They have hundreds of thousands of pictures and videos of people of all races and bodytypes (both clothed and nude), from all angles and performing different actions (walking, sword fighting, loading a gun, stretching, etc.) another potentially useful thing is varying facial expressions, including pronouncing various letters Fantastic reference materials. There's some free samples here: http://www.3d.sk/photos/freeSample |
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