In the article written by Jeff Hayes he talks about how "there are 3 steps to creating game ready animation assets."
Step 1: Design
This step involves:
Motion Archetyping
Camera positioning
Character design
Flow charting
Motion Archetyping
At the start of the design process you should really start thinking about the fundamentals of your characters movement and how they interact with the world around them.
Jeff Hayes brings up some very important questions that you should challenge yourself to answer that will help to shape your character even before you have begun bringing them to life physically through modelling.
How does your character stand?
What posture defines your characters view on the world the inhabit?
How does your character carry their weight?
How dose your character move from place to place? Do they run or do they walk bow-legged.
These are just an example of many of the questions Hayes goes on to ask
Once you have answered these questions Hayes talks about how you must be able to communicate your character to your team, the most effective way is to stand up and act out yourself they way you in-vision your characters behaviour and movement. Another way would be to compare your characters movement to that of an actor or a person, something that other people will be able to research themselves instead of them having to imagine it.
Camera Positioning
Camera positioning is a big part of character animations in games, depending on what type of camera is used could effect the quality of your animations, or even effect how they are viewed.
Hayes talks about how first and third person can effect how you animate your character, if your game camera is in first person you can cut down a lot of the animating requirements as things like walking cycles won't be viewed as often as in a third person game. Hayes goes on to say how a third person camera can allow the animator to show off "your animating muscle".
There are a few questions you must ask yourself before beginning your animation as the answers could effect how your animation is viewed.
"Is the camera close or far away?"
"Is the camera at a fixed angle?"
"Does the camera run against a rail or are the X,Y,Z positions pre set based on the position of the character?"
Hayes explains a unfortunate circumstance where the camera he was using in a game effected a certain animations outcome. "...we frequently used a rail-cam. Since our animation testing software didn't let us use an in-game camera, we had no idea that, when our outfielder stood in the warning track facing away from the camera in his relaxed pose, it looked like he was relieving himself against the outfield wall..."
Flow Charting
Flow charting is a very important part of animation preparation, flow charts offer the animator to mark out every movement that the character will make in the game and how these animations happen.
There are 3 types of flow charts that are favoured among animators.
The linear flow chart.
Radial flow chart
And the most popular, the descending flow chart.
My next post will be continuing with this research with Step 2:Create.
-J.W
No comments:
Post a Comment