Thu Jan 08, 2009 12:32 pm
Animation And You! ...well me anyway.
My background in animation never left a sheet of paper before joining up with Novo. I was lucky in that regard, because it gave me a good foundation of the animation process. When you have so many frames to meticulously draw out individually it really pushes you to plan out your scene. For that reason I would encourage anyone who wants to get into the field of 3D animation to pick up a pencil and at least put together a flip book. I don't think anything taught me the importance of timing better than having to sit down and draw out 103 sheets of paper for a 3 - 4 second animation. And the dedication to that animation then came in the form of having to take each sheet and stick it under a camera, in just the right place between the masking tape, rolling over to the computer and pressing the spacebar, just once and wait for the computer to register. Rinse and repeat several hundred times. Oh and hope that Adobe Premier doesn't crash before you're done.
With 3D animation, you're at the will of your assets. Do the joints of your model have the appropriate amount of polygons to compensate for stretching? Do your UVs have any unsightly seams that will be revealed when limbs and appendages start moving? Does your rig (the bone structure of the model, which controls the mesh and allows you to animate the character using the "bones of the "rig") have enough bones to simulate the right kind of movement?
Well, luckily with the Skellie-Man I didn't have to worry about any of that! There are very few connected areas on the Skeleton if you're not dealing with flesh. All you've got is elbows, knees, wrists, fingers and toes. I didn't have to worry about the lower back, pelvis area, or upper chest because he's wearing rigid chest armor and a separate pelvis bone. In fact if you look closely (if I've ever given you the chance and you certainly won't have it in-game) the legs are essentially floating in the pelvis bone. He is magic you know. We should probably remake the whole game with just Skeletons.
For this project we decided to use 3D Studio Max's Character Studio to rig our characters. Character Studio offers a neat basic rig called the "Biped". The cool thing about using Biped is you can save out animation key frames and apply them to other models that are rigged up with Biped. So say I wanted to see what Skellie-Man would look like strutting like the Dwarf. All I would have to do is save out the biped file of the Dwarf and load it into the Skellie's Biped. Now, we're not planning on explicitly sharing animations between characters, but this gives us a good place to start. Instead of starting from zero, you move on up to some non-sensical yet arbitrarily high number I made up for this example; let's say: 65. See, make sense now?
Now, the Biped set up isn't without its annoyances. Because it's such a basic setup the rig itself isn't terribly complicated which means dealing with it often times can be. For example, each appendage is apart of its own "Link Node" creating a hierarchy of parented and child objects thusly downwards until you reach its end. Such as the arm starts with the collar bone, down to the bicep, to the forearm, then the wrist and lastly the fingers. When any of these bones are moved or rotated and then keyed, keyframe data is saved for the child objects as well.
So say you put together a 'throwing a ball' animation. Your thought process might be to get the big motions down first. Rotate the collar bone and bicep back, and then as the bicep drives the motion forward straighten the forearm out for extension and follow through. Now we can worry about the hands right? Wrong. Well now that you've made all those keys for the parented objects, the wrist and fingers are now key framed to be in the neutral position you left them in. So now you'll have to go through each key frame and change the hand positioning, which can result in a somewhat shuddery animation if you're not careful. In the end it's not a big deal. It just means that you have to think a little differently. If you work on posing every bone you want to move on the Link Node in each key frame before moving onto the next pose, then you're all set.
Anyways, that's enough ranting. I do want to say that animating the Skeleton was a huge treat. We didn't really consider too much about his personality in the pre-production phase. He was a Skeleton with three weapon and shield combinations, he'll have these skills and there's going to be lots of them. That's all that gameplay needed to care about. But once I started animating him we realized that there was a lot of great potential for personality with him. Well he's undead right? How does he exist, magic? What is he driven by? The lore we have set up for our world covered some of it, but what was motivating him became a big factor.
What we ended up with is a Skeleton controlled by a magic man of some kind (I'm not the writer, don't ask me) who's main motivating factor is to kill you dead. When you're not around however, what does he care? "Oh look a birdie! It's great to be alive!" So what we end up with is a more than literal, brainless happy go lucky creature who's ferocity isn't released until he's attacking you, then you better watch out! His personality and the fact that he's being "puppeted" played into some of my favorite animations. I can't wait for you guys to see!
I'd like to end this with some screenshots I took of those animations. I didn't have time to add any cool background effects or a ground plane, so it's just matte grey or "gray" if you like to be wrong [For confused parties, Bill is Canadian. Mock or fear him appropriately. -Walker]. If there's interest I could put together something better.
With 3D animation, you're at the will of your assets. Do the joints of your model have the appropriate amount of polygons to compensate for stretching? Do your UVs have any unsightly seams that will be revealed when limbs and appendages start moving? Does your rig (the bone structure of the model, which controls the mesh and allows you to animate the character using the "bones of the "rig") have enough bones to simulate the right kind of movement?
Well, luckily with the Skellie-Man I didn't have to worry about any of that! There are very few connected areas on the Skeleton if you're not dealing with flesh. All you've got is elbows, knees, wrists, fingers and toes. I didn't have to worry about the lower back, pelvis area, or upper chest because he's wearing rigid chest armor and a separate pelvis bone. In fact if you look closely (if I've ever given you the chance and you certainly won't have it in-game) the legs are essentially floating in the pelvis bone. He is magic you know. We should probably remake the whole game with just Skeletons.
For this project we decided to use 3D Studio Max's Character Studio to rig our characters. Character Studio offers a neat basic rig called the "Biped". The cool thing about using Biped is you can save out animation key frames and apply them to other models that are rigged up with Biped. So say I wanted to see what Skellie-Man would look like strutting like the Dwarf. All I would have to do is save out the biped file of the Dwarf and load it into the Skellie's Biped. Now, we're not planning on explicitly sharing animations between characters, but this gives us a good place to start. Instead of starting from zero, you move on up to some non-sensical yet arbitrarily high number I made up for this example; let's say: 65. See, make sense now?
Now, the Biped set up isn't without its annoyances. Because it's such a basic setup the rig itself isn't terribly complicated which means dealing with it often times can be. For example, each appendage is apart of its own "Link Node" creating a hierarchy of parented and child objects thusly downwards until you reach its end. Such as the arm starts with the collar bone, down to the bicep, to the forearm, then the wrist and lastly the fingers. When any of these bones are moved or rotated and then keyed, keyframe data is saved for the child objects as well.
So say you put together a 'throwing a ball' animation. Your thought process might be to get the big motions down first. Rotate the collar bone and bicep back, and then as the bicep drives the motion forward straighten the forearm out for extension and follow through. Now we can worry about the hands right? Wrong. Well now that you've made all those keys for the parented objects, the wrist and fingers are now key framed to be in the neutral position you left them in. So now you'll have to go through each key frame and change the hand positioning, which can result in a somewhat shuddery animation if you're not careful. In the end it's not a big deal. It just means that you have to think a little differently. If you work on posing every bone you want to move on the Link Node in each key frame before moving onto the next pose, then you're all set.
Anyways, that's enough ranting. I do want to say that animating the Skeleton was a huge treat. We didn't really consider too much about his personality in the pre-production phase. He was a Skeleton with three weapon and shield combinations, he'll have these skills and there's going to be lots of them. That's all that gameplay needed to care about. But once I started animating him we realized that there was a lot of great potential for personality with him. Well he's undead right? How does he exist, magic? What is he driven by? The lore we have set up for our world covered some of it, but what was motivating him became a big factor.
What we ended up with is a Skeleton controlled by a magic man of some kind (I'm not the writer, don't ask me) who's main motivating factor is to kill you dead. When you're not around however, what does he care? "Oh look a birdie! It's great to be alive!" So what we end up with is a more than literal, brainless happy go lucky creature who's ferocity isn't released until he's attacking you, then you better watch out! His personality and the fact that he's being "puppeted" played into some of my favorite animations. I can't wait for you guys to see!
I'd like to end this with some screenshots I took of those animations. I didn't have time to add any cool background effects or a ground plane, so it's just matte grey or "gray" if you like to be wrong [For confused parties, Bill is Canadian. Mock or fear him appropriately. -Walker]. If there's interest I could put together something better.
Senior Artist - Novo Interactive