21st September 2012

I've just been hunting around the web for possible free game character rigs i could use as i'm not really wanting to create my own character. Experience has taught me that animations are far easier to create when the rig is of a higher quality and i'm not sure if i should upgrade my own skills as part of this project or not. Something I'll have to discuss at my meeting.

I looked up the understanding animation book and it's currently in the library so i'll borrow it and see if it could be of any use for literature reviews and things.

General Google of game animation techniques to try and identify some of the existing trends.
I came across this website written by George Maestri:
http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=22801&seqNum=3

He brings up one of the issues I've been thinking about concerning limitations of game animation. The character must be under the command of the player during active parts of the game.

" Moves must be short to preserve interactivity. If a player moves the joystick, he doesn't want to wait several seconds for an action to complete before the character responds. No matter how good it looks, the gamers of the world will loathe your animation if it takes too long to play back and spoils their control of the character."
He also talks about cycles that should be included, one of the points he mentions is Reacting

"React. For added realism, it's a good idea to animate your character reacting to something, as shown in Figure 5. This reaction could be anything from a head turn to a full-body take. The reaction depends on what is interacting with the character, such as react to bite, react to shot, react to fire, and so on. This usually involves about 15 or fewer frames."

Figure 5.

This point is interesting because of what examples he uses. He mentions a lot about physical reactions to things such as gunshots but doesn't really consider mental reactions to the environment like if the atmosphere of a room became tense would the characters generic walk, run and jump cycles reflect that by becoming visibly nervous? Of course this would add a lot of extra work for the animator but would it add anything to a players experience or would they even notice the changes at all?

From this article this book looks like it could be useful as it talks more about concept and technique rather that software tips. I'll look into it more.

For the rest of my work today other than playing some games and making notes on the character animations (which kind of counts but i'll be doing it on my own time) i'll be looking up a tutorial for a walk cycle for games, i figure if i see how someone else approaches it i'll be able to adapt my own approach and improve my methods.
Update: I've found this tutorial which looks like its pretty in depth and comes with it's own rig so i'm going to try this one and post the result either tomorrow or the day after depending on how long it takes me to follow.
http://www.ewestlund.com/downloads/basicWalk_tutorial.pdf

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Things to do next

Previous

Look up Understanding Animation (Book)

Set up a meeting with the appropriate lecturer
Create a generic walk cycle for a 3rd person game character (warming up for future tests)
Write some notes on existing game animations. - ongoing.

New
Borrow Understanding Animation from the Library