Animating for Games - Game Character Development with Maya - page 938

Note
If you would like to learn more about the basic principles of animation,
many helpful topics are recommended in Appendix B , “ Reference and
Further Reading . ”
To prepare for animation, you must know everything your character will do and how they
should do it. Your lead animator will work closely with the designer on the project to com-
pile an animation list that will then be passed to you.
In Chapter 1 , we introduced some of the design elements associated with our characters.
You read a brief background story that helped to portray the characters' personalities, and
basic information in the form of bios offered more insight into who they are and why. All
this character information will now help us decide how Kila and Grae will walk. We know
Kila is a dancer, so we can enhance her feminine walk, adding a bit more sway to her hips
and giving her a sexier look. Grae, on the other hand, is a colossal beast; we want to feel
the power behind each purposeful step as he lumbers around.
With these ideas of how the characters will move and interact with the game world, you
can then go on to gather some reference material. More than likely this will be in the form
of movies (DVDs, videos downloaded from the Internet, or something you have filmed
yourself). Once you have a solid idea of the movements required, you and your team can
discuss how they will be implemented into the game engine and what techniques will be
used to save memory.
Animation Optimization
As you are now well aware, in every aspect of real-time artwork you have to keep within
specified boundaries, and the same applies to animation. If your character can perform a
hundred moves, all these will have to be stored in memory. Add to this the animations
for all of the nonplayer characters, plus scenic animation, and your allotted chunk of the
memory is soon gone.
Restricting the number of animations used isn't the best approach for today's games; in-
gameanimationisahugedrawthesedays,andvarietyisthekeytomakingyourcharacters
interesting and believable. Instead, you can explore the following options for saving pro-
cessing power.