Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The Animation List
Most of the animations you create will rely heavily on animations you've created previ-
ously. Therefore, it's important to follow the structure of the
animation list,
which your
lead animator and project designer will have compiled in advance.
You would think a list containing the animations a character performs in a game would
be pretty straightforward. They walk, run, jump, maybe have some fight moves or shoot
a gun. In actual fact, however, a lot more animations than these explicit ones are involved
in getting your characters to move, most of which you may not even realize are separate
animations.
The animation list will tell you what movements are required, but not how the character
will perform them. A walk cycle, for example, can be one of the most difficult animations
to create because it can be interpreted in any number of ways—each person has their own
way of walking. So creating a unique animation that also has to loop is tricky. Since most
animations are based upon it, the very first pose that needs to be defined is the
rest pose
.
Defining the Rest Pose
With any third-person-perspective game, the main character has to be interesting even
when the player is not controlling him. Look at any game you play, and when you're not
controlling the character, he will first adopt the idle animation before looping through any
fidget animations he has. Before these animations can be created, a
rest pose
needs to be
defined.
It's important to lock the rest pose early on, since changing it later will involve altering
manyoftheanimationsbasedonit.Forexample,consideracrouchingposition.Theanim-
ation would start with the character in the rest pose and end in the crouch position, which
can be classed as another rest pose. Then when the character stands again, the rest pose is
where the animation would end. So altering the rest pose would also mean editing all these
other animations.
Initially, the rest pose need only be a single frame, just one pose. At this stage you don't
need any animation, because this is the pose used as the starting point for many others.
You may find that you will need a number of rest poses, each depending on the character's
state of health or current mood. For Kila, we might have the following (the first three are
illustrated in
Figure 16.1
)
:
The default posture used in game: relaxed yet dynamic, and—most important of
all—in keeping with her personality. Also, don't have the feet too far apart, or it
will be difficult to get other animations back into this pose.
