Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
10. Just as the desire to eat cake never really goes away (because, let's face
it, cake tastes awesome, which contrasts with weighting), painting
skin weights often feels like it's never done. Getting to a point that is
acceptable is probably where you should decide to move on. Chances are,
when you are animating, you'll find something that bugs you and you'll
be back fixing it anyway.
Tutorial 10.3: Maya Animation
In this game we don't see a whole lot of Aegis moving (he'll move his
arms, but not his whole body in game play). But, seeing how to prepare
an animated mesh for export from Maya and import to Unity is an
important part of the game creation process; so we're making a brief
introduction level using our now rigged and skinned Aegis to illustrate
these techniques.
But before we can get him exported we need to animate him. Getting all the
intricacies of effective animation in is way beyond the scope of this topic, but
we will look at a few of the important concepts and techniques unique to
animating an asset for game engine consumption.
If you're confident with your rig and skinning, use it for sure. If you grew tired
of skinning, feel free to use the version of Aegis included on the web site
(AegisChung-SingleMesh-Rigged).
General Notes on Game Animation
There are a few things unique to game animation that is worthwhile to
point out. First, think cycles. Almost every game character animation should
be a cycle; this means that the first and the last keyframe of each motion
should match. For walks, animate from left foot fall to left foot fall. In an idle
animation, have the character return to exactly the same pose as he began.
The reason for this is that most animations in games are quite short and
called up via script (programmatically). Different animations will be called up
at different times, but sometimes (like in an idle animation) there might not
be any new input and an animation needs to play through more than once.
Without a cycle, the animation will jump and jerk in very awkward ways.
Second, remember that for game animations, most cycles should be
short—or often shorter than they would be for high-rez projects. For example,
a common problem for students is the jump animation. They've animated
it before in a nongame situation with a lot of great squash and stretch that
when used in game means the character hasn't even gotten ready to jump
before they should be in the air. This doesn't mean that good concepts of
animation (i.e., squash and stretch) shouldn't be used—in fact it's critical
that they are. They just often need to happen quicker and subtler. The one
exception to this would be an idle animation—the animation a character does
when it's waiting for other instructions. A longer idle animation keeps the
repeating cycle from being quite so obvious.
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