Video Game Animation

[AnRCHistIV]

I'm about to start at an Animation school, and was wondering if the Obsidian Animators had any resources or books that really helped you guys with Animation. Also, what kind of Animation jobs are there, and what kind of duties would be performed by the different jobs?

 

As well I was wondering if there are any skills I should practice that would help me later. So far I've been practicing with Maya, becoming familiar with keyframes, and animating various basic objects. For the last couple weeks I've started sketching as well, and while pretty basic drawings at the moment, I'm slowly getting better at it.

[AnRCHistIV]

*cricket noises* =(

[Nightshape]

*Tumble Weed*

[Alvin Nelson]

Sorries, we've been pretty busy round here. I've got some books that both the animators have bought on their own, and we have in our library here.

 

The Animator's Survival Kit

Action Anatomy: For Gamers, Animators, and Digital Artists

Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right

Human Anatomy for Artists: The Elements of Form

Body Language: Advanced 3D Character Rigging

 

And let's say you have tons of money...Then these are also recommended:

 

Rhino House

The Animator's Survival Kit Animated

Jason Ryan Animation

 

 

I'll try to get some animators to post some more help too.

[Kaftan Barlast]

Speaking from my own experience, animating for computer games is the last thing you want to do in the field of animation. Most of it consist of extremely repetitive and dull work putting together dozens of very short loops and even more variations of each loop for different purpouses. Sometimes youll also have to do both boring and technicly demanding things like baking animation generated by physics into keyframes and adjust them to look cooler, debree from explosions or even worse - cloth animation.

 

 

Youll probably get to do much cooler and more fun stuff working in advertising for instance

[AnRCHistIV]

Thanks for the replies! And Kaftan, would that apply to Cinematic animators as well? That's what I'm aiming for at the moment, having always been a big fan of Blizzard's cinematics and cutscenes.

[Joseph Bulock]

Thanks for the replies! And Kaftan, would that apply to Cinematic animators as well? That's what I'm aiming for at the moment, having always been a big fan of Blizzard's cinematics and cutscenes.

 

Kaftan is mainly describing the sorts of things that a gameplay animator would do. Cinematic sequences often contain more single use animations and special case, flashy stuff. I couldn't tell you anything about any other company's practices though.

[Kaftan Barlast]

Animating cinematics for film or games is what you want to do as an animator, because thats where the fun lies. Especially pre-rendered cinematics like Blizzard uses. What you do there is entire scenes, working like a classic animator instead of putting hundreds of short loops together. Ingame cutscenes are very different, you usually use gameplay animations with as small a number of custom scene-specific animations as possible.

 

 

But the competiton in that field is murder, because thats where everyone wants to be and there is a relatively small amount of companies working the field. Blizzard is about the only studio that do their (prerendered)cinematics in-house, all the others outsource it to animation companies like Blur or Plastic wax.

Edited October 30, 2008 by Kaftan Barlast