Animation In Game

Games are meant to be interactive. When you play a game, you’ll have complete control of the character and the camera. You’re the one driving the story forward and making the character move. So not only does the animation need to look good, it needs to look good from every possible angle.

For instance, if the game is third person, and the player rotates the camera around they’ll see the walk or run cycle from a completely new angle. This new angle can revealing things like knee pops that may not have been visible in the normal camera view. These are things that a game animator needs to take into account to ensure their animation holds up to whatever the player may throw at it.

Unlike animation in a movie where the animator doesn’t need to worry about how it will look from a side view or from behind, creating animations for games need to look good from any angle. For instance, when implementing the principle of arcs into an animation, the animator needs to ensure the character is following nice smooth arcing motions from any camera angle.

As a game animator you’ll be exposed to many more types of animations than what is typically found in a movie like Pixar orDreamWorks produces. You may find yourself creating animations for fantasy creatures, giants, combat maneuvers, scripted events, etc. And you’ll do many different types of cycles, not just walk and run cycles.

For instance, most games will need to have a breathing cycle, an idle stance cycle (when the character is standing still) crouching and walking, walking forward while aiming a gun, laying down and crawling forward, the list goes on. You can get an idea of what these look like in the Bringing the Hero to Life for the Indie Game Development Pipeline article.

Most games are driven by body mechanics, so you’ll need to spend a lot of time perfecting your body mechanics to be successful in games. That’s not to say you won’t be animating any acting scenes, but if you look back at the last video game you played, you’ll probably see just how body mechanics heavy it is.

The timing for animations in games is often determined by the needs of the player inputs. Nothing is more frustrating than getting caught in a gun fight in Call of Duty and suddenly having to reload, typically resulting in your death. But those reload animations have be timed perfectly to enhance the gameplay. For instance, you want a reload animation to be fast enough so the player can get back to the action, but also slow enough to be realistic, and add a challenge for the player.

History of 3D Animation

3D animation is a process that involves taking fully 3D objects (whether they are physical or digital) and making them animate and move. Most 3D animation today is done using CGI (computer-generated imagery). From something as simple as a short cartoon to something as complex as a feature-length film, a 3D animation is a complicated piece of art that takes lots of practice and skill in order to properly execute. The most famous company that creates CGI animations is Pixar Animation Studios. Founded in 1985, they created the very first all-CGI movie in 1995, Toy Story, and they have made a dozen full movies to date. Pixar created an entire business out of the art of 3D animation.

Although Pixar began CGI animation, they weren’t the first ones to do 3D animation. The first type of 3D animation is actually stop-motion/Clay-mation. This process, done as early as the 60’s, involves taking real-life objects (typically clay models of characters) and making them animate in real-life. This is done by posing the model, taking a picture, change the pose of the character slightly, and then taking another picture. This is done until you have dozens of different pictures. When stringed together, they form a smooth animation that brings the intimate objects to life. Some of the most notable stop-motion animations include Gumby, Shawn the Sheep, and Wallace and Gromit, created by Aardman. Aardman continues to have success with their animations. Most recently, they co-developed the film Arthur Christmas with Sony Pictures.

This type of animation is very rewarding to do, but is a very time-consuming process. It takes several hours of poses and photographs just to get a few second’s worth of film. It also requires that the hundreds of shots that are taken have the same lighting, colors, and camera angles, or else the animation will look inconsistent and choppy. Although stop-motion animation isn’t used as much as it was from the 60’s to the 90’s, it is still used to this day, most notably in TV shows such as Robot Chicken. If you have the patience for it, stop-motion animation is a fulfilling and entertaining hobby.

Despite the success of stop-motion animation, many companies and artists have moved on to created 3D animations using computers, referred to as CGI Animation (meaning Computer Generated Imagery). CGI, when used in feature-length movies and short cartoons, usually refers to 3D animation, and not 2D animation. There are countless different programs out there for creating animations on a computer. Some of the most notable ones include Adobe Flash (for 2D animation), Blender (a freeware program for making 3D models), and Renderman (a professional 3D program developed by Pixar, creators of the Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. films.). Which program you decide to use all depends on the specs of your computer and on what you are wanting to do with your animations.

Films have been using CGI in their films for over two decades. Although it has been used in films since the 1980s, it wasn’t used in large quantities until 1995, when Pixar Animation Studios released the first all-CGI film ever made, Toy Story. This ground-breaking film is about Andy and the adventures that his various toys have as they spring to life. Many of the toys are ones that exist in real-life, including Mr. Potato Head and Slinky-Dog. The character models and animations were considered to be very complex for its time, with detailed lighting, various textures, and a wide variety of facial animations. After this film was made, several other films were created using only computers. Some of the most notable CGI companies include Pixar (who has made over a dozen films), DreamWorks (who created the Shrek and Kung-Fu Panda series) and Blue Sky (who makes the Ice Age films).

In the early 00s, several cartoon shows began to move towards CGI animation. One of the first ones was Jimmy Neutron, a cartoon show on the Nickelodeon channel. It was based on the CGI movie of the same name. These kinds of cartoons can be produced to air on a weekly basis. Similar to 2D animation for TV, short-cuts are taken in order to keep the costs down. Characters have simplified animation (such as stiffer movement and mouth flaps that don’t necessarily match the dialogue). Also, things such as fur are either simplified or nonexistent in TV CGI. One example of this is in The Penguins of Madagascar (a spin-off of the Madagascar movies). The main movies use several characters that have fur, such as lemurs and monkeys. But when those characters appear in the Penguins cartoon, simplified character models are used. These eliminate most of the fur on the animals, and instead give them a much smoother body and shape. Although they aren't as detailed, using these character models reduce many of the costs that it would take to animate fur.

3D animations are becoming more and more popular. Dozens of films each year are made in CGI. Many cartoon shows are completely made in 3D. Advertising, especially TV commercials, are aided by CGI. 3D animations are quickly turning into the most popular form of animation.

Camera Viewport Control in 3ds Max

Dolly Camera, Target, or Both
The buttons on this flyout replace the Zoom button when a Camera viewport is active. Use them to move the camera and/or its target along the camera's main axis, toward or away from what the camera is pointing at.

Perspective
Perspective performs a combination of FOV and Dolly for target cameras and free cameras. It increases the amount of perspective flare, while maintaining the composition of the scene.

Roll Camera

Roll Camera rotates a target camera about its line of sight, and rotates a free camera about its local Z axis.

Truck Camera

Truck Camera moves the camera parallel to the view plane.

Orbit/Pan Camera

Orbit Camera rotates a camera about the target. Pan Camera rotates the target about the camera.

Lighting in 3ds Max

Target Spotlight
A spotlight casts a focused beam of light like a flashlight, a follow spot in a theater, or a headlight. A target spotlight uses a movable target object to aim the light.

Free Spotlight
A spotlight casts a focused beam of light like a flashlight, a follow spot in a theater, or a headlight. Unlike a targeted spotlight, a Free Spot has no target object. You can move and rotate the free spot to aim it in any direction.

Target Directional Light
Directional lights cast parallel light rays in a single direction, as the sun does (for all practical purposes) at the surface of the earth. Directional lights are primarily used to simulate sunlight. You can adjust the color of the light and position and rotate the light in 3D space.

Free Directional Light
Directional lights cast parallel light rays in a single direction, as the sun does (for all practical purposes) at the surface of the earth. Directional lights are primarily used to simulate sunlight. You can adjust the color of the light and position and rotate the light in 3D space.

Omni Light
An Omni light casts rays in all directions from a single source. Omni lights are useful for adding "fill lighting" to your scene, or simulating point source lights.

Skylight
The Skylight light models daylight. You can set the color of the sky or assign it a map. The sky is modeled as a dome above the scene.

mr Area Omni Light
The area omni light emits light from a spherical or cylindrical volume, rather than from a point source, when you render a scene using the mental ray renderer. With the default scanline renderer, the area omni light behaves like any other standard omni light.

mr Area Spotlight
The area spotlight emits light from a rectangular or disc-shaped area, rather than from a point source, when you render a scene using the mental ray renderer. With the default scanline renderer, the area spotlight behaves like any other standard spotlight.

Mapping Technique in 3ds Max

Normal Bump Mapping
Normal bump mapping is a technique that lets you simulate high-resolution surface detail on low-resolution polygonal models.
Normal bump mapping is similar in some respects to regular bump mapping, but it conveys more complex surface detail. Normal bump maps store not only the depth information used in regular bump mapping, but also information on the direction normal of the surface, to produce more life-like results.
The practical benefits of normal bump mapping were first seen in real-time gaming platforms. The ability, however, to create more realistic detail with fewer polygons is desirable in all areas of digital content creation. 3D artists of every specialty should therefore be familiar with two normal bump mapping techniques: the planar projection method and the cage projection method. In this section, each technique is presented in its own tutorial.

Composite Mapping

A composite map layers two or more texture maps onto one another, in order to produce a more detailed image.
The end result is determined by the level of transparency defined for each layer. Transparency can be global (applied to the entire surface of the layer), derived from the layer’s alpha channel, or based on a mask. To fine-tune the image, the pixels of each layer can also be blended with one another in a number of different ways.
In this Mapping, you will create a complex texture map of a steel shutter for a pawn shop. The map will consist of five layers of images composited together using various transparency settings and blending techniques.


Spline Mapping

Spline mapping is useful for mapping curved objects with a cylindrical cross-section, such as a snake or tentacle, as well as curved flat surfaces such as a winding road. This feature lets you use any spline to specify mapping on a mesh surface, as well as manipulate the mapping gizmo via cross-sections for greater accuracy. The result more closely approximates the actual shape of such objects than other mapping methods, making it easier to create convincing texture maps.

Adding Skeleton for the Human Body Model

There are few method on the 3ds Max to add the skeleton for the human body modelling to make the model move like a real human body.

There are two different method on doing the ringing such as physique technique and Skin technique.

In the latest version of character studio, Physique has more features than Skin, but they are more effective only on models with large polygon numbers (over 50,000 or 70, 000). We are discussing modeling with an average of number of polygons (15,000 to 20,000), where skin is preferable.

The only difference between Skin abd Physique is that the latter has only one skinning method: adjusting the envelopes of the bones to the vertices of the model. However, unlike the envelopes in Skin, this method is perfect.

In turn, unlike Physique, skin allows you to assign weights of the bones influence directly to the vertices for a fine adjustment.

Following Attachment are some tutorial on how to do both different ringing in 3ds Max:

3D Human Body Modelling

The human body modelling is crafted from a rectangle block and slowly added the body part one by one and enhance the shape for the body. The first step for modelling the body from the block is modify the block to have the body torso shape as the base structure, after that the hand is added by the extrude method from the cube to make the extension for the hand and also the leg part. After finish both the hand and leg body part, the head is add to complete the whole body structure.

the technique us to simplify the modelling process is by using the symmetric system so only one side of the body part have to be construct.

Following picture are the result of the final modelling:

SIDE VIEW

FRONT VIEW

BACK VIEW

12 Principles of Animation

Squash and Stretch
To give a sense of weight and flexibility to drawn object.
The volume of the object does not change during the squash and stretch.

Anticipation
To prepare audience for an action, and to make the action appear more realistic.

Staging
To direct the audience attention, and make it clear what is of greatest importance in a scene.
To keeping focus on what is relevant, and avoiding unnecessary detail.

Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
Straight ahead action means drawing out a scene frame by frame from beginning to the end.
Pose to pose involve starting with drawing a few key frames, and then filling in the intervals later.

Follow Through and Overlapping Action
To render movement more realistically, and help to give the impression that character follow the laws of physic, including the principle of inertia.

Slow In and Slow Out
The movement of the human body, and other objects need time to accelerate and slow down.
More drawing near the beginning and end of an action, emphasizing the extreme poses, and fewer in the middle.

Arc
Natural action tends to follow an arched trajectory, and animation should adhere to this principle by following implied "arcs" for greater realism.

Secondary Action
Adding a secondary action to the main action gives a scene more life, and can help to support the main action.

Timing
Timing refers to the number of the drawings or frames for a given action, which translates to the speed of the action on film.

Exaggeration
An effect especially useful for animation, as perfect imitation of reality can look static and dull in cartoon. The level of exaggeration depends on whether one seeks realism or a particular style, like a caricature or the style of a specific artist.

Solid Drawing
Solid drawing means taking into accounts forms in three-dimensional space, or giving them volume and weight. The animator needs to be a skilled artist and has to understand the basic of three-dimensional shapes, anatomy, weight, balance, light, and shadow.

Appeal
Appeal in a cartoon character corresponds to what would be called charisma in an actor. The important thing is that the viewer feels the character is real and interesting.

Scamper

Scamper is a technique that guide people to develop or improve a new idea for a product. Scamper help developers to create something step by step by using all the method from the scamper guide.
The technique is use to questions with the existed product to come out with a new idea or improve them.

The technique of the scamper question as below statement:

Substitute

what material or resources can we substitute or swap to improve the product?
what other product or process could we use?
What rule could we substitute?
Can we use this product somewhere else, or as a substitute for something else?
What will happen if we change our feelings or attitude toward this product?

Combine

What would happen if we combined this product with another, to create something new?
What if we combined purpose or objectives?
What could we combine to maximize the uses of this product?
How could we combine talent and resources to create a new approach to this product?

Adapt

How could we adapt or readjust this product to serve another purpose or use?
What else is the product like?
Who or what could we emulate to adapt this product into?
What other products or ideas could we use for inspiration?

Modify

How could we change the shape, look, or feel of our product?
What could we add to modify this product?
What could we emphasize or highlight to create more value?
What element of this product could we strengthen to create something new?

Put to another use

Can we use this product somewhere else, perhaps in another industry?
Who else could use this product?
How would this product behave differently in another setting?
Could we recycle the waste from this product to make something new?

Eliminate

How could we streamline or simplify this product?
What features, parts, or rules could we eliminate?
What could we understate or tone down?
How could we make it smaller, faster, lighter, or more fun?
What would happen if we took away part of this product? What would we have in its place?

Reverse

What would happen if we reversed this process or sequenced things differently?
What if we try to do the exact opposite of what we're trying to do now?
What components could we substitute to change the order of the product?
What roles could we reverse or swap?
How could we reorganize this product?

Walk Cycle model

This was the final result of my walk cycle from previous references. The process of making zombie walk cycle is a bit simple compare to the normal human walk cycle because it has less restrict for some logical movement. 

The Walk cycle still can further improve to increase the movement of the head and finger, to make the movement more obvious and clear to the audience.

3D Walk Cycle

the videos above will be my references to create a 3D modelling walk cycle for 30sec and each walk cycle will use for 10sec out of 30sec.

the software i will use to create the model is 3Dmax with 2016 edition.

Be patient with the final output of my work.

Facial Expression Drawing

iI was given a tutorial to draw my own six different facial expressions. It was a big challenge for me since I'm not good in drawing and does not practice much on drawing skills. The problem I faced while drawing the facial expression is I'm very poor in hand drawing coordination and it causes the drawing to have some wired proportion to the face i have drawn.

The next problem for me in drawing the expression is, i was lack of patient while drawing the expression and cause the drawing to have a wired proportion of my face. I'm more likely like to do work in fast phase and it seen to be not very suitable while drawing something.

The end result of my drawing although is not that good but i still feel satisfying on what i have done. I hope i can done better for next time.

The final result of my work as following: