Introduction to Game Animation

This workshop places a big focus on acquiring and breaking down video references. Life and the movement all around us is the best teacher so learning how to leverage it properly will aid you well on your animator journey.

Assignment: The Bouncing Ball - In the first assignment, we'll use video reference to capture two different balls bouncing, break it down and recreate the bouncing balls with precision in mind. The product should be a highly convincing animation of two bouncing balls.

Animators are often presented with the scenario in which you are asked to animate something that you cannot readily find a video reference for (eg. A dragon or other fictional beast). In these cases, you're best bet is to find a "proxy" reference that you can use to reverse engineer how the fictional character would move if it were real. (eg. Using a combination of animals for your dragon reference). This allows us to come up with a "recipe" on how the character should move so that the body mechanics are consistent and believable.

Assignment: The UFO- For your second assignment, we'll animate a UFO by using a proxy reference to help us understand how the flying saucer should move and why.

Body Mechanics is arguably one of the most important concepts an animator needs to learn. To master body mechanics, is to deeply understand how and why a character moves the way it does and touches on a wide variety of topics including physics and anatomy. We'll discuss the most important poses to consider when dealing with a character action like a jump.

Assignment: The Hop Block- This intro to body mechanics assignment uses a highly simplified rig so we can focus on the core concepts without getting distracted by too many extra details. We'll use this simple rig to animate a basic hop. This hop assignment is broken down into two parts. This first part requires you to shoot your own reference, identify the core poses and recreate the poses using the rig in Maya. Feedback will then be given on the blocked out poses before polishing the animation.

A continuation of Part 1.

Assignment: The Hop Polish- As a continuation to Part 1, we'll now get into breaking the animation down with more poses, spending some time in the graph editor to control the interpolation between the poses and then polish things off with adding overlapping action and other final details.

We'll discuss game animation at a high level and where/how it fits into a game production as a whole. We'll be using Unreal Engine 5, so we'll also take a high level tour of the interface and core concepts like BluePrints. We'll be looking at the concept of "idle" animations and why it's so important to start with them when developing a game character.

Assignment: Game Idle - Our first assignment will be to come up with an idle pose and animation for our Lisa character and integrate it into our game project.

The next logical feature to add to our character is a run. We'll discuss core concepts regarding run cycles and how they are typically implemented into a game.

Assignment Game Run Cycle- after creating a rough version of our run cycle, we'll get it integrated into the game project.

To fill out the core feature set of our character, we'll need a jump. We'll use only poses for this one as a means to introduce everyone to the concept of "procedural animation" inside of a game engine.

Assignment: Game Jump - animate and integrate a jump in our game project.

Now that we have some basic actions our character can do (eg idle, run around and jump) it's time to add something from scratch. We'll build out a dodge roll feature using both the Character and Animation Blueprints in Unreal Engine.

Assignment: Game Action (Dodge Roll)- we'll need to find some good reference to breakdown and animate a combat roll and integrate it into our game projects.

The class will vote on a handful of possible animation related features for our game project. The winning vote will require homework for the week and we'll cover how to integrate the feature the following week.

Assignment: New Feature 1 - To be voted on.

The class will vote again on the next new feature to be added to the game project.

Assignment: New Feature 2 - To be voted on.