How difficult is animation?

Yes, I understand that question is on par with "How difficult is it to program", with all the expected caveats.

What prompts my question is the number of characters available on Turbosquid which are rigged but not animated. I (knowing nothing about the process) find it strange to take a product 2/3 (my uneducated guess) of the way and not finish it; thus I'm beginning to suspect that the "secret sauce" in character development is in the animation.

Assuming a typical biped that is "fully rigged", and you are aiming for the standard 6-7 Mario type actions, is there a rough ball-park estimate of the work involved?

No, I'm not asking anyone to quote anything this lame and abstract, I'm just lost when it comes to "what is big" and "what is small" on the artistic side of things.

Last question; is there a difference in quality of model rigging? Meaning, if I buy a model that is "rigged" should I be armed with any questions about how and such, or is it all pretty much the same.

Thanks!
Charles

 

I've animated for thirteen years.

Moving things around the screen isn't hard.

"Animating" is hard.

Character animating is extremely hard. At least, character animating WELL is extremely hard.

When I say "animating," I mean you are moving objects and characters around in a realistic or snappy way, so there is "life" in it. It also means showing shifting of balance and weight during the course of movement.

It takes a long time to get good at being a character animator. If you're not an animator, find someone to do it for your project; that is if you want the project to be released within six months.

Barring this option, you can be "stylistic" and just flop limbs around and make muggy facial expressions using a cute but unrealistic character. Even then, the results will look amateurish.

There are principles of animation that are essential to professional, entertaining animation.

 

Well being an animation student I can tell you that its easy to animate that is given you know how to use the tools to animate for your software, but its not easy to do quality animation.
The model and the rig matter as well. A poorly modeled character will give bad deformations when animated and a bad rig will give many headaches when animating.

Now if the model and the rig are good and you have a good understanding of how to use the tools to animate in your software then one could easily animate 6-7 actions in a couple days. BUT....
Anyone can animate, but not everyone can animate well and good animation takes time and knowledge of animation and its principles.

 

The thing about animation is that the needs of a project are often far too specific for any off-the-shelf solution to ever work, since animation is usually very tightly interwoven with how your systems and gameplay are designed. Things as simple as how fast the attack animation is (does a punch land on the 3rd frame or the 12th?) can have a profound effect on how a game "feels," not to mention the fact that in order to have a flexible player character that can do lots of things at once, you pretty much have to start blending/mixing animations, which is a whole mess of its own... ensuring a suite of content that accommodates even the most generic of games will inevitably be inadequate and unmarketable.

In short, animation is hard.

 

I'd agree with the sentiment here. I've been working in this environment for three years or so and basic animation is easy, anything non-human is harder and humans are very hard to do. I prefer using mocap so long as the skeletons have the same structure.

Its good to hear what the more experienced users had to say as I love what I do and the whole pipeline but as I dont understand the principals of animation, Im totally hopeless in this regard, and cant really understand why I'm so inept. There must be a good way of learning, a good sequence of steps to follow...

I'd be bit wary of random turbosquid stuff and try and find a reputable vendor with bundled animations to at least get going. I think (my opinion) its one of the most sought after skills in the whole pipeline.

HTH
AC

 

Given what I've seen available, I'm not surprised to hear this.

@Targos: I did look at mocap, out of curiosity more than anything, but that presents an "uncanny valley" feel in many of the games I've seen, where the realism of the motion does not match the style of the game. Having said that, it may be the only option for most of us. I agree about turbo-squid. I've only purchased from 3DRT.com and Dexsoft, both great companies.

@Animator: You bring up the issue that actually sent me searching for animated characters to begin with. The animations in the "skeleton horde" pack from 3DRT are top-notch (in my opinion) but the jump animation has this darn cute little issue where the character stabs their staff in the ground before jumping. Looks fantastic! But... it delays the time when the skeleton actually should launch himself into the air, which is a no-no if you are doing a game where jumping is important. I've also tried blending transforms on the model in other places, but as you mentioned, if animation A and animation B were not planned to work together, the chances of it looking natural appear pretty slim.

@Wadoman: This is exactly the kind general idea I was looking for. I honestly had no idea if animations were so easy that people didn't bother to include them, or that they required months of work. I'm sure everything varies by how much everything varies, but the notion that "a few days" of work can generate at least something gives me some general notion.

@DIgiLusion: I hope the tone of my post wasn't misread to question whether good animation requires talent. Please understand that I haven't a (visually) creative bone in my body. Hell, even photo-shop seems like an opaque, arcane religion to me. I was more curious as to why there were so many models available but so few animations, and even fewer good animations. It looks like the process takes a good measure of labor and an even heavier dose of talent, which, yes, I suppose can be said about many things, but the talent involved in good animation (a la World of Warcraft) looks to be an especially rarifed thing.

Thanks to all for posting,
Charles

 

I'm in no way artistic (creative duct-tape solutions and wordings aside), but I very much agree that out-of-the-box animated characters make little sense as Mr. Animator here have said.

If everyone were making first person shooters and nothing else, it would make sense. However since the artist would probably prefer that his or her model be used for as many projects as possible, he or she would likely end up doing too many or too few animations for each project.

If I'm doing a Doom II remake, a walkcycle will be useful as will turn and shoot animations, but jump and crouch animations would be utterly useless and I'd be charged for stuff that I wouldn't be using. Plus I could have a need for weapon-specific shoot animations which means I'd have to have custom animations done anyway.

Oh and by the way: For the love of god, someone please make a crouch animation for the standard assets robot!

 

Has anyone outsourced character animation for their own projects? I'm curious to know if its possible to hire a skilled animator to work remotely creating a few animation sequences, and what the cost of it would be.

e.g., if I wanted a short animation of a person skipping rope, would I be looking at a pricetag of a few hundred, or a few thousand dollars?

 

For what you're asking, if you wanted a good job done, you'd be paying around $750-1000.

 

A Good book (not that you asked for one)if you wish to learn the principles and fundamentals of animation is Preston Blairs "Cartoon Animation" another good book is Disneys Illusion of life but thats more theoretical

 

haha i second what solventFactory recomeneded, those two books are amazing, anything you'd ever want to know about animation is within those pages. another good recommendation, especially if you think very technically
(like a programmer) is richard williams' "animators survival kit". it breaks animation down to the nuts and bolts of what's going on, frame for frame, in a very easy to understand way. granted it is aimed at paper animation, but the principles still apply for 3d animation.

and p.s. i feel your pain, i'm an animator trying to learn programming so i can make my own games, and i'm like "how difficult is it to program?"

 

That all depends on who you find to do it. Just like outsourcing modeling. I've found people that charge $1000 and people that charge $200 for the same work. Some artist are just starting in freelance and need the work and will charge less.

For example I'm currently a character animation student and I'm going to start to put my services out for freelance work in a couple weeks. Now I'm not hard up for work, but for your example "girl jumping a rope" I wouldn't charge $750-$1000. Maybe $200 and I feel I'm a very competent character animator.

If it was a backed project with a descent budget I would charge more of an industry rate, but for most of the work around being low budget indie work I would stay low.

And it also depends on the complexity of each animation. Two 24 frame animations, one is an idle and the other is a walk cycle. The idle would cost less then a walk cycle due to the simplicity.

 

Now, see, that's why the professional rate I'd charge is between $750 and 1000. The quality of animation I'm talking about is on the www.animationmentor.com side, rather than the limited keyframe animation style of say Hanna Barbera.

One style takes almost no time at all, while the other takes around a day or so to plan out and then a few days to a week to animate (and then revise and then rerevise until it looks great). Of course, if an animator is good AND super fast, it would take them less.

Usually, good AND fast aren't compatible.

As I've said before, I've contracted professional, hollywood-level animators over the years. They aren't cheap.

 

Yes I agree and I am currently a student at animationmentor.com. So far an amazing school. Im about half-way through school right now, but anyway if your talking feature film type animation quality then yes your looking at a pretty penny and slow turn around time. Feature film animation studios usually expect around 80 frames a week of animation out of each animator. My current assignments at Animation Mentor are around 200-250 frames and they give me 4 weeks to finish. Thats 1 week of planning and 3 weeks of animation.

Now game animation is not as complex and would have a quicker turn around per animation. Walk cycle: 24 frames, no real heavy planning required and animation finished in about a day. Cost: Industry going rate for an animator 0-1 year exp. in industry: $20+ hour: 8 hours $160. Of course the catch is how many animations needed. Walk,run,idle,crouch,climb,swim,shoot,reload,sidestep etc..

But then again this all goes out the window when your talking freelancing for indie projects. Freelancers can charge as little or as high as they want depending on their situation. Some may be hard up for the money or need to build a reel/resume and others can afford to charge more and hold out for the higher paying projects.

 

Unless I'm mistaken this has nothing to do with Collaboration so much as it's a general discussion about animation and whatnot. As such I'm moving the thread to Gossip. Correct me (politely, via PM) if I'm wrong, otherwise please use appropriate forum sections when posting, thanks!

 

I agree with what DigiLusionist said.... and everyone else here.

And yes, for the record, if you're clever and you have the software to support it, use MoCap.

On my last project, (when using 3DsMax), I purchased MoCap biped animation files from a sub contractor on the GarageGames website, and then built my animations off of those. It worked very well and was fast.

I only paid a total of $50.00 for the animations and I was able to tweak each of them to use with several different models. Economical and fast.

But yeah. Animation from scratch is très difficile. I bought Paul Steed's "Animating a Character in 3Ds Max" years ago and its a good book but be prepared to either spend a LOT of time on it, or purchase/ hire outside help.

 

I dont think its that difficult (or more complex as other things) .... that is if you understand the flow of movement of the body.

It is very time consuming, thats for sure.

 

Quick studying books about Disney techniques is very helpful when you begin

 

@Tom: Yeah, I think this thread was originally aimed at getting a ball-park estimate of the cost involved in working with an animator, so the original intention may not have been as off track as the thread became (no complaints here).

However, most of my needs are now being met by christophe's (FroGames) super-awesome, neat-o wonderful prototype pack!

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=25698

That, plus his forum pic competes with you for silliest forum image.

-Charles :wink:

 

LOL, at least I'm in the running!

I'm glad the thread move was on track, even if off-target given your original intent.

Rock on!

 

Yes, animating by hand is time consuming.

Being a lone developer for my game, I depend on software to shave off as much development time as I can (so I can hopefully finish my game in my lifetime! )


For animating my characters, I have yet to find anything within my main 3D animation programs (Cinema 4D, Softimage Lightwave) that allows me to churn out decent animations like I can with DAZStudio with the Animate+ Plugin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6p4...93415463&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=42
http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/0/animate-plus-bundle?item=9010&cat=_m=d

Using this, I was able to setup this quick walk about in less than 2 minutes:


For me, this package is powerful enough to let me create my own canned motions in addition to what's provided or can be purchased.

Then I export my animations into Cinema 4D where I have Cactus Dan's excellent CA plugins for tweaking but most of the time I can get by with my aniMate+ motions.

DAZStudio's Puppeteer and PowerPose are the other excellent tools to help with my character jaubs!

Good enough for my purposes...

-Will

PS - If the links don't work, just do a search at the DAZ site for "Animate" and look at the video tutorials

 

Yes for those that can't afford an animator there are options out there like mocap and things like DAZ3D plugin, biped and CAT that you can get some descent quick walk run animations out of. I know in 3DSmax you can use CAT and Biped to animate walk/run cycles along paths and even over surfaces. You can also import mocap and blend between mocap files. I assume most 3D packages can use and blend mocap.

 

I updated the first link in my post to point to a YouTube video - this one also shows Puppeteer in use.

Thinking about how UT is working on Unity's animation tools - I was looking at how the camera was being animated using Puppeteer and I was saying to myself damn, that'd be a nice tool to have in Unity!

-Will