MOBA, How to make Character Skill Animations ? Hold them in place or move by animating?

Hello everybody,

I am Vince Kieft and i am making a MOBA.
I have some questions about how to make the animations for the skills ingame?

Normaly when i make a character i animated the walk/run/ jump animation in 1 place. So at the 0,0,0 location in 3ds max. BUT how do i animate complex attack animations where the character hase to move certain amouth of distances and in diffrent directions? do i animate that in 3ds max or programm it ingame? plz help me with this

Greethings,
Vince Kieft

 

If you use the new animation system (Mecanim), animate your characters in 3DS Max with root motion. This way, Mecanim will automatically move your character the correct distance.

 

An alternate animation process - one I have adapted to allow in-place animation creation and to take advantage of mecanims root motion transformation is to add one additional root bone to your rig in max. First animate in place - if you prefer - then animate the new root bone to make sure the animation matches up with the movement.
Export all with the new root bone which mecanim see's as the root transformation.

Before mecanim all projects I worked on minus 1 asked for in-place animations. The transformations of the characters were controlled by code in the engine. Now (I assume this is why) with mecanims retarget ability of mocap animations on humanoid rigs root motion seems to be desired more than it used to be.

Another alternative - not one I would choose because I can't code - is to animate in place then parent the character to a empty game object which is the character controller - movement controlled by code. I'm sure this process has it's own disadvantages when wanting to consider physics and other things. But it's another option I've seen used in the past.

Update with the process you decide to use.