3D animation question

H

Handstand

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Hello everyone,

I've been reading this forum for a while, and just recently signed up. I have an animation questions that i'm hoping maybe someone can offer some advice/ point me in the right direction. I know this is a DVX page, but I'm hoping some people here are also pretty hardcore in animation

Anyways here it goes, I came across an awesome fight animation: http://gametrailers.com/umwatcher.php?id=74358 by this cool cat, Monty Oum.

It kind of inspired me to try to pursue a career in Game directing or being an animator (basically someone who gets paid to do stuff like he did). I took one Maya class that was a bit difficult to follow and didn't really help me learn the steps needed to do what he did (more about rigging).

I was wondering about two things:

Do you thing he went through the whole process of creating and rigging each character? or did he extract the models from a game. if so do you guys know any tutorials or places i can get a simple rigged human being (i saw one for 500 dollars, ouch.)?

If i do give up on learning, i did save up a bit of money to maybe hire a college grad to help create this. Do you guys know any websites i can post on to find ambitious college student that will know how to do something like this?

Any questions or clarification let me know.





 
Just from a glance it looks like machinima to me,

essentially its a relatively new "art form" medium for filmmaking,

you use a game engine with either players "acting" out the moves OR use a script based program that directs the animation.

Usually people create custome "mods" to create the people and props and environment.

The tutorials exist google around "Machinima".

The othe method is classical full CGI, either motion capture or keyframed is used to animate characters.

You could use 3d max's biped (out of box) solution to automactically rig a model with a few clicks then just move the person as you wish.

Some free human models exist online too if you wished to play with those too.
 
thank you for your response. I'll definitely look into that Machinima.

I was thinking about using that program Poser 7, but it seems like quite an expense to get anything that is not in the package.
 
Well for animation as complex as that clip that you showed earlier I would hesitate to use Poser to do it, and remember poser will not have any environments to place your characters.

You may be better of going the Machinima route.

In fact the easiest Machinima is "The Sims, Movies" which basically jumped onto the machinima craze and made an entire game dedicated to machinima.

No deep learning requried, just buy the game and ger stuck in :)
 
Thanks for the reply! I wanted to use this to map out some complex fight choreography that i had in mind.

With only researching Sims for an hour it doesn't seem like you can use key frames (like punch him in this exact spot) It seems like more like moving a general behavior (make him sit). I'm correct? or am i totally crapping this out ?

The reason i wanted to use Poser is the fact that they make files for the biped actions (like running) that would save me alot of time creating. But you have a very good point of the environment that poser can't help to.

If you have time, you're probably alot busier than me!, what are your thoughts on Motionbuilder and how much time that saves when only doing animation?
 
Halo 2 is a famous game for machinima making. I've helped make many upon many films in Machinima for the xbox games. Normally the best thing is something similar to fraps, a capture card perhaps. There's lot's of details on it via google as Anhar said.
 
Well sadly machinima and similar routes (although real-time in nature) are still hacks (in my view) and if you want absolute control then you will need a full blow 3d application.

Motion builder is what the profesionals use for animation (i've not used it myself) so I can't comment about it, but I would assume its not a simple tool that you could pick up straight away, for the best part most of the animation can very easly be done in ANY 3d application, eg Max/Maya/XSI/C4D/etc..

But learning to animate is in its self an art as well, hence the reason we have animators, unless of course you want to use mocap, but then you will need a mocap studio and also the need to clean that data.

One "Poor Mans mocap" is when you use video overlayed in your 3d application, you then manually keyframe using the video as your guide, works quite well I've done it myself (guy doing a backflip), its kinda tedious but it works well when enough time is spent and of course it doesn't cost anything.

So basically just shot the action sequence using real actors, then split it up into scenes, (may note of the camera angles of each shot) use locked down cameras, if you have more then one camera even better.

Then import this into your 3d appliction and keyframe by hand using your video as the guide.

Then just save the motion files and apply to your rigged characters and then you can animate the virtual camera to any angle you want.
 
Ooops, fogot to mention is that if you spend some money you can of course buy ready made, rigged textured + animated models

Once such company I liked was Rocketbox Studio, check out the soliders and military models they have, they even have a huge collection of animation motion that comes with it, ready for use out of the box:

http://www.rocketbox.de/cc.htm
 
Cough* cough* 3000 dollars. That's a bit steep. theoretically I only need two people. I def need to learn more about the motions. I didn't know you can apply the same motion to an entirely different model. crazy-ness! I really wish i studied for college rather than a stupid advertising degree.


I think i'm going to put a job posting for student animators in the NYC area


thanks for the help!
 
haha that's funny i actually saw those on youtube when i was searching for an example of what i wanted. that's really cool. is there any tutorials online that you used to try that out?
 
its just basic biped skinning and loading mocap data.

also for the final one you will need to look into using shadow/matte material and camera matching + compositing tutorials (to blend CG into real world video/stills)
 
The big contenders of animation programs are Maya, 3dsmax, Softimage, Lightwave, Cinema 4D (edit), and Houdini. These are all the pro tools most commonly used. Pixar has there own software called Renderman, and I've heard that it is similar to maya. They also have made their render engine available to Maya with a plugin called Renderman for Maya.

There are also open source programs, Wings 3d and Blender. You can use either of these programs for free. Wings is much easier to learn in comparison to Blender, but both are powerful applications.

One other option is pretty sweet. You can get what is called the Softimage Mod Tool. It is a free version of the software that integrates with game creation nicely (edit: i.e. Microsoft's XNA package), but it must be used for non-commercial use only.

I hope this is helps anyone who needs direction in becoming an animator.
 
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I'd highly recommend blender to learn with. It's free and there is a huge user base that can help you with all your questions. Make no mistake though, "animation" is not a simple thing. I went to school for 6 years to learn it, and just now am I getting results. (can't show you any, working on a secret project :/)

But just keep at it.
 
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