Animation

[DejaVooDoo]

I'm not up on the history of these type of forums, but in my experience with cgchat, polycount, and now ga ... it's always focused on modeling/texturing. What about the other half of the character art pipeline ... animation? I do both, and I truly find one as important as the other. Creating an exciting, believable, fun animation takes just as much hard work and dedication to detail as sculpting a mesh or painting a texture. Is there a particular reason animation is not a topic covered in these forums? Is it just an area the forum mods do not dabble in, or is it so different that it is just left up to other forums to tackle?
I think one major detail of a good, quality model is its articulation and ability to be animated well. That is a topic I don't think I've ever seen talked about here.
I guess some people may not consider an animator an 'artist', but I totally disagree. Good animation can be like a symphony ... so many small parts flowing smoothly together to create a masterpiece!
That is what makes people 'artists' anyway ... the ability to create.

[Marcus Dublin]

Animation is extremely important in the game art pipeline and not just for characters but vehicles, weapons, etc. I think the reason you don’t see as much animation talk is due to it’s barrier to entry, it’s much easier to model, sculpt, and texture something really quickly as opposed to creating a quality animation. On top of that the 3d game art forum culture leans more towards the other half of the pipeline due to it’s ease of use in terms of posting finished work, WIP, etc. I mean it’s much easier and less of a bandwidth hit to post some jpgs, gifs, bmp, etc than it is to post AVI files of animation frames. This is probably why we’ve never seen an animation comp, or animation required for modeling comps. At the same time rigging and skinning lack the sex appeal to many artists as opposed to say showing off the latest Cyborg model or whatever. Animation has so many subtleties it’s difficult to appreciate if your not sure what to look for but everyone can appreciate right of the bat a sculpture off the Hulk.

Animators are truly artists in there own write and anyone who disclaims this fact is either living under rock and or has never been in a professional production house. I mean when we play games we don’t play with static meshes, on top of that animators usually have to deal with almost all other areas of the game art pipeline from dealing with modelers not making models correctly, texture artist putting details in places where a character may stretch in a weird way, AI, Level designers, Audio, you name it. To get back to your point I’d love to see more animation discussion and maybe a dedicated area with not just personal work from artists but links to other animation sources. Maybe some video from the latest 360 game your playing to talk about and critique why in which you like the animation to say Virtua fighter. We’ll see what happens as the forum grows and if more talented animators jump on board.

Marcus

PS: I’m not a trained animator but I’ve always had an interest in it and would like to study it to get a better understanding of the art and science behind it.

[BiG ToE]

well, I'll tell ya this. If you just need to get some animation juice flowing with other people, Threedy has a section just for "speed" animations. But it's more like a month. Right now we are kicking each other in the nuts. Who knows what we do next month. http://forums.3dtotal.com/forumdisplay.php?f=68