I am new to animation world.I intend to make short animation films. I have started learning blender and have grasped modelling, rigging and rendering concepts. Recently I found out that game engines(unity, unreal) can also be used for animations.
Should i switch to 'unreal' instead as I can learn only a single tool over a period of time?
Or would blender be enough to make good quality animation?
Please suggest a complete animation tool for a beginner.
There is no point in making short films in game engines , if you want to make short film that users interacts with it somehow like a visual novel or where users input will matter in story then you should use a game engine because it is considered a game , but if you just want to make a short film then just use animation tools no need for a game engine because you don't need real time rendering in animations then you can get a far better rendering output by not using game engines and for animation tools there are plenty of them to use these are my personal suggestions
Maya+vray animation , rendering
mari , substance painter&designer texturing
Zbrush modeling
unity is capable of rendering each frame of animation in a second with almost the same quality that you would achieve with offline renting using vray or arnold for example , but using them each frame would take around 15 minutes that is
a 10 min animation needs about 3 months full time rendering
that's why I personally never use anything other than a game engine for short animation
but I use offline rendering when one frame is intended though
Related
Apologies if this is a very specific and out of the blue type of question. Tekken 3 was one of the best games that left a lasting impression on me, growing up, especially the cinematic intro. For me it's still one of the best and coolest game cinematic intros ever, even compared to this era (giving it's been over 20 years now since the game's release). Even though I'm a software developer, I've always been intrigued by how such amazing cinematics intros are created. I've researched on Google everywhere, but unfortunately couldn't find a source that discloses such information. I know it's been over 20 years since and the game is quite old, but I still find it strange that there's no discussion anywhere online on how its amazing cinematic intro was created (what software(s) was used, how the cinematic effect was created ...etc). The best resource info I could find, simply talks about the game characters, moves ..etc. Nothing about the opening cinematic intro. Just for those who need a reference as to what I'm talking about, here's the video from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsvtUxEFQaU.
I'm aware it's a very complicated process that requires a highly experienced team to work on it, but I simply want to know what software and what kind of processes/effects were used (even guesses from experienced animators/developers would suffice) and as much information about the process as possible, would be really appreciated. There are numerous tutorials online about how to make computer animations on 3D std max, Maya, Unity and Unreal, but they all look like children Disney animations or animation from the actual game graphic itself, not the cinematic effect rendering you experience from Tekken 3 intro. If you watch its intro you will know what I mean. I would really appreciate any help and would be very intrigued to learn the process if somebody could provide me with a direction and some information on the software and processes used, just from a very high level view.
Thank you so much in advance for the help. You will literally be answering one of my main life's mysteries :)
but they all look like children Disney animations or animation from the actual game graphic itself
I'm sorry, but did we watch the same video? It's entertaining for sure but visually nothing impressive.
This doesn't look like an in-game cinematic so it's probably using a 3d animation package like 3DsMax/Maya/Softimage/etc.. These packages are also used for feature films so I'm not sure where you're getting at that it all looks like children Disney animations. They can also be used for live action for photo realistic renders. Though these days 3DsMax is mostly used for games, Maya is what's mainly being used for films as it's what the studios are using (for the most part, there's exceptions). These packages also include solutions for particle effects, and cloth simulations. Right now Houdini is king for these 2 though.
Of course what matters most is the skills from the team to make the most out of the software.
The process generally goes like this:
Create a script to define the story
Create concept art for characters and locations
Create assets (3d models/textures/shaders)
Rig the assets so they can deform
Animate the assets into shots (modeling/rigging/anim can work in parallel)
Do character effects on your finished shots (cloth, hair, rigid dynamics. This depends on your budget and is optional)
If you're using any other software for lighting/effects, you probably need to export your scene to cache data (alembic is a popular format)
Render everything out
Use a compositing software to add all different elements together and make final tweaks to the shot (optional)
I'm still missing a few stuff, especially for bigger productions, but that's the general idea.
I'm working on a school project and we are developing an interactive story with the A-Frame framework. The idea is to visit your old house and to have memories about good old times. So we're using 360° images in sky entities and we're switching those images between present and past.
I'm working on the transition when switching images, but the only good transition I can develop is a simple fade to black... My idea would be to get something similar to CSS Mask Transition here : https://tympanus.net/Tutorials/CSSMaskTransition/
Is it in any way possible to get a similar result ?
If not, would you have any idea of a good and easy transition that I could do ?
Just so you know, I'm not used to web development, we only have 3 days to finish this experience and I'm completely new to the A-Frame framework (I've been working on it for 3 days now only).
Thank you very much for you time and have a nice day !
Augustin.
A transition similar to that will be pretty involved to implement, I don't think it is possible in the span of a couple days with not much graphics experience. You'll mostly likely need to write your own shader that changes the alpha value of each pixel. Or you can maybe create an alpha map GIF or video, and use that to control the alpha values of the texture.
A-Frame has an example for transitioning between 360 images. For better performance, you have one image, do a fade to black, swap out the image, and fade back out: https://github.com/aframevr/360-image-gallery-boilerplate
I'm evaluating canvas libraries, and my needs are:
I want to make it easy to build nice looking buttons that move
around and on which I can easily capture events. Button drawing
helpers would be cool
I'll be building a system for others to use to create animated
scenes combining moving test, images, and sound. I won't ever be
drawing complex shapes myself, the most I might be drawing is
buttons around some text.
I do not want to be totally insulated from the low level machinery
of the per-frame drawing callback. Helped along sure, but
I'm going to be syncing with Web Audio API stuff and want to keep
access to super tight timing control
I'm comfortable with pretty low level scripting of animation, would rather not have it be something that changes Canvas into some
totally different paradigm, but not sure on this point
needs to work well for touch on iOs
I'd ideally like to be using one with good docs and a high truck number. The state of Canvas libs reminds me of the state of JS libs
10 years ago, and I'd rather not invest in something that doesn't
have an actual "team" behind it. Truck number == 1 worries me.
You flagged KineticJS, so I can say a little bit about how that would work.
1) It's a great tool for tracking shapes on a canvas, capturing clicks, and moving them around. It's easy to place an image on any shape, but I would use another program to make those images.
2) Even if you don't do a lot beyond buttons, KineticJS provides some nice features for manipulating the canvas, and I'm sure you'd use a lot of them in making tools for others.
3) KineticJS provides an animation object that repeatedly calls the draw() method for you. You define your draw method in order to create animations.
4) It's more of a wrapper around canvas. You work with a Stage and Layers, but there is still a lot of transparency to the canvas itself, and you can always do direct manipulation as well.
5) You can capture a broad range of events including "touch", "click", etc. It's easy to treat them the same when appropriate or differently if you need to. Furthermore, you can simply mark shapes as "draggable" and it handles all that appropriately.
6) Kinetic has had spectacular documentation and examples, but in looking now, the tutorials seem to be missing from http://kineticjs.com/ and I can't find them elsewhere. That's minorly worrisome, but the docs are still there and my guess is that they'll be back up soon since KineticJS is still under active development.
I'll weigh in on #1:
Nice looking buttons:
Hands-down...use Adobe Illustrator to create a set of button vector images (.svg).
If you need low level control over the button design at run-time then convert the Illustrator images to canvas drawing commands with this great plugin from Mike Swanson:
http://blog.mikeswanson.com/post/29634279264/ai2canvas.
The key here is that canvas will scale the vector button for you so you're always getting a professional, polished look both on a small mobile screen and a large desktop screen.
You could use canvas to build each part of a button from scratch, but don't reinvent the wheel.
A good animation library is Greensock. It also helps you build timelines (kind of like Flash timelines).
http://www.greensock.com/gsap-js/
As to canvas libraries, check out Stackoverflow's sister site that offers software recommendations:
http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com
Good luck with your project!
I am a video game programmer working on building my own video game. I've decided that in order to build my game, I am going to need a large amount of animation files from 3DS Max.
My question is, what is the best approach to building a huge number of animation files? I'm looking to create 20 movement animations + 4 fighting styles * 18 attack types + 8 shooting animations + 10-20 magic casting animations for an estimated total of 128-138 animations (and probably more that I can't think of now).
I'm personally only planning on creating a small number of these animations myself, but I am trying to design the best workflow for creating a huge number of animations so that once I decide to create these animations, it is a feasible task.
I am familiar with how to create animations manually in 3ds max, but this approach seems slow, and would seem to take too many manhours to complete. I am vaguely familiar with motion capture, but I don't know any approaches for this or tutorials, and I don't know if this would work out at that scale.
Should be only few suggestions to make many animations quickly in low budget:
Avoid 3ds Max bones, use Biped system with Skin modifier, so you don't have to spend much time creating the rig.
Plan your game design adjusted to your possibilities: I mean, simple character models, without complex effects like hair, clothes and face expression morphs.
Since motion capture is expensive you can use reference videos inside your scene putting them in a plane's texture to help you creating animation keys.
Use MaxScript to solve repeating task. MaxScript is easy to learn. And there is lot of free plugins at: http://www.scriptspot.com/
There is lot of work involved you can't avoid if you want to create original content, unless you choose the expensive way:
The really fast quick approach is to use a service like: http://www.mixamo.com/
There you upload your model, auto-rig it and apply animation in less than 3 minutes each one. They have a database of motion captures and also provide custom motions.
I'm in the process of starting to build a strategy game (think warcraft) for the web. I've been doing research on HTML5 Canvas and CSS3 sprites and still can't decide which technology to use.
The game won't be completed for another 6 months.
Any advice would be appreciated.
As you probably hear so frequently... "It Depends..." ™
My suggestion would be consider the feel of the application you're after. If you are trying to build a very graphically rich, mostly-images application, then I would use Canvas. However if you are trying to animate some graphics, but have the page remain and behave more "Web-like", mixed with other HTML content, I'd give CSS3 a try.
Two additional points:
Currently, Canvas is better supported than CSS3 animation/sprites.
If you use Canvas you're going to be implementing your own render loop and animation code (or making use of a 3rd partly library). Your code create animation by compositing the various layers of each frame, applying movement, and repeating. You can't simply say "move this image a little to the right". You'll have to do that yourself.
The EA web game "Lords of Ultima", as dull as it is, is an excellent example of a WarCraft-styled (well, it's more city building as there are no visible units) overworld, with animations and everything, built on a pure HTML and CSS sprite base. It looks and performs well and I think the square block box-model nature of HTML suits that kind of tile based design, especially since a lot of the image processing (embed an <img> or a <div> with a background, change background-position for animation) and click/mouse handling is done for you in simple html.
If you do go canvas you have to manage that yourself which will greatly increase the complexity and dev time. You'll have more control of minor elements and improved performance, but then you'll also lose (if it's at all important), greater backwards compatibility with older browsers. So it depends on how complex your design is and what kind of performance you need.
Use Canvas. If you use CSS sprites to build a game, then you are going to make a lots of <div>'s which performs operations on the DOM, which may slow down and also have a lots of focus and compatibility problems.
It may pay off to trade the development time for performance on <canvas>, by the assumption of "A code will be maintained forever".
I think CSS3 sprite system takes more time to develop, because you need to handle browser compatibility.
Browsers like IE 8 (8 or 9?) are using GPU to accelerate graphics, which lets you get the free lunch of Moore's Law.
There's pros and cons to both. Currently, Canvas is better supported then is CSS3, but you said that your game won't be done for another 6 months, by then the support for CSS3 could be much much better. There's also a lot of other variables here, such as: What browser will the game be viewed on? How advanced are the graphics you need to animate? etc... I would say that canvas would be better for support of the current generation of browsers and for gaming graphics, however CSS3 would be quicker, but wouldn't even come close to the support or graphics handling. But it doesn't seem like your in a rush to get it done.
Basically:
Canvas: Graphics, current support in users browser
CSS3: Speed of development
Ether will work. But for now I would use Canvas. However, 6 months in the tech world is an eternity, things could be a lot different then.