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.
Related
Is there a way to animate wind for certain game objects?
For example, branches of trees should gently move, like there's a breeze in game. Not gameplay, more like a special background effect.
If it's not possible in code, what would be the best way to create proper sprite images?
I see a few options to actually achieve that Wind Effect.
SKFieldNode, It allows you to actually apply physics effects to nodes. And if you want real tree branches that can move based on the physics, you should combine SKFieldNode with SKPhysicsJoint. When you combine those two you can actually create indepedent Branch Nodes to receive some kind of force to simulate a wind effect. To understand what you can do with SKPhysicsJoint, check out this guide. This solution can get really complex and hard to achieve with superficial understanding of SpriteKit Engine, but you can create an amazing effect using it. Personally, I would not recommend if you have deadlines to attend, physics always get buggy if you lose your grasp on what you are doing, you may invest a lot of time trying to achieve this using physics.
Create different animation of your tree responding to wind movement and control which animation frame you should use at that specif case. I Would highly recommend this one, because you will have control over what is going on with you tree and people that play games don't pay that much attention to what is going on with background, altho is a good thing to think about it from the game experience.
Create your tree textures and change the anchor point to be at the place you want the effect to be more effective and responsive. The farthest the coordinate in the node is from the anchor points coordinate, less effect from your SKAction it will get.
Sorry for my English, is not my native language.
I want to begin working on a big sandbox game with lots of oceans and islands. This will obviously require a very big map.
I've spent the last couple days researching the best methods on doing this and so far have figured out that
I need to split the terrain into tiles/chunks.
I need to have the player only load those tiles/chunks that are closest to them and unload those further away.
That being said. I would rather avoid flooding my game with a bunch of assets and want to kind of handle things on my own and hard code these systems in myself.
Some questions,
Can I just create a massive 20k x 20k terrain using Unity's built in terrain editing system and then worry about splicing and loading/unloading the tiles later?
or do I need to build my big terrain in an alternative program and import my terrain in then handle the splicing and loading situation?
Also, when it comes to multiplayer. I assume I would just need to basically do the same thing just for each client?
I would appreciate any other tips or guidance on doing this as well. Thanks.
Splitting into multiple chunks but ones that arent too small seems to be the better option, maybe like 4 quarters, that way you are not flooding with assets, you would disable all quarters except the one the player is in.
The problem with making a big terrain is, while you could get a tool from the asset store to split ur terrain later, you will get into the headache of resolutions and sizes and overall I guess its better to split it into 4 pieces or a bit.
You would have a trigger point where you want the game to load the terrain, and depending on which trigger point the player entered you would load the corresponding terrain piece.
For multiplayer, you would do the same thing for each client, making your big terrain as 4 smaller terrains and then loading the corresponding quarter. Tell me if I missed something.
I'm currently working on a game using Three.js. I've been studying software engineering for four years and have been working professionally on backends for two, but I've barely touched on graphics aside from some simple Unity experimenting.
I currently have ~22,000 vertices and ~8,000 faces according to renderstats.js, and my desktop (above average) can't run it above 20 FPS. I'm using Lambert material as well as a single ambient light, so I feel like this isn't too much to ask.
With these figures in mind, is this the expected behavior for three.js rendering?
I would be pretty sure that is not end of the line and you are probably missing some possibilities for massive performance-improvements.
But just to give you some numbers first,
if you leave everything fancy away (including three.js) and just render an ultra-simple point-cloud with one fragment rendered per point, you can easily get to rendering 10-20 million (yes, million) points/vertices on an average GPU.
just with simple shapes and material, I already got three.js to render something in the range of 500k triangles (at 1080p-resolution) at 60FPS without problem. You can probably take those numbers times 10 for latest high-end GPUs.
However, these kinds of numbers are not really helpful.
Some hints:
if you want to debug your rendering-performance, you should first add some metrics. Renderstats is good, but I'd recommend integrating http://spite.github.io/rstats/ for this (see the example).
generally the choice of material shouldn't matter too much, the GPU is way more capable than most people think. It's more likely a problem somewhere else in the pipeline. EDIT from comment: In some cases, like hi-resolution displays with slow GPUs (think mobile-devices) this might be less true and complicated shader-code can slow down your site, but it might worth be looking at the other points first. As the rendering itself happens off-thread (so you can't measure it's duration using regular tools like the devtools-profiler), you can use the EXT_disjoint_timer_query-extension to get some information about what is going on on the GPU.
the number of drawcalls shouldn't be too high: three.js needs to do a single drawcall for every Mesh and Points-object rendered in the scene and too many objects are generally a far bigger problem than objects with lots of vertices. Reducing the number of drawcalls can be done by merging multiple geometries into one and making use of multi-materials, vertex-colors and things like that.
if you are doing postprocessing, the GPU needs to render every pixel on screen several times. This might as well massively limit your performance. This can be optimized by merging multiple postprocessing-passes into one (I admit, that'd be a lot of hard work..)
another problem could be on the JS side: you should use the profiler or timeline-view from the chrome devtools to see if maybe it's the javascript that is taking too much time per frame (shouldn't be more than 8-12ms per frame). I've been told there are ways to optimize the javascript-performance as well :)
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
I'm a structural engineering master student work on a seismic evaluation of a temple structure in Portugal. For the evaluation, I have created a 3D block model of the structure and will use a discrete element code to analyze the behaviour of the structure under a variety of seismic (earthquake) records. The software that I will use for the analysis has the ability to produce snapshots of the structure at regular intervals which can then be put together to make a movie of the response. However, producing the images slows down the analysis. Furthermore, since the pictures are 2D images from a specified angle, there is no possibility to rotate and view the response from other angles without re-running the model (a process that currently takes 3 days of computer time).
I am looking for an alternative method for creating a movie of the response of the structure. What I want is a very lightweight solution, where I can just bring in the block model which I have and then produce the animation by feeding in the location and the three principal axis of each block at regular intervals to produce the animation on the fly. The blocks are described as prisms with the top and bottom planes defining all of the vertices. Since the model is produced as text files, I can modify the output so that it can be read and understood by the animation code. The model is composed of about 180 blocks with 24 vertices per block (so 4320 vertices). The location and three unit vectors describing the block axis are produced by the program and I can write them out in a way that I want.
The main issue is that the quality of the animation should be decent. If the system is vector based and allows for scaling, that would be great. I would like to be able to rotate the model in real time with simple mouse dragging without too much lag or other issues.
I have very limited time (in fact I am already very behind). That is why I wanted to ask the experts here so that I don't waste my time on something that will not work in the end. I have been using Rhino and Grasshopper to generate my model but I don't think it is the right tool for this purpose. I was thinking that Processing might be able to handle this but I don't have any experience with it. Another thing that I would like to be able to do is to maybe have a 3D PDF file for distribution. But I'm not sure if this can be done with 3D PDF.
Any insight or guidance is greatly appreciated.
Don't let the name fool you, but BluffTitler DX9, a commercial software, may be what your looking for.
It's simple interface provides a fast learning curve, may quick tutorials to either watch or dissect. Depending on how fast your GPU is, real-time previews are scalable.
Reference:
Model Layer Page
User Submitted Gallery (3D models)
Jim Merry from tetra4D here. We make the 3D CAD conversion tools for Acrobat X to generate 3D PDFs. Acrobat has a 3D javascript API that enables you to manipulate objects, i.e, you could drive translations, rotations, etc of objects from your animation information after translating your model to 3D PDF. Not sure I would recommend this approach if you are in a hurry however. Also - I don't think there are any commercial 3D PDF generation tools for the formats you are using (Rhino, Grasshopper, Processing).
If you are trying to animate geometric deformations, 3D PDF won't really help you at all. You could capture the animation and encode it as flash video and embed in a PDF, but this a function of the multimedia tool in Acrobat Pro, i.e, is not specific to 3D.