Animating Real- Time Game Characters-P9

Animating Real- Time Game Characters-P9: My intent in writing Animating Real-Time Game Characters has been toshare my work methods, thoughts, and ideas about animating real-timecharacters in 3ds max 4™ and character studio 3®. Any factor that affectsthe animation process using these two tools has been covered.
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Animating Real- Time Game Characters-P9230 Animating Real-Time Game Characters FIGURE 6.50 Adding a Time Tag gives you a nice shortcut to an animation clip. Move your Time Slider to Frame 50. Click on the Add Time Tag box, and a new option is there for you to click on: 20 Idle. Click on it, and the Time Slider automatically goes to the first frame of the idle (Figure 6.51). FIGURE6.51 Time Tags will appear when clicking on the Add Time Tag message box. Since Widge will be used for a WildTangent export, you will need to know the start and end time of the animation when you export the ani- mations later. Bring up Time Configuration again, and change your End Time to 60 instead of 59. Then go to the Time Tag menu and select Edit Tag (Figure 6.52). FIGURE 6.52 Edit Time Tags to change the name or delete a time tag. When the Edit Time Tag menu pops up, select 20 Idle from the list and rename it in the Tag Name field to Idle Start. Hit OK, and then go to Frame 60. Click on Add Time Tag again, and create a new time tag called Idle End (Figure 6.53). Chapter 6 Keyframe Animation: Part 231 FIGURE 6.53 Add the end of the idle motion to the Time Tag list. The benefit of using time tags should be obvious. They are definitely most useful when a character has a substantially large number of anima- tions. With the animation complete, save your max file, skip ahead 20 frames, and youre ready to move on to any other animations required. If you want or need to, load Widge4.max from the Chapter6 directory on this books CD-ROM (Figure 6.54). FIGURE 6.54 Load Widge4.max to see how the alien psychos supposed to look.SUMMARY Before animating, decide whether or not to use keyframes, motion cap- ture, or a combination of the two. Whichever method you choose, think232 Animating Real-Time Game Characters of your 3ds max file as an animation folder that holds all your characters moves. Prior to setting any keyframes, make sure you prepare your Biped for animation by assigning a transparent material to it and/or creating a Named Selection Set out of it for quick selection. Once youre ready to begin animating, start by saving Frame 0 in the Bipeds default position, exactly as it was when attached to the mesh. Do this using either the Track View or Set Key buttons in the Motion panel. When working on an animation, define its range in the Time Configura- tion menu. You can also define frame rate and playback speed there. Copy keyframes either in the Track View or via the Time Slider bar, but always keep a buffer between animation clips for easy identification. Learn the effects of the tension, continuity, and bias settings of the de- fault TCB animation controller. Use them to create smooth loops for your animation clips. Always strive for secondary motion to add that extra bit of detail to your animation. Use Layers to add this sort of additional mo- tion over the rest of an animation. Finally, make navigation through your collected animations (your animation folder) easier by adding time tags to the start and end points of your various motion clips.KEYFRAME ANIMATION: PART II 233234 Animating Real-Time Game Characters Y ou now have the fundamentals mastered for using 3ds max and character studio to create keyframe animations, but Widge was just your appetizer. As an enemy character for a game, he has a rela- tively less demanding animation set and mainly plays the role of target. He sits idle, runs, walks, attacks, reacts to being attacked, and dies (Fig- ure 7.1). This isnt such a lengthy list; the player character, on ...