Just 4 Steps to Make a 3d Animation: from Rigging to Animation and Engine

Animation is the soul of the work. The characters come to life when the animation is done carefully. Each blink, each small action design and execution is the key to reflect the character’s personality. There are three major types of animation: 2D animation, 3D animation and stop-motion animation. Once we have created a 3d character, it can be further transformed into 3d animation.

With the growth of people’s increasingly rich spiritual and cultural needs, the development of animation also faces a series of opportunities and challenges, and the image value of animation characters is gradually elevated to the height of commercial operation. The success of an animation image not only means the success of the animation film, but also foretells the huge market and profit generated from it, so only fully designed animation characters will get a better market.

Today we will talk about how to animate your model. Let’s take the four actions of the dwarf as an example: idle state, walk, run, and attack.

• Plug-in installation

Download the ARTv1 plug-in, install it into Maya, and proceed.

• Character skinning production

First of all, we have to build the skeleton of the character, after the skeleton and various control points are done, make the mask, draw on the model the degree of influence of each control point on the muscles and bones, and make the character move through the control rigging.

• Animation simulation

Prepare the 3d animation scene, then make idle animations and start animating for the model walking cycle. Then start animating for the running cycle. Add the attack action simulation, add keys and reset the timeline, and finally finish the attack action simulation.

• Importing into the virtual engine

After the character binding and animation is done, we import everything into the game engine and put everything we did together. We import the finished animations into the engine and start making character blueprints and animation blueprints. Then, add the attack animation simulation. Then we use montage to create the animation layer and finally export the whole 3d animation.

Xara Mahmoudi is a senior 3D character animator and character technical director with over 8 years of experience. He is passionate about animation, game development and filmmaking and has worked on projects such as The Dark Phantom: Dawn Of Darkness, Dark Madness, Qbang. He offered a online animation course at Wingfox: The Dwarf Warrior II: from rigging to animation and engine

This course is very useful for those who want to be involved in the game character process. If you are a modeler or a character binder or even an animator, you can get something out of this class. Because this course will impart some very practical knowledge that will facilitate your understanding of the workflow of the other parts of game character production.

In this course, you will learn to create complex and friendly character bindings that provide 3d animations for the game. These animations will then be imported into the game engine and integrated with the bound characters. By using the ARTv1 plug-in, binding becomes very easy and convenient. In addition, ARTv1 has a very durable control selector and other useful tools that make animating even easier. This course is suitable for students who have some basic knowledge of maya and ue4. You can systematically learn the core knowledge of game characters, suitable for beginners to intermediate and advanced progression.

This 3d animation course covers the three main topics of binding, animation and engine animation testing. Besides the modeling part, you can learn different parts of the character process. Rigging is some times very troublesome and complicated, but with the help of ART plugins, everyone can bind and mask characters.

It is suitable for game action master, film and television animators, and related professional students to learn. Students who do not have the foundation of maya and virtual engine are not recommended to learn, it will be very overwhelming. It is recommended to learn other basic courses on the site before studying this set of courses in depth, which can help you better understand the different techniques.

If you want to learn to make 3d animation in more detail, welcome to join this animation course.