Sunday 22 April 2012

UDK vs CryEngine 3 SDK - Exporting animated meshes

We've seen how to make and export static meshes, now it's time to look at meshes you can play animations on. As in the previous article, I'll investigate how the pipeline expects the data to be set up, then take a look at how you export that data, and what happens in the process.

Note that I'm focussing on non-character objects (i.e. humanoïds, animals, etc) because, well, characters aren't the only ones that need animations, and because it is slightly easier for me to generate data for them. I will cover characters though. Someday.

Why should I care?

Pretty much the same as usual, to see how restrictive or flexible the pipeline is, what's done in the editor, what's done in the modelling package.

Saturday 7 April 2012

Animation Chronicles - Episode 7: First animation, playblast and graph editor

I am now all set to animate my helicopter. I'll need a bunch of animations to make my tests and I'll start with a simple one : a looping animation of the rotors turning. This will be the opportunity to talk about a few of Maya's animation related features: referencing, playblasts, and the graph editor.