So I’ve been looking into lots of game dev stuff and what caught my eye was in-game cutscenes. What I was wondering is how the heck do Devs go about animating for those cutscenes? Like, I know they do it in programs like Maya or Blender, but how do they get the animations to fit in the game world?
What I mean is say for example I want a character to sit on a chair and put his hand on a desk while sitting. How would an animator get the reference of the table & chair to get it to fit perfectly when they play the animation in-game?
I’ve looked it up and surprisingly enough there isn’t any info about this specifically. Thanks in advance!
The way we do it is have the animators use object references in their animation package (A block in place of a table, or the table itself) so they can see what their animation needs to do. For picking up objects you can also align the objects to a pose before starting the scene.
This way objects they move about are perfectly in place for the animation to come over and get it.
Then when we play it in engine we just make sure the animation is lined up before it starts to animate.
That’s really interesting actually, so you just have basic 1:1 models as reference while animating withing whatever program they use. Huh 
Yeah pretty much, we also sometimes move thing around a little in the scene after to suit the animation, but that is usually only minor tweaks to make it look perfect