I want to add an animation where my character is fighting another character just like the trooper demo or the infiltrator demo.
You sure do have a great question, I an sure like to know the answer to that as well. As in reference to the animation or cinematic, are you referring to the bik type of videos as you see in many other games?
the cinematic i want is a video as seen in other games.
hi, so the cinematic is a video or animation imported in FB?
Wow, ok now I understand what you are asking for and it is a huge tale as well. Where can I start here. All AAA game trailers are made by a team of professionals including directors, concept artists, digital artists, 3D modellers, character animators, visual fx makers, matte painters, sound producers, composers, motion capture technicians and many more. Plus extensive post-processing and very complex simulations (for cloth, smoke, fire and liquid effects) are also involved. The production of such trailers are very demanding and takes months (sometimes a year) for a large team to complete. They are using all kinds of expensive software dedicated to certain tasks.
Some of them are: Maya, 3DS Max, ZBrush, Cinema4D, Photoshop, After Effects.
Most characters for current gen are built to extremely high detail for normal map generation anyway, so often those assets can translate easily to the pre-rendered realm. The main differences are in shader complexity, rendering, and lighting.
A studio can do this all internally, particularly someone like Blizzard who are known for cinematics. It does require some individuals with a specific skillset so you need to keep them busy with work. Today most companies find it easier to farm out pre-rendered cinematics to external houses that focus on that sort of work.
You can often create these 3D game trailers in game engines themselves, such as Unity3D. Currently, UCLA is offering a course on 3D Real-time Animation which uses Unity. I have no idea if it can even be done using Unreal 4. Hopefully, one of the kind people at Epic Games can shine a light to this for us.
Learning blender (Free and Open 3D Creation Software) will help you create 3D objects that you can import into Unity3D and then manipulate using scripts. Additionally, you could use Maya to create 3D objects and somehow import them into Unity3D. The list goes on and on. Additionally, you don’t have to use Unity3D.
If you like a game’s cinematic trailer, try looking for their blogs online and see if they’ve got any posts about how they produced their trailers and what technologies they used. Don’t forget that large companies spend lots of money to make the trailer look good since most users will choose to buy based on their impressions of the game. I’m positive a lot of people document the development of these time-consuming, labor-intensive, money-sucking trailers.
Perhaps these page will show you some ideas on what is done.
andGood luck with your game!