I know the exact framerate I animate at is theoretically unimportant, since you can alter an animation’s playback rate in-engine, but is there a specific framerate I should be using when I animate stuff outside of unreal? I know television and movies animate at 24fps, and a lot of 2d games like skullgirls animate at 60fps, but I genuinely have no clue what scale I should be using.
Hello! You can chose framerate free but i recomended to use 60 frames timeline in 3d Max or Maya. 60 frames help to avoid strange 360 degres rotation bug. And after importing you can set the playrate from 1.0 (60 frames animation - slow) to faster.
That’s really helpful, thanks for the feedback! Out of curiosity, what’s the 360 degree rotation bug? I haven’t encountered it yet, but that might just be luck on my part 
I assume he is referring to gimbal lock.
Gimbal lock is simply the loss of a degree of freedom in your rotation space. E.G. All the sudden, after a previous rotation, you can no longer rotate on the Y axis.
Technically any engine using quaternions for rotations will have no problem with gimbal lock.
If this was the physical world of engineering, you solve it with fluid bearings.
Ooh that makes more sense, thanks for clarifying. I’ve been messing around with it, and 60 looks way better, so I’m happy there’s no obvious technical reason to avoid it!
IMHO
The norm for animating for games is usually 30 fps unless its something very specific, this goes same with animating films at 24 fps or tv PAL 25 fps, I’ve personally never heard of an animator in the industry setting 60 fps as his or her preferred choice of frame rate to start animating, while you can animate 24 fps and 25 for games, It is usually preferable to do 30 fps, from an animators perspective animating at 30 fps is closer and feels more natural in timing comparatively to industry standard figures like 24 fps. Since animating directly on 60 fps requires the usual timing approach (sense fo timing) to be entirely different in most cases. From Unreal perspective, it is my personal opinion that 30 fps worked best among my tests involving character animation. In most cases locking the import frame rate to 30fps from the fbx settings in Unreal produced best and most accurate results for me.
Furthermore if more frames are required to possibly simulate high speed in Unreal, then unreal can either do this automatically with the 30 fps “usually multiplying it by even numbers” or if you want absolute detail in the motion you can check “Resample all” button from the fbx export from max or maya, I believe this will create in between sampling keys and detail for the engine to consider (never tried it though).
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That’s super-helpful, I’ll probably end up sticking to animating on twos at 24fps… thank you for the help
Note: this was based on NTSC and PAL formats, and, im not 100% sure that applies to the application of animation for games. PAL and NTSC would be film formats and the difference is MASSIVE in that respect. Again, i can not think of a time when animation (for gaming) has the decision of “do you want this PAL or NTSC?”. I maybe wrong, since, im not a game animator on a professional level, so, take what i said there for a gain of sand. Unless i am right, then, im the smartest man aliiiiiiiiive!
29.97 is the standard (again, NTSC). Would you record and animate in 30 or 60 … ? Personal pref i think. I use all 60 and use the 1 tick for timing. 30 is “easier” on the system, but, its up to you. Depends on a lot of things. Have you tested 30 and 60 and seen the difference? Thats what i would do, take a look at how they “feel” side by side and see what feels more natural. Maybe small detailed movements would benefit from a 60, but, general movement would only really require 30… dont know. Just a guess. Would animation sequences be effected by someone, like myself, running 2x 1080GTX’s ? if the games “standard” is 30FPs, and, im playing at (random int) 55FPs, is it effected due to my system over the standard cap of animation (30FPS)? Then again, is the timings messed up if you used 60 FPS and i was playing at 119FPS?
Would putting a cap on FPS @ 30 work? I can tell you, you would have a lot of ****** off players @ a 30FPS cap. This isnt 1997 and your not (i hope) making Doom. Ya, the original lol. It honestly depends on what you are making tho, i believe.
So many questions … so many.
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I think you misunderstand me, NTSC or Pal were given as examples for standards as so film. Games don’t have absolute standards as i also stated and that you could have many types of timelines for it. But preferable from what i’ve experienced and seen mostly 30 fps timeline is used over others to animate in external applications, and yes timing does change per frame basis when you start going over as in animating in 60 fps directly (timing as in sense of time for animators and frames required for a specific action), it is just not convenient, since 30 fps can easily be scaled up to 60 at any given time.
Now when it comes to games and fps there are 2 different things we are talking about here, fps in games has little to nothing to do with fps animation timeline in max or maya etc… these are different. So yes technically if you have 30 fps animated character in max it would easily run 200 fps in game or at 9 fps depending on your system or level performance etc… and when i mention to “lock Fps during import” it means locking the 30 fps of the animation itself and not locking the fps of the engine which is different and independent of this, I believe “locking” may be a bad term to use form my part, my apologies, it is called “Use default sample rate” in the fbx import settings in Unreal, this would preserve the integrity of the motion created at a specific sample rate /fps in max or Maya, I am still not sure why this isn’t checked by default but again with our tests we saw a much better fidelity and less animation deviations in the imported file when this is checked.
Hope this helps somewhat, but yes I have to agree it does get confusing.
P.S. For the record 30 fps lock for a game is not a bad thing or taboo as made up to be, for instance the latest God of War that was showcased runs just a little over 30 (it was even meant to be locked at 30). Same goes with countless other games actually locked or running below 40 fps especially for third person action adventure. and there are very good reasons for this. I must agree though that anything to do with fast paced first person shooters 60 fps would be the ideal target to hit.
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ok cool, yeah i got what you were saying now. thanks for clearing that up. hope you didnt take that as a pi$$ing contest, it wasnt suppose to be lol.
You seem to have much more experience in this then i do, but, would it be more beneficial to use a higher FPS on the animations for fine details (like say, weapons drawing, or, some parcore animations) and a lower one for “standard” stuff like walk/run?
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Sure, no worries at all. Besides we are all learning here, we have been fiddling with game dev for roughly a little over a year now, but we do come from VFX and animation background for features as a profession for a long time.
As for the question, again i can only tell you what has worked best for us and in general from what we have seen work for others, usually 30 fps is what we stick with all the way for everything, even though we tried 24 fps at some point since we are so used to animating for film) but we went back to 30 as it played nicer with the engine. And I say this with us having animation as priority in games, so yes we are very critical about it and if we had noticed something amiss we wouldn’t be using what we have so far.
For slow motion effects usually Unreal can scale up well, but if there is something very specific like a frame or shot in a cinematic, sometimes we would like extreme control over certain places so we animate the slow motion effect and fake it at 30 fps time line and just export it back like a regular animation to be played in unreal at that moment in time.
Good luck!
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