Proper method of animating game props

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’ve got a question that will surely get a lot of people rolling their eyes, and i apologize for that.

I’ve been researching around a little bit, and i was unable to find a single tutorial that explains how to properly animate game props. All i have been able to find are character tutorials. What i am trying to achieve is to animate a early 1900s camera to fold open and closed, the shutter must open and close, and the film roller needs to work.

Am i to animate it using bones? Key-framing? And is the workflow any different than animating a character? Are there any tutorials about it? The software i use is Autodesk Maya 2015.

If you could help, that would be awesome! If someone really feels generous/brave, i would love to talk to you via Skype. My username is Derek.Verveer If not, any help is very much appreciated here on the answerhub. Thanks!

2

Your best bet is to give your camera a skeleton and skin it then create anims for it all in Maya. The process would work just like a character but be much much simpler as you wouldn’t need a complicated binding for most of it.