What are your biggest issues with 3D animation?

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello all,

My name is and I work in Product Development for .

We are really interested in engaging with the developer community and want to understand the key challenges you face in 3D Animation.

Maybe it’s rigging? Poor quality MoCap? Issues animating non-humanoid characters?

Whatever it is - I want to hear it. Hopefully myself or one of the team here can help.

Thanks,

2

Rigging, definitely rigging. It’s a royal pain in the butt. Easier rigging would make life wonderful.

3

Especially for an indie developer the high price of a mocab session is a big problem + the kinect/… stuff is just in a moderate quality :slight_smile:

4

Yeah same here with the rigging.

I’d also have to say melee animations can be tough because you want them to be responsive but also visually satisfying to the player.

5

I don’t really have a problem with rigs, but weighting a mesh to a rig is difficult–that’s one of the things I like about Mixamo, since they have the automatic system that works pretty well for the most part.

6

I have my own solution for auto-rigging and auto-weighting (which I can clean up, modularize and share if there’s interest - it requires your character come from Makehuman tho), my issue is in mocap. Hand animation takes much too long for two animators to tackle everything in a timely manner without burning themselves out and the current low-cost animation solutions are mediocre at best. Professional mocap is just too expensive. We really need something in the range of a few hundred dollars with actual 3D tracking.

7

Have you looked into Kinect mocap? it actually works pretty well, main limitation is the amount of space it can capture which means you won’t be running around.

8

Yeah, this is the exact thing I’m talking about tho. It’s far too jittery and never gives me a good result. Even using iPi Soft with kinect, for all it does mitigating the jitter, I end up with popping and weird artifacts - and that’s after setting it to refine and waiting dozens of minutes.

9

Thanks a lot guys. So, from what I understand the biggest issues are:

Difficulties with Rigging
Obtaining decent MoCap at a reasonable cost (Kinect not sufficient) - mid range solution required.
Weighting a mesh to a rig is difficult

The development team will soon be producing regular ‘Master-Class’ papers for the Indie Developer Community on these and other topics. These briefings will be distributed to all of our WebAnimate users via email.

You do need to sign up to WebAnimate to get them, but I’m sure you all are anyway. And its free.