Maya game character animation for dummies

[loganb]

Okay, I'm new to maya character animation. I'm familiar with character studio, and am a very good 2d animator. I went thru the instant maya tutorials and have been doing indepth learning of rigging, control objects etc... but when it comes down to actually getting the character to move I find too much happening that makes no sense...

so I'm looking for a good starting point for skeletal character animation in maya for games....don't need rigging lessons, don't need squash and stretch lessons, just the brute mechanics of getting your rig to move without disaters.

Do character sets matter? (for game animation) What is the basic idea of character sets?

Does the trax editor matter?

Which editor is best to use -curves, dope sheet?

How do I keep Maya from interpolating my poses until I really want it to inerpolate? Ie, how do i isolate one sequence (like a run) from another (like an attack) with out them interfering with eachother (the attack pose gets interpolated all over the walk cycle)

Why do my minotaurs' arms freak out when I try to wag the tail? (okay that's too specific, but it was the catalyst for this post.)

There seems to be a gap between basic bouncing ball tutorials and the stuff I see in Quake or Jak and Daxter that I don't see filled anywhere. I'm not sure if I'm just an idiot or if these problems are common enough, but they sure dont get adressed too clearly in the help files...

any leads on where to look?

[joojaa]

In reply to:
Do character sets matter? (for game animation) What is the basic idea of character sets?

well character sets are just a mecjanism to collect the data to one place so that you can key them all simutaneousli in a intelligent manner and see them in the graph editor at one time etc. etc.

In reply to:
Does the trax editor matter?

helps to unederstand how the blending between nodes works. but works bad for turning.... not an issue for most testing tough

In reply to:
Which editor is best to use -curves, dope sheet?

graph editor. tip its good to uncheck the autoload slected if you have all your character sets neatly arranged.

In reply to:How do I keep Maya from interpolating my poses until I really want it to inerpolate? Ie, how do i isolate one sequence (like a run) from another (like an attack) with out them interfering with eachother (the attack pose gets interpolated all over the walk cycle)

what do you mean are you using trax or what? or are you klooking into editting curve tangents?

In reply to:
Why do my minotaurs' arms freak out when I try to wag the tail?

probably becuse the tail bones still own parts of the hands. When you made the skin cluster you allowed them to reach too far. Edith wights by painting or edit with homponent editor!

Basicaly the modelling/ animation for games doesent differ much from the rest its just that you use different (simpler) modells to do this on so it should be even easier.

[loganb]

thanks for the response. Every bit helps....

I think I get character sets...it's sort of like having a selection set of all the joints in character studio, so you can easily key all of them.

Right now I am experimenting with trax but it's giving me grief, I'm thinking it's value is limited if I can't learn to create a variety of sequences w/out it...

The problem of different sequences interfering with eachother hasen't actually happened to me in Maya, but I remember it being a problem when learning Character Studio.

As for the arm freaking out, I'm certain it's not a binding problem. It's the skeleton responding in some unexpected way when I animated the tail.

what I'd like to do is create a set of simple game type animations so I can export a sort of demo reel animation.

what would be the best approach?