using preset animations, what's your opinion

[Jellyfish]

Some may argue that the process of using presets is lazy and leads to lacklustre quality in an animation. I would agree with this somewhat, I think for larger animations such as running you would get a much better quality if you were to animate for the enviroment, it just brings that extra bit of quality. On the other hand for things such as breathing and idle swaying I would think presets are just fine.
I'm interested to know what other people's opinion on this is.

[Nookyava]

The main issue of using presets, even to create the appearance of breathing, does bring in laziness while learning to animate from scratch does take more work and is frustrating but will pay off in the long run. I think though that if you look at Practical Problems he uses the presets fine when it comes to making it look like a real game is going on, but have it affect the main focus of the movie. I suppose each has it's own place and time.

[Jellyfish]

Yea, I see where your comeing from, one will never learn anything from using presets, you could alternately make your own presets such as walk cycles, but then that does raise the generic unfitting movement problem again

[R234]

Well, I'll argue that, being no animator and not looking to become one either, my movies would be a lot more lackluster if I didn't use imported sequences. So, for people like me who have good animation ideas but barely any animation skills, they can be very useful.

If you are planning on becoming a good animator though, I'll have to agree that you shouldn't use them too much.

[raptornx01]

I think using presets are fine. but like phoneme tables, should be tweaked to fit the situation and to fine-tune the animation.

[Pte Jack]

Each method has its own merit. Could you imagine how long or the number of animators that would be required to put out a Dreamworks or Pixar or any big ticket movie if the film companies didn't use canned or mo-cap type animation. For most of us still learning, it takes hours to get a pose to look right (I'm speaking for myself here by the way). Custom animating takes talent and time, but obtaining that initial sequence, well, if you ramp your transitions between animations just right, canned animations can work quite well.

[Jellyfish]

True, one rule in are, particularly animating, is know good shortcuts. As long as the imported animation looks fitting then by all means, don't waste time animating every iota of the model, you could also blend presets with your own to make a good result

[Nookyava]

For example this took me an hour and half just for this small bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrB3opqzz3U

It's not that good of an animation but getting it to look humane while making it interesting took awhile. It was all custom animated and hell, I was confused for a bit on how to make it work. So I do see where you guys come from with using the imported and working off that and I agree it can help with such as breathing, or moving. But you also have to take into consideration that a lot more can be done when all custom. I'm not saying that some great things haven't been done with using imported but I feel the quality increases tremendously when you do create your own.

[Jellyfish]

^ I agree, time + effort = quality after all

[psi onix]

for me it's not even a default option to use presets because i don't use Valve models, only customs. i would have to resort to some various tricks to use already created preset stuff which i haven't bothered to look into figuring out because i don't mind doing the work myself in the graph editor.

[R234]

I know I NEVER could've achieved anything near as good as this:
http://www.freewebs.com/ssasde/photos/undefined/SAAtwirl.gif
... if I hadn't used the Engi's selection screen sequence, that's for darn sure ;)

[raptornx01]

Many custom models do have presets available, they just need to be obtained from elsewhere. Facepunch, sfmbox, deviant art, etc.

[Pte Jack]

@ Psi

You know you could aways try this technique for your custom models... (R234's method of transferring actions of one model to another)

http://youtu.be/6W2PamTlSYQ

[psi onix]

Първоначално публикувано от raptornx01:

Many custom models do have presets available, they just need to be obtained from elsewhere. Facepunch, sfmbox, deviant art, etc.

yeah i have read about that a little bit... apparently with lots of models the animations and stuff can easily be transfered during the ripping & porting process but i don't know much beyond that. I don't believe there are any animations for the Models i am using for my current project (Transformers Dark of the Moon models), but i will take another look, good idea.

[psi onix]

Първоначално публикувано от Pte Jack:

@ Psi

You know you could aways try this technique for your custom models... (R234's method of transferring actions of one model to another)

http://youtu.be/6W2PamTlSYQ

yeah that looks pretty straight forward, thanks for linking. i was also thinking of a similar way to do it by simply locking the respective bones to one another then applying the playhead slider to copy the motion over to a different model. i have done that before with jet plane model that i animated and later had decided to use a different model but wanted to keep the animation work i'd done.

[Dr. Chaotic Lord, PhD™]

I like using preset animations for background characters that aren't important, as long as one exists for what I need them to be doing.