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UE3 Home > Animators

Animators


character.jpg

The job of the animator is extremely important in modern game development. Characters make up a large part of any video game and, quite often, those characters are human beings or other familiar creatures. how they move and look on screen can make or break the immersive experience of the player. The human eye has an uncanny ability to detect flaws in the movement of living things, and especially the movement of human beings. This makes the animator's job even more difficult as they not only have to work within the constraints of the engine in terms of memory consumption and the technical limits of what is possible, they also have to do so while making movements that can fool the human eye into believing they are natural and real.

Animations are created in external applications, such as 3D animation programs like Autodesk 3dsMax and Maya. Or, some prefer to use dedicated animation tools, such as Autodesk MotionBuilder?. All of these programs provide the ability to manipulate and keyframe the rotation and position of the bones or joints of a skeleton over time. The selection of frames that make up the animation can then be exported from the external application and imported into Unreal Editor as animation sequences and saved in animation sets. When applied to skeletal meshes with matching underlying skeletons, which have also been imported from external applications, these animation sequences drive the skeleton, deforming the mesh, to recreate the desired motions.

Unreal Engine 3 and its animation system provides many tools and features that make creating believable and realistic animation possible, and thus making the life of the animator that much easier.

  • fbx.jpg
    Technical documentation and tutorials over using the FBX pipeline to create content for and import content into UE3. Static Meshes - Skletal Meshes - Materials - Animations - Morph Targets.

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