How Great First-Person Animations are Made - 10 Tips for Animating FPS Characters/Weapons in Blender

before we dive into all the technical stuff about how to set up the project and get animating I want to take a few minutes and share some of the interesting tips and tricks that I found while researching the topic and also share some resources that you can check out if you want to learn more beyond what's just covered in the course first up some general do's and don'ts number one gameplay comes first while we obviously want our animations to look cool it's more important to make sure that they communicate the action without getting in the way of the player a short snappy but otherwise boring animation can't be better than a fancy one with lots of anticipation and flourish because your player is going to be watching this hundreds if not thousands of times it might be fun the first couple times but after that the distraction or extra time it takes can be frustrating you don't want to make your player wait around an extra second every time they do an action just so that you can show off your cool animation skills that said we do want to try to use the limited time we have well and make things feel fluid and natural and most importantly fun but just be aware that that can be a secondary goal check out this video by new frame plus on the animation of Smash Bros characters to see how you can strike a great balance between style and function the animators in that use the fact that they only have a few frames to actually influence and inform the style and end up with a really satisfying result I'd also highly recommend his video on overwatch this first-person animation and how the different animation styles for different characters can convey personality it's a perfect example of how if you're really careful you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to style versus functionality I'm going to try to strike a good balance in this course but feel free to lean a little more one way or the other if you think mine is either too boring or too fast a common technique for making your animations feel snappy to the player is to not start on the first frame when animating you need that first frame of idle to make sure that the transition feels natural but in-game you can start on the second or even third frame sometimes and jump the player right into the action as soon as they hit that button on that same topic of not frustrating the player don't block whatever they're trying to look at with the animation this GDC talk by David Helsby about the first-person animation of destiny refers to the combat corridor the area down the middle of the screen that the player is focused on try to keep that clear as much as you can so that they don't miss anything important in that same talk David also mentions the idea of framing the reticle it's a nice touch that just feels good and instead of blocking the player you're helping them stay focused on that most important area another great lesson from him is why you should be super careful when animating the camera when we run our head stays somewhat stable but unlike a chicken still rotates and moves a noticeable amount when you try to animate that though you're going to make your players sick because their sense of balance while sitting down and then what they're seeing in the game don't line up and that misalignment is what triggers motion sickness if any of you have trouble reading while riding in a car you know what I mean so translate it a bit for effect if you really need some camera shake or something but stay far away from rotation especially while walking running or when the player is directly in control of the action if you need to throw some in for effects during a cutscene or something like I did for my shot of the robot getting up then that's fine but try to do it sparingly I also thought it was interesting that in destiny and a lot of other FPS games there's a second camera for the character with its own field of view maybe your game has an adjustable field of view or maybe you decide that you need to change the focal length later well if you've only used one camera all that hard work you've done on the animations is suddenly out the window because it totally alters how it looks and feels the solution is to have one camera for the player with a set field of view we just copy destiny and used 77 because that felt good and then a second camera for everything else that can be freely adjusted to your liking without messing the other stuff up with those design tips in mind here are some technical tips that I found helpful when I was first starting out it works either way to have the hand parented to the gun or the gun parented to the hand but I found it easier to work with the gun parented to the hand so that all the characters movements are in one action and all of the guns movements are in another overall you'll end up with less actions to deal with this way and it'll be more intuitive to animate you can then parently left hand to the right hand or the gun so that it follows along the next decision is whether to animate it all in one long go or break it up into multiple actions while it's another case of you can technically do either and it'll turn out fine I found that it's a lot easier to manage by making a different action for each movement and then using the NLA editor to arrange them into a sequence that way the actions for the character and the actions for the gun won't get out of sync or confused as you work your way through them just be sure that you key frame all of the important values including constraint influences so that when you change something in another strip down the road things won't get all funky also this way is just really easy to import into unity as all those actions are separate animations as you work save a pose in the pose library for the default poses like idle for each weapon iron sights etc so that you can easily revert back to them at any time since it'll be different than your resting pose you won't be able to alt G and alt are your way back to safety lastly we need to structure our assets so that they import well into unity or unreal in the course I show you how to link two separate asset files into a new animation file using proxies or the new library overrides which by the way are super cool and then take the baked animation data back into the original files for cleaner exporting this is the way to go if you're working with a large team or a huge number of assets but if it's just you and you're doing a few simple animations for one character and only a couple of weapons then it might not be worth that extra hassle and you can just do it all in one file and not really worry about it now that you have those tips floating around in the back of your mind I think we're ready to get started I hope you found them helpful and I'd encourage you to take some time to check out those videos I mentioned at the beginning if you're curious and then jump into the course when you're ready see you there

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 667,102

Keywords: blender, tutorial, first-person, gun, game, unity, unreal, 2.8, eevee, rifle, weapon, character

Id: dclA9iwZB_s

Length: 6min 9sec (369 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Russian_repost_bot]

So many triple "A" developers need that tip on changing the FOV and not stretching the gun and player arm models. As a PC player, if you're developing for PC, this is a must.

The days of locked FOV on PC games is over.