ill be taking my first steps into animating a 3d game tomorrow and wanted to ask.
precisely: if I Implement a bunch of animations for a base “stand in character” which is fully rigged and ready to be animated, will it transfer well when I inevitably change that stand in character to look how I want.
aka can i use a mannequin for now and replace that later with a random bandit/cowboy/pirate or whatever.
or do I need to get my Characters set up before I try to animate them.
thanks for any answers I will check this tomorrow before i get started.
As long as the rigs are the same height there shouldn’t be any issues switching out the character, and associating it with the animator controller, as long as it is the humanoid rig. Can also use generic - if the exact same rig is used, with same names and sizes for all bones.
Height determines the distance how the walk/run (movement) animations perform on the characters. If the temp character is 1m tall but the final character is 1.8m tall - edits will be needed. There can be no discrepancy in height if using generic rig setup, if you want the animations to map properly onto the new character.
Also watch out for ‘extra’ bones. If you decide down the line you want to control secondary items with bone based animation included in the rig - that will require additional setup in the animator controller - and could cause a lot of ‘rework’.
Simply stated though - you can create a ‘placeholder’ character even with final animations so you can work on game/level design, while also creating the final 3D character.