Hello all,
My name is Jerry and I work in Product Development for Ikinema.
We are really interested in engaging with the developer community and want to understand the key challenges you face in 3D Animation.
Maybe it’s rigging? Poor quality MoCap? Issues animating non-humanoid characters?
Whatever it is - I want to hear it. Hopefully myself or one of the team here can help.
Thanks,
Jerry
Facial expressions.
Rigging, skin weight painting is time consuming, but mostly the process of animating.
Mixamo is a great service, maybe check them out as an example of a very valuable service for indie developers… I wish their animation library had more animations.
File conversion from blender to max, maya to max, other to max, max to maya.
I wish there was a standard animation file superior to .fbx that retained keyframe data and IK links. FBX is good but it would be awesome if there was a standard.
Maya to Max isn’t as terrible as it used to be but the merge and load animation features in almost all the animation packages kinda suck!
@p87 , there are a lot of other sources of mocap data on the web that can be brought into Unity but the raw stuff looks twitchy if an animator doesn’t work it up properly. Have seen a lot of rough stuff lately not properly processed.
All of us can agree on facial expressions being a challenge… 
Anyway, my experiences: For me, animation is something of a mixed bag, as it really depends on the complexity of your model.
In my case, I normally use human-like rigs for my characters, but recently, I had to do something slightly different to make a whip. believe me, it didn’t take long for me to work out how to animate it, but it did look a little weird at first! 
Overall though, the biggest challenge for all animators is to get the animations looking as natural as possible, especially with humans, but very well applies to dragons, monsters, weird creations you make, etc.
And for me, the longest time-hog at times is having to name all the bones after the rig is finished. For my most recent animated model, I had to come up with names for over 20 bones! (and I reckon 75% of those were in the whips… )
And another wall a lot of animators, including me, run into is when you go and put the most bad-ass pose on your epic model, but then go “wait what?! why is the arm bending in such a weird shape?!” 
Yes, I am pointing at getting weights right! 
In fact, I almost forgot to mention one of my WORST personal animation jobs (The result actually didn’t look too bad though… ) And that was for a dragon-like creature. The bone weights wouldn’t generate because the re-mesh modifier wrecked the topology, so I had to make all the weights manually!
Overall, the biggest challenge is to get the topology of your model just right, so that when you go to rig your character, any auto-weight tools work smoothly for you!
Personally though, animation processes are tough and grueling rigging, skin weights, bone adjustments, animating, all types of things, having to know motivations and story and feelings and situations to deliver a convincing performance,I love it!
It’s a labor of love, it feels great to work on an awesome model other artists have put together and deliver a tight animation as it was originally envisioned.
But transferring a rigged model from blender to max sucks!
Your first point: AGREED!
Your second point: AGREED! I found this out myself, except for me, it was the other way round (Getting a 3DS max rig into blender intact… )
IMHO, our biggest challange is the current create/update workflow cycle that Unity propose.
The challange is to not loose all the tuning of point 3 when importing again. That is especially hard when renaming or resizing animations and when introducing/changing bones.
There is almost no support from Unity for merging things when importing the new animation. The only “support” is summarized as “Most of the time, you keep links to the animation clips and sometimes you may keep animation events”.
Things we would like to have:
Hi,
I m struggling with the same issue since over a year, I putted it on the side until now, expecting someone would have found a solution but I m still at the same point today.
this is about a bunch of jump and climb animations that shake when playing in game but they look fine in the preview window. setting everything in original or not doesn t affect the shaking issue, checking “bake into pose” neither.
So, I think, it would be great to have a real help or free tutorial more accurate to explain how to setup some kind of animations, for example, or, at least, a preview window that renders the visual as we get it in game, instead of pushing Play everytime
thanks
G
Thanks a lot guys. So, from what I understand the biggest issues are:
Facial expressions
Issues with rigging & the process of Animation
File conversion through the pipeline (why no standard ‘animation’ file?) & Unity workflow cycles
Natural looking animations
The Ikinema development team will soon be producing regular ‘Master-Class’ papers for the Indie Developer Community on these and other topics. These briefings will be distributed to all of our WebAnimate users via email.
You do need to sign up to WebAnimate to get them, but I’m sure you all are anyway. And its free.
http://www.ikinema.com/webanimate/
Jerry
The thing in bold… That’s the biggest challenge all animators face, so a tut on that would definitely help a lot of people!
I could help with this if you like. True, not all of us are super gurus at this, and neither am I, but I can offer what I know!
As for “issues with rigging,” I can help with that too. this issue actually covers a very wide area, in my opinion, as it really depends on the way your geometry is modeled.
Anyway, let us indies know if any of us can be of any help!
Regards
-FuzzyQuills