Animating Virtual Heroes: the Workflow of a 3D Animator

Learn the types and basics on animation, the workflow of a 3D animator, and essential tips for the pros on our team.

In the world of video games, animation is a full-fledged artistic tool that can help convey an in-game character‘s nature, mood, and thoughts. And while animation can indeed connect the player and the character, it can also disrupt a user’s immersion in a virtual world, spoiling their impression of the gameplay and graphics.

Creating art for 3D animation requires us not only to think about how people actually move in reality, we must also understand how to properly emphasize each movement in order to evoke certain emotions within a player.

In this article, lead animators from MY.GAMES, Konstantin Turkin and Leonid Mikheev, as well as senior animator Daniil Shipitsyn, will share their expertise. They’ll describe the different types of animations, the difficulties animators face, and their workflow.

The animator’s journey

Animation is a fairly complex area of graphics with a very steep threshold to entry; an animator can only achieve consistent results by going a long way with the profession. If we compare an animator’s current level of growth with a viewer’s perception of the results the animator produces, we get something like this:

As you can see from the “results” line, it’s easy to face initial disappointment when starting out with this profession — that’s why there are so few animators. (And especially little good ones.) But it’s not all that bad! Animation is a wide field, and it’s possible for anyone to find something they enjoy doing and to develop a passion for their work.

Types of animation

Getting back to the topic at hand, animation is indeed very diverse, with dozens of subtypes: these can be categorized both in terms of production method and by the scope of the work.

If we’re talking exclusively about 3D animation, then, in terms of scope, we can divide it as follows:

• Gameplay animation
• “Acting” animation (cutscenes, cinematics, ads, cartoons)

Let’s give both their dues.

The animator’s primer on gameplay animation

When talking about gameplay animation, our paramount concerns are clarity, character responsiveness, and player comfort. Users should be 100% certain that the corresponding events onscreen are under their complete control. Actually, from this perspective, the “character” in a game is actually part of the interface itself. So, gameplay animators must pay special attention to feel, perception of time, and the smoothness and seamlessness of the entire game system — and the better a system works, the richer and more compelling the user experience.

When working on gameplay, animators must prepare a sort-of constructor from which various small actions may be combined and swapped in and out depending on the game context. If an animator can achieve this, then they’re able to create gameplay where users have a real, stable connection with the character and the game world.

Acting animation basics

“Acting” animation is a completely different world. Unlike gameplay, all these events are linear and without variation. With these, the animators have complete control over the camera and the character.

But even though there is less interaction-fueled dynamism, there are still special requirements imposed on each frame: the composition itself, dynamics, cinematic credibility, and detail, must all be in impeccable form — and facial animations must look perfect!

Acting animations, in particular, demand an absence of flaws: polygons shouldn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere, geometry intersection should be avoided. This is demanding work, and in general, the meticulous are welcome in the 3D modeling profession.

It’s worth noting that both of those subtypes of animation are created by using exactly the same techniques. Let’s talk about production methods.

Animation categorized by production method

In terms of production method, two groups can be distinguished:

• Keyframes
• Mock-ups

Keyframes are completely human-crafted animations and mock-ups are the recorded movements of an actor which have undergone special processing, (a.k.a. “cleaning”). Both methods have their pros and cons.

The pros and cons of keyframes

First, let’s take a look at what keyframes have to offer, then we’ll look at where they might fall short.

Keyframe pros:

• A richer picture; more pleasant to look at
• Keyframes offer a much higher degree of abstraction, a sort-of “animated metaphor”
• We can do anything; to contrast, not everything can be recorded as a mock-up (although stories are shared between animators detailing how a live elephant was recorded once)
• Movements are perfectly adjusted, nothing superfluous
• Individual production is cheaper

Keyframe cons:

• It’s expensive to large big volumes and it takes much time
• Difficult to find a skilled specialist
• Advancing to a sufficient skill level entails high requirements

Analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of mock-ups

Let’s move on to mock-ups now.

Mock-up pros:

• Relatively cheap per volume
• Much lower entry threshold; less skill requirements
• Realism, authentic movements
• High detail of movement

Mock-up cons:

• Result often look boring due to poor visual dynamics
• Limited by what was filmed
• A lot of unnecessary movements, visual noise, which is meaningless to the viewer
• Boring to work with

Let’s figure out how to prioritize these areas.

Gameplay or acting?

For most animators, the decision to prioritize gameplay vs. acting animations changes at different periods of their career. Luckily, since, in both cases, production is the same, animators can try both worlds and decide which is cooler from them!

The market regularly experiences a personnel shortage, so studios often agree to hire and train candidates. For example, it’s common that someone from the world of cartoons is hired and then trained for game animation creation, or vice versa.

If we’re talking about the beginning of a career, I would recommend starting with Keyframe Acting — you’ll gain the most valuable experience this way, and that experience will truly be your rock when completing any task. — Konstantin Turkin

Keyframes or mock-ups?

There is no single answer to the question of Keyframes vs. Mock-ups. That said, some of our internal teams use keyframes for the most important things and mock-ups for events in the background. Moreover, there are a number of tasks where animators take a mock-up and do some serious manual reworking.

The result is a hybrid development format, where animators get their work done faster (and cheaper) by leveraging pre-recorded material, and, at the same time, are able to reap all the advantages of a keyframe approach. But for such work, a team needs specialists who know both development methods and are able to effectively combine them.

Animation alternatives

There are also alternative ways to implement animation — the rapidly developing area of procedure animation. For instance, with Cascadeur, a 3D keyframe animation software for humanoid (or other) characters, the developers achieved the most outstanding results in this field by writing a system for creating physically correct movement: jumps, acrobatics, and complex choreography are created in Cascadeur in semi-automatic mode while taking into account reliable body physics and ballistics. In addition, they have a neural network that helps to set anatomically correct poses.

There are also simpler systems, such as Richard Lico’s methods. He offers a special, flexible approach to animation, which greatly expands a developer’s options and speeds up work.

And, of course, we should point out that procedure animation is possible in the game software engines: physical and dynamic systems, tissue simulations and procedural body rotations. Game developers often use such systems to make the picture even more convincing for users, and additionally, to alleviate extra workloads from developers. After all, if a machine can do the work, why should a person?

The criteria for evaluating animation quality

It would seem that making a movement that shows the process of going from point A to point B would be simple and uncomplicated. A couple of keys and — voila — everything moves. The problem is that few people would actually want to look at such a low-effort result.

Here are the key criteria for understanding if an animation was a success:

1. A lot of contrast is good, both in terms of overall form, within each individual frame, and contrast from frame to frame (of course, within reasonable limits). Most people only perceive seven events per second; and not all animations are correctly perceived by viewers: the principles of a good picture were wonderfully described by Richard Williams in Animator: Survival Kit (which describes the 12 principles of animation in detail).
2. If the viewers see that you’re “deceiving” them, they’ll stop watching the animation. The laws of physics, logic and anatomy are so imprinted in everyone’s subcortex that, for instance, a violation of the laws of inertia within just one frame can cause the entire animation to look questionable.
3. On the other hand, if you’re not “deceiving” at some level, that’s no fun. With just a timely violation of the laws of physics and logic, we have an “animation metaphor”. (This kind of unrealistic result doesn’t fly everywhere. To understand, start exaggerating everything and see how far you can go.)
4. A good animator always asks the following: “Why would people watch this?” What you show to the audience should be understandable, but not overdone (for instance, we do not need to portray the “heroism” of a character with every single movement) this is necessary not only at the picture level, but also at the meaning level. What story can you tell “between the lines”?

What does the workflow of a 3D animator look like?

Finally, let’s talk about what a 3D animation’s workflow actually looks like in practice. The classic process goes something like this:

Thumbnails — Blocking — In-betweeners — Spline — Polish and Details

Here, we move from thumbnailing, where the animator sketches out their ideas, to blocking with keyframes, then to intermediate ones, transferring the animation into spline (to animate) and then, finally, polishing and details in an attempt to make the animation more convincing.

This development process was inherited from classic 2D animation. In that field, keyframes were drawn first, then clarifying ones, and then a crowd of in-betweeners are hired to fill in all the gaps — now this is totally done by a program.

Still, this is a good workflow for someone who is trying to understand animation for the first time; a beginner needs at least a couple of dozen tries to be able to even start to follow in the footsteps of their animator-ancestors.

Once an animator has developed more experience, they’ll gain confidence, and at this point, animators often find themselves adapting a new workflow:

Thumbnails — Sketch — Details

With this flow, the idea stage is still present, but there are no more blocking and Spline stages. Attention is being directed, not so much to poses, but to the dynamics and the overall impressions that a movement makes.

The body, legs and arms are created, but the animator doesn’t try to set the final poses here, just an outline. At this stage, you need to look for silhouettes in terms of larger forms and, most importantly, look for a rhythm. Since you’re only moving a few large character forms, searching takes less time.

If you’re working for a client, these self-explanatory stages get added to the process: “Receiving a task” at the beginning, as well as “showing to the customer” and “edits” at the end; those final two stages may be repeated several times.

In general, the process of creating character animations depends on many aspects — but the idea, the concept, is always the fundamental element of this process, because it’s the idea itself that should “hook” the player or viewer.

I like to plan the entire timeline in advance and work through blocking. I set keyframes, check balance, silhouette poses, and spacing so that the scene has an interesting rhythm. Often, along with key poses, I immediately do a pose breakdown, turn on interpolation, check the rhythm and spacing of the scene, make edits and clean the arches of the body and limbs. To avoid getting into a mess, I recommend beginners make a checklist and stick to it. — Leonid Mikheev

How often do animators resort to mock-ups?

Mock-ups have become a fact of life even for those animators dedicated to the manual work behind the craft. Indeed, just one mock-up session can save weeks of routine manual work for a studio — of course, as long as this tool is being properly used.

That said, because of their convenience, it’s easy to get lazy and start recording everything with mock-ups. That is, animators can completely turn off their minds, thus leaving all creative decisions at the mercy of actors and directors. This mock-up-centric approach often results in visually poor and boring projects. And in today’s aggressive market, such projects will be doomed to a sluggish and inglorious existence.

Animators and ready-made animations

Animation libraries are most often used by small indie teams that simply can’t handle the full range of animations planned for a project. Large studios, of course, make animations from scratch. However, across a project’s lifetime, a library of created animations gets accumulated, and the teams, of course, work with that.

Sometimes a purchased animation pack can solve some simple tasks; third-party packs can be also useful for prototyping and testing some hypotheses.

But if the task is to fully reveal a character or to create a unique, harmonious gaming experience, then libraries won’t help: high-quality animation is always context-sensitive, and standard solutions won’t provide the desired visual richness.

What is the hardest part of being an animator?

The hardest part of being an animator is perfectly understanding the context. Any imbalance can ruin the impression. A good animation is always perfectly balanced: every part of the body is in its place, everything happens at the right moment.

For example, let’s say you’re working on a smile. If you pull the corner of the mouth a couple of millimeters higher than necessary, the character will immediately look boisterous and silly; miss by a couple of millimeters, and the smile will acquire a sarcastic, mocking connotation, or worse, become a meme (remember Mass Effect Andromeda?)

Or, let’s say you’re working on an attack, like a kick. If you go too little, it won’t be powerful enough, or even look ridiculous. Overdo things, and the result is ridiculous again, or the character will noticeably break down. If you’re late by one frame, the animation will sail away. Not enough frames and it will be unclear what is actually happening in the scene.

Sometimes you can predict difficulties when imagining the desired action in your head. If you start the work without this mental exercise, it might be a waste of time.

To sum things up, here’s some advice from our experts to beginning animators:

• To improve your skills, compare your animations to good, established work by other animators; the most important thing is to note the differences and try to move closer to that work.
• Remember, there are no unimportant poses in animation. Even a passing pose should be one you’d want to print using a 3D printer, place on a table, and admire.
• The easiest way to improve your work is to show it to a friend, a senior professional, and get detailed feedback. If not possible, try to analyze the errors yourself and, perhaps, even recreate the scene, having a ready-made analysis.
• The most important thing in animation is the concept (not perfect technical implementation), because if it’s boring, no polishing will save it. The primary goal of animation is entertainment, everything else is secondary.
• Use references as much as possible. You can follow the movements of the characters or stand in front of the mirror yourself and see how your body moves.
• It’s crucial to learn how to work with poses, to be able to quickly create them, first in your head, and then in the editor.
• Study the classics: 3D animation differs from classical animation only in execution. All the rules and techniques that apply in classical animation work in 3D animation as well.