• Home
• T3A:Online
• Tournaments & Games
• Replays
• Tutorials
• Mods
• Maps
• Downloads
• Forum
• Showcase
• Users
• Links
• Help

Quick Lists

Top Rated Popular New Updated Last Comments Users

First thing if you want to start animating is to check this older tutorial here!

it covers basic of rigging/animating for SAGE engine step by step. with this i can only add some my personal tips how to animate.

so here we go 10 tips for animating (might be more...or less)

0. if you are using renx don't forget to save your work often...and backup your files cause sometime it can became corrupted even if you didn't open it at all. well maybe get rid of Renx completely and try to get 3DS Max 7 if you can. it is way better than Renx.

1. always animate with rigged model. it is only way how to prevent errors like twisting the bones.

2. look for suitable skeleton all around. it may doesn't fit exactly to what you want but trying to animate all anims for unit is suicide (trust me i try it and failed). best way is if you find anim where you can only edit few anims by touching them here and there...no big work but with great effect.

3. you can combinee anims from different skeletons sometime( well it isnt that often but possible on some skeletons ). you need to have same bonecount and same names for the bones. then try to export it and you will see. sometime only few things are messed up so you can redo those. but if it gets to screw don't bother to repair. it takes too much time and sometime it isnt possible at all.

4. try to find suitable parts of anims. i most likely look for good anim of legs for my new anim. it is really hard to make good looking anim of legs and most of the time there is already suitable anim ingame. nothing kills anim that much as footslidering.

5. even if you are just reanimating or scratch making anim try to find some references of the moves. youtube is really good friend on that. i find that everything that i was looking for...starts for naginata ( japanese weapon ) to attacking bear. you can also try to do the move that you animate yourself. it helps a lot...you get the right feeling of the move.

6. remember that anims are connected together. so if you redo idla anim a lot you will need to redo all the anims that goes from that one. so in the case that you edit idla then you need to edit all attacking anims, selected anims, anims for death and hit and so on .. otherwise there will be a visible step between those anims and it is good. bear that in mind if you want to have one cool looking anim.

7. if you want to animate part of the anim from scratch ( i will take an arms as an example ) i suggest those steps. if you have the anim in Renx/Max select all the bones that want to reanimate. you see keyframes on time slider. select the keyframes in range that you want to redo and delete them ( click right button of mouse on the time slider and select Delete selected keys). always left at least first and last keyframe..because you need to link the anim to the other anims in animset and those are key to that. with that you can start work on the anim.

8. when animating try to only rotate bone, dont move them to the positions. that ensure that you will not stretch the bones. also in reality the joints only rotate no one can stretch his bones. only case when you can move the bone are shoulders on idle anims. this is way that EA use on most of their idle anims. but it isn't correct but they use it since their skeletons lack clavicle in most cases so if you want to move shoulder you cant do it via that and you need to move the shoulder itself. so except of that the only bone that should be be really moved is ROOT bone. well this and all the bones that aren't linked to anything ( weapons, shields, cape bones etc. )

9. when you are animating you don't need to put pose bones on each frame. it is ok to animate only each 10th frame for idle anims and parts of most of other anims. on the rest i usually animate each 5th frame. but at some parts of attacking anims i need animate each 2nd frame cause the move is really intensive and i want it to ge screw. the problems are those free bones that i mention above (weapons etc.). the problem is that their move goes different between keyframes then move of the human skeleton ( skeleton moves are complicated while this free bone uses linear moves) so cause of that you need to pose them more often the other skeletons.

10. cause of problems mentioned above if you want to make new skeleton try to link those free bones to the whole skeleton. it makes animating much easier...for example you can link weapon bone the right hand one. it is fine as long as you don't want that weapon to go off that hand. then i can cause big problems.but one thing you should make for sure if you are making new skeleton and want to make some caped anims for it. like the cape bones together like rangers have. you will have to reanimate the cape on all anims then but it is much easier to do that then to make some anim on EA's capes from scratch.