Kind of bummed that there don't really seem to be any serious threads about animation on this board. Of course, most games nowadays just use motion capture for everything, but I'm still of the opinion that animations made by hand such as all the animations in Fumito Ueda's games have a special something about them that mocap cannot reach. And these aren't super stylized or cartoony animations either. They're grounded and realistic but have a lightness to them. I was trying to find resources on how to learn to animate like that, but it seems like a lost art. There are blender courses for animation out there such as the "Alive!" by P2D Design academy, but they all focus on they all focus on this over the top bouncy Disney style. Pretty much all across western animation courses.

>>1015225 (OP)
Essentially you're gonna find aol the principles you learn for the bouncy stuff are the same you use for the realistic stuff, only somwwhat dialed back. The disney principles of animation were all built on the observation of real life.

>>1015229
When I say Disney, I meant modern Disney, where everything is hyper exaggerated in an uncanny way with additional unnecessary movements.

>>1015230
Yeah but that's still the same thing. Same principles, dial back the extras. But you're gonna need to knoe how to do it the exaggerated way to be able to make it subtle.

>>1015225 (OP)
Topic is too advanced and audience too small for people in the know to share it openly. Imagine a topic you spent decades of your life perfecting and penning a comprehensive tutorial for it is 20x the effort making content an audience of hundreds of thousands to millions are interested in, but here you are giving away something difficult to obtain to a single digit audience that are advanced enough to benefit from what you could teach. This is why everyone that knows how to do this is self-taught 'reinventing the wheel' til they got on the inside and learnt directly from their peers.

Maybe top schools like gnomon etch back in the day had people teach such courses but then they where paid handsomely by the small class that took their workshops.

I've made the journey you are on starting out ~20 years ago and everything I know about animation beyond the basics I reinvented myself by analyzing and extrapolating things I witnessed combined with what input I could piece together from reading thru the backlog of discussion threads on animation topics at threedy, cgsociety, polycount and various artists webpages.

The key to good 3d animation is a good rig. The rig should take longer to make than the animation. If you're serious, you should have a rig for every seperate motion a character has to do.

>>1015239
Hell yeah, this anon is a real une' and what's stated is very true. When you are a rigger as well as an animator (OG/thug rigger) it is almost always easier to build a custom rig
that supports specifically that part of motion you are currently working on.

Everyone attempt to make some 'do everything' rig at some point but if you do you you end up fighting the rig more than it helps you.
It simplifies things a lot if you know how to rig for the motions you are currently making.
Such that if a movement is complicated and calls for two very different rigs - use two different rigs and let one take over where the other one fails.

Do things like having your full skinned character rig not being rigged at all but just have it's key joints orientation/roation constrained
so it's slaved to a skeletal copy 'dummy rig' you actually animate.

that way you can swap and mix rigs as you please the fly without ever breaking or having to tear off already rigger parts etc.

>>1015237
This reminds me of Jonathan Blow's talk about declining software quality as the parallels to the collapse of civilizations.
Basically over the millennia a lot of knowledge that would still benefit us today just wasn't passed on and got lost forever. And the same thing happened when the ogs retired from software development.

>>1015241
>>1015237
nice blog with no helpful information. we don't need your life story. feel free to shit up reddit and tell other beginners about how it will take them 20 years of doing it themselves to learn something

>>1015225 (OP)
like >>1015239 said, a good rig is most of the battle. something like maya offers insane options for rig control and smooth bindings between joint and mesh. the tutorials and documentation (some of which are 20+ year old like unc poster above) are all still relevant and accessible via youtube and free content on the net. if you're serious, I would just consider getting maya and start learning to animate using those resources which can later be applied to blender or whatever you prefer. btw - you can easily get maya for free by signing up in a local community college and getting an edu license after getting a student account set up. GL

>>1015242
Johnny Blowhard is an academic. Someone who loves musing over pseudo philosophical questions, but hates actually committing to getting something concrete done on a schedule. He's like someone that knows how to sail small single-person boats, and has read a lot about different types of sailing, but has never sailed a 12-person racing vessel, or worked on a freighter. He has a very narrow window of expertise, and is incredibly mediocre outside of that window. That's not to say he couldn't learn, he absolutely could. But people take his word as gospel when they should only ever give his word thought inside that narrow window.

Some of the best people to learn how to animate from are people that have to get shit done by a certain deadline. The real mark of a quality animator is how fast you can complete a good animation. Anyone can spend years or decades perfecting a single animation, but only someone genuinely good can animate something in a reasonable time frame.

>>1015242
>declining software quality as the parallels to the collapse of civilizations
SSSSHHHHHHH do NOT bring up demographic changes along side the downfall of software quality.

the wikipedia of this game says it introduced, or was one of the first games to use something called "keyframe animation" but the article it links to doesn't explain what that means other than saying that the game was made using handcrafted animations instead of using motion capture. and if key frame animation is just what we consider normal animation today, then what did they use before then

>>1015715
Key frame animation is when you move the time line, pose the character, save the pose to that point in time, then do it again. It is the most basic normal form of 3d animation. The only way to get more basic is in Tron when they had to write algorithms to move all the verts in a mesh through a desired path.