What part of games are the animations

[jsmoke]

I thought the animations were the cutscenes, as far as I know you create the animations in blender, 3d max, although I have no idea how this is done, so are the animations part of the physics of the game. In GTA3-5 for example are the animations the other people/cars?

What would a typical animator create?

 

[touch]

Depends on the context.
'Animation' could include things like what the character does when you press the jump button for example.
It has nothing to do with the physics though. You could replace the characters with 2d squares of colour and still have all the same physics.

 

[gord]

Interesting question. In my understanding it's anything that requires explicit movement. An animator will create an assortment of movements from running animations for characters and facial expressions to getting into a vehicle or bouncing a ball. A cutscene may be referred to as an animation if it is comprised of animations. For example, Command and Conquer mixed live action cutscenes (real actors) and FMV cutscenes (computer generated), the latter being an animation.

But I disagree with touch. While you can abstract physics and animation they are very closely related in gaming and becoming ever more so. That's why I said "explicit movement" earlier. For example, in GTA you have a running animation for your character. It's always the same, left foot forward, right foot forward, as an animator intended. But if you get hit by a vehicle the character needs to react appropriately. In old games a character would have a predetermined way of falling, it would happen the same each time (or however many animation variants the animator could implement). Today we seamlessly move from the predetermined running animation to a physics driven animation where the moving vehicle is calculated hitting the character model and the movement is generated by the computer, until the character needs to stand up again at which point a predetermined "stand up" animation will play.

As physics simulation becomes ever more advanced we will see fewer typical animations and more procedural.

NB. I don't work in animation, just interested. Please correct if any pro animators drop by.

 

[Lareon]

I use 3ds max in my profession and can give you a brief intro to animation.

Animation in games have a variety of types as gord says, you have hand made animations, MOCAP animations and you have physics based or a mix of all of these

Hand made animations can be as simple as a door opening and closingin a pre defined way to a much more complex scenario but if its hand made then its pre defined it can't be affected. a simple animation that is used a lot is simply to rotate an object on the spot so you can see it from all directions.

MOCAP animation is animation that is recorded, (motion capture) this is how a lot of games do the animations for characters walking, running etc these can also be mixed together in a motion mixer to make a blended animation. imagine a character running and shooting at the same time. these are generally filmed in a mocap studio with a live actor wearing a suit with 3d points on them. these points are then recorded and turned into mocap files that can be used on models to simulate what was recorded

Physics based animations are where you give objects real world properties; mass, elasticity, weight (define gravity) etc etc and then you let them interact with other objects i.e one simple physics based tool i use at work is to simple give a load of objects weight and let them fall to the floor or into a bowl etc. this is really handy as it gives them a realistic look as if they've been dropped without me having to sit there and play with each object one at a time getting them to look perfectly random.

the same applies to games, if you want something to reach realistically you have to make it react to the world realistically. this also makes it slightly out of your control so sometimes hilarious things happen with the physics when it screws up

an animatior himself will take objects made by modellers and then he would give them movement.

a character for example has whats called a RIG this is almost like a skeleton

you can see here a simple rig for a character.

these give the character constraints, for example how much can each bone rotate, move etc.

once you have the rig set up you can set about either importing your mocap information or creating animations by hand.

the subject is much much deeper than i've gone into but hopefully that gives you a brief idea