Animation - Unable to add multiple aniblocks at the same time to a character?

jobber_nicole

Hi all. I am trying my first foray into animating some of my characters, and was hoping to use aniblocks to at least get started. I am stumped however on how to layer multiple aniblocks onto a single character. Hopefully someone can provide some guidance.

What I am trying to do: 

• Have the character breathe (Alive Breathing 3)
• Have the character make a left fist (Alive Neutral to FIST)
• Have the character make a right fist (Alive Neutral to FIST (but the other one that has the same name)

How I tried to do it.

1. Add the breathing aniblock to AniMate Lite at frame 0 (works)
2. Bake the aniblock to studio keyframes (works)
3. Delete the breathing aniblock from Animate Lite (works)
4. Add the left fist aniblock to Animate Lite (works, but previews no longer happen)
5. Bake the aniblock to studio keyframes (nothing happens)

SimonJM

Try adding a new track for each aniblock you are adding?

TimberWolf

Simon's absolutely right - you need to add a sub track for each of those animations but the workflow you're using suggests to me that you're pretty new to this. Animation in Studio is, sadly, an exercise in nail pulling. There are a couple of evangelists for it but it's pretty hopeless compared to what's offered in Blender, Unity or Unreal. That said, if you want to use your assets in a ray traced environment without tedious conversion and loss of quality you'll have to live with it.

You don't need to convert your aniblocks to keyframes. All you need to do is add further animation tracks to the object (character) you want to animate and slot the aniblocks into those newly created subtracks at the appropriate point. Breathing, eye blinks, hand movements, whatever you want.

It's not what I'd call obvious in the UI. Select your character and then refer to the attached screenshot to create subtracks. Click the + symbol (in yellow in the screenshot)  in the Animate timeline to add as many sub tracks as you like. Drag and drop the animations in.

If you really want to get into animation using Studio, @Dartanbeck has a huge amount of posts on these forums and a series of paid tutorials in the store. He knows his stuff and is very generous with his knowledge. Google the threads and have a read through. If you're looking to animate an avatar or an in-game portrait for example, Studio will do the job. Anything more than that will involve a hefty learning curve and a ton of frustration imho.

Gusf1

I think you need the full version for this.  Ie, animate 2. 

                    Gus

Gordig

TimberWolf said:

Animation in Studio is, sadly, an exercise in nail pulling. There are a couple of evangelists for it but it's pretty hopeless compared to what's offered in Blender, Unity or Unreal.

or Maya, or C4D, or Houdini, or....

TimberWolf

Et.al. Indeed. There are a lot to choose from.

Blender, Unity and Unreal are free, the same pricing tier as Studio. It's my opinion that the animation capabilities in those other packages are objectively better than Studio.

Maya, C4D, Houdini and most others aren't free so it would be fairly disappointing if their toolset was weaker than the free options! We use C4D as opposed to most of the indie studios who use Max but we make games for mobile the way a lot of the mainstream studios used to make games for PCs in the 90s before GPUs were a widely fitted option and performance of the CPU couldn't be taken for granted; pre-rendered environments and sprites. Studio is ideally suited to this kind of animation but if you want to add smoke/steam/flames/dust/whatever it all starts to fall apart - hence C4D. Likewise if you want to animate a camera track through a scene. It's not that you can't do it in Studio - you can - but... ugh. Anyone's who tried to battle with this will be nodding along in sympathy at this point.

Pick what works for you and, for simple animations or sprite sheets, Studio will work and it will work well.

For anything more complex though....