Tutorials for Animating in Games?

[keres]

Hi guys,

I'm quite fluent with both 3ds Max and Maya. I can animate stuff around a timeline; it's easy enough to set key frames. However, one thing I cannot figure out or find any kind of documentation on whatsoever is how someone can skin/rig/animate a character for use in a game.
This is very annoying for me, because it's one of the only puzzle pieces of the game development process that has eluded me for a very long time.

Would someone mind posting a link to a confirmed amazing tutorial on how to do this? What I'm looking to learn is how you can take a mesh (of a character, or whatever) that has just been modeled and textured, and turn it into the final product.

Note: Epic has their human skeletons in .max files for animating characters. This crashes the program when I try to open it, and I'm wanting to learn how to make such a thing from scratch.

Thanks a ton, guys. Happy new year to all of you!

[SpeCter]

It depends on the engine how animations are handled.
Some can use skinning some morphing some both.
Normally you can define in the exporter which keyframes belong to which animation, like 0-30 = Idle,31-61 = Walk etc.
And you have to look for things like how many bones can influence one vert. I think in most engines it is 4 bones per vertex.

One thing to look at would be the tutorials inside of Max.They give you the basics of rigging and stuff.

[keres]

I was thinking that you specify the range of keyframes for the animation, but didn't know for sure. Maya has that "trax" thing, and I didn't know if anyone used this.

Thanks for the reply. I'll see if I can get these help docs to tell me anything :)

[Eric Chadwick]

I added a couple links for the Unreal rigging tech here, might help...
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryAnimation#Rigging