ABSTRACT
Video game animation is both an artistic and technical challenge. While animators on larger projects are not always required to handle the technical side of animation, it helps to understand why things are the way they are in order to see opportunities for improvement. Early considerations that animators should express, many of which can even be anticipated at the concept phase, typically revolve around how the character will deform once skinned and animated. Arms are down for the vast majority of animations, so modelling the way allows the skinning to be better polished for the most common poses. Beyond the rigging associated with the character, it should be at the animator's discretion to make use of custom scene rigging to achieve the desired result as long as the animation exports correctly. Standardization and conformity of skeletons allow the easy sharing and reuse of animations across multiple characters inside the game, as the animations map exactly to one another.
