- first of all thank you very much for the detailed insight
- as a guy who is very much new to gamedev, threejs etc but not to programming (have a decade of programming experience on backends, android apps etc) i am running into lots of questions as i try to build a mental model of what game dev process looks like
- let us say i wanted to add a player 3d model into this setup, the player can walk, run, crouch, shoot, throw a grenade, go prone, take cover to the wall etc. how do these animations get implemented? what kind of tools are needed for making these animations
- i read that the technique used is called skeletal animation. how are you supposed to think about this? you press w, the character moves forward. in terms of animation that means your character needs to play the standing at one place animation initially and transition to the walking animation as long as the w button is pressed. now you press shift and this walking animation needs to transition to running animation as long as shift is pressed. is this the right way to think about this?
- do we need intermediate animations like "transition from walk to run", "transition from run to walk", "transition from walk to crouch" etc? that would add a lot of states would it not?
- are there LLM tools that you are aware of that are capable of generating these animations?
- i also read there are different file formats like obj, fbx, m3d, glb etc. is the same data stored in these files in a slightly different way like csv vs json or are they completely different?
But much more likely is you won't be making animations, you'll be buying them (or getting them for free). There are many places you can buy these animations already, already rigged to a skeleton.
Some examples (I don't endorse them specifically):
https://characters3d.com/
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/game-animation-sampl...
Think about giving direction to an actor. You give high-level instructions to the animation system, and it picks the animation based on rules about what animation to use in what situation, that you already set up. It manages the transition to the next animation, all of which are animations of the skeleton, that the character model adapts to (including physics-based parts of the character like hair and cloth)Generally speaking, you define animation cycles (e.g. walk cycle, run cycle), and then transition between two different animations that are in phase with each other, but it can be a lot more complicated in order to look more natural.
Unity has the Animation Controller. Unreal has "Motion Matching". Godot has Animation Trees.
If you want to, yes, but also you can have the game engine interpolateYou haven't even mentioned things like having the character's feet stand realisticly on non-level ground. For that you would use inverse kinematics, but not too much of it because it has a tendancy to go wonky
Yes but you'd be better off with animations someone has already created, they tend to look better. Many companies now offering AI-based 3D character generators too. They all have different purposes. You want glTF/glB (same format but in text vs binary) for most purposesTry out this FPS game project for the Godot Engine: https://github.com/godotengine/tps-demo