Video games are interactive when you play games and have that complete control over the character within the game and shows that everything your character does, you can see so if there are bad animations in place for walking forward as an example, then you are going to see this and it will not immerse the player, maybe there is popping with certain joints or the animation may not look like a fluid one, if this is the case then it is the job of the animator to consider all of the possible angles and make sure that the animation is perfect and smooth when doing so, so that the animations in the video games you also have to consider the fact that you may not always be animating a human character, you might be animating different types like different figures of creatures, monsters etc. And for human like character you have to think about the way they are doing. For example maybe they are doing or holding onto something, at the same time they could be crouching or laying on the floor. So you can see that there is quite a lot to think about with each character you are animation and the way they may do some things differently.
The body mechanics and the way people move in video games is something you need to be really good at so it's good to take real life examples and animate stuff from there, if they are in a running position the animation is suppose to be nice and fluid then people may not even notice it and this is a good thing as it comes naturally to them as they see people doing stuff in their daily basis like walking, jogging, running around. It's also not only movement in games but the way certain things are done, for instance if you are holding a weapon as a first person shooter game you would want the animation to look nice and fluid again but you also have to consider how long it would take to reload the gun when the bullets run out, some weapons might take longer.
When working with animation in video games you have to consider the amount of time you have to animate something and how long it might take. You need to get it from start to finish as fast as possible whilst also making the animation look good, so having knowledge of creating these animation is incredibly important, you need to ensure the animation works well in the game but also make sure players will like the animations that's been made and shown to them.
Motion capture is also big lately in video games today and many big story driven games utilises motion capture to convey a characters true feelings, and inflict these into a game. The games are included is, The Last of Us, Assassin's Creed, Batman, Call of Duty and many more games uses motion capture, and it is the best way to get a game to look realistic with the animations. As a video game animation becoming familiar with motion capture software is essential this day in age and quite impressive.
Creating animations is a process which involves speed and knowledge of the program and you are using, these days aspiring animators can use maya software to create video games animations. It also involves a process where you can create a character animation object as an example, the default animation would be an idle animation where a character will stand still breathing and could be looking around or interact with it. From here he will go onto walking but walking can be continued with moving, but when the character stops it all goes back to the idle animation.
This is an example on what a stem leaf animation might look like for characters doing stuff:
As you can see this is a very complex process thing to do but if you have a lot of knowledge about it on this certain subject this could be done over a few days or maybe hours depending on your skills with animations and how quickly you can do them.
As I mentioned earlier, a good free animation package was maya software and it can be used to create a character rig and then animation them all at the same time in the same program, so it's really good to program and learn and many students in education right now aspiring animators and uses maya to learn. In the end any program will be the same in some way in this process, make the character rig the character and add the bones to connect where you want the parts of the character to move and assign them to each different process the animation tree.
This video is a great example of what motion capture is about and how it works and transfers within the video game. These where taken from the game NBA 2K16 created by 2K Sports:
You can see that they will use this type of movement in the game and different types of animations will be seen on game play. As it was explained in the video how the character dunks on the hoop, you could use that animation in game as you can select it to your character if you are making your own character in the game.
I chose NBA 2K16 as it shows one of the best examples for animations as it's shown in real life and seeing it within the video game is just surreal to see, because each animation that was shown in this clip is what you see people do in the internet. And not only NBA 2K16 is a sport game, they included different types of animations that was shown here.
These where James Harden and Jimmy Butler shows some of the animations in-game:
http://i.imgur.com/TWG4Yd4.gif
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