Rigs for games

I have been researching some free rigs that I may use for my animations.

The Abertay Grunt rig is an obvious one and the Digital tutors rig is also simple to use.

After some more research into rigs ive decided to use the Kila rig which is overall easy to understand and has a variety of controls for body movement and facial features.

The free Kila rig was made by Anthony Ward who has wrote some books on creating game characters.

Approach to animation

I've been looking into what is needed for game animations.
Main points:
- Overall believable, polished and accurate animations
- Cycled animation that can be smoothly looped
- Set pieces

-Fairly simple rig

Other things to consider:
-Using layered animation (shown in Skyrim)

Some of the technical research I've found:

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=22801&seqNum=7 - An article that outlines some important areas in game animation by George Maestri.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016323/Animation-methodology-for-Battlefield - a presentation on the animations used in battlefield 3 that shows how DICE approach there animation pipeline.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97447 – people’s opinions on what’s needed in animation. Some people feel that being good at general animation is the most important skill. You can then apply this knowledge to game animation.

Bioshock Infinite Research

I think Bioshock Infinite is a good example of a game with a large variety of animations. The main character Booker's companion, Elizabeth is a good example she has several animations that change based on her mood. General animations: idle, running, walking, pick locking, inspecting objects throwing objects to the main character. They also have many in-game set pieces and cut scenes.

I wont be using there methods, but the video shows the kind of animations they used.

League of Legends Research

League of Legends introduces new Champions to play every month and each one has unique animations.
The animations include idle, 1 or 2 basic attacks, critical attack, run, taunt, laugh, dance, joke, 4 different abilities and teleport. The characters may also have different animations and sounds based on new skins(costumes).

For my animation show-reel I could take this approach and create animations based around a single character. I would have to design my own character traits or could create them based around new animations for an existing character.

Examples of animations:

I will be researching Animation for games and will start by tying some basic tutorials on Digital Tutors.
Here is an example of there Rig i will be using from DigitalTutors.

Final 11 second club animation

Here is my final 11 second club animation. I felt my animation was good for my first 3D animation, from feedback areas a need to improve are, more accurate animations, the motion of the full body and how different motion effect other body parts.