How to quickly create hundreds of biped animations?

Question

I am a video game programmer working on building my own video game. I've decided that in order to build my game, I am going to need a large amount of animation files from 3DS Max.

My question is, what is the best approach to building a huge number of animation files? I'm looking to create 20 movement animations + 4 fighting styles * 18 attack types + 8 shooting animations + 10-20 magic casting animations for an estimated total of 128-138 animations (and probably more that I can't think of now).

I'm personally only planning on creating a small number of these animations myself, but I am trying to design the best workflow for creating a huge number of animations so that once I decide to create these animations, it is a feasible task.

I am familiar with how to create animations manually in 3ds max, but this approach seems slow, and would seem to take too many manhours to complete. I am vaguely familiar with motion capture, but I don't know any approaches for this or tutorials, and I don't know if this would work out at that scale.

Answer 1

Should be only few suggestions to make many animations quickly in low budget:

• Avoid 3ds Max bones, use Biped system with Skin modifier, so you don't have to spend much time creating the rig.
• Plan your game design adjusted to your possibilities: I mean, simple character models, without complex effects like hair, clothes and face expression morphs.
• Since motion capture is expensive you can use reference videos inside your scene putting them in a plane's texture to help you creating animation keys.
• Use MaxScript to solve repeating task. MaxScript is easy to learn. And there is lot of free plugins at: http://www.scriptspot.com/

There is lot of work involved you can't avoid if you want to create original content, unless you choose the expensive way:

The really fast quick approach is to use a service like: http://www.mixamo.com/ There you upload your model, auto-rig it and apply animation in less than 3 minutes each one. They have a database of motion captures and also provide custom motions.