First of all, thank you for all your input. This is really helping me develop the format.

Quote: Original post by TyrianFin
1. Is there special nead to lock animation keys to spesific time?
Float variables can handle fractional numbers :D
Normaly framerate in games is dynaamic and lives on 15.0fps - 120.0fps,
unlike in movies where framerate is fixed to 24fps.

But since monitors normaly are limited to max. 60fps,
there is no advantage of going above 60fps. (if no motion blur is calculated.)

(normaly I don`t care where keys land, I just make sure that animation looks good)

2.
face morphs are must for complex face expressions, but if only moving chin is neaded, then bone animation works.

3.
There is some cases where direct vertex animation is neaded.

Flag waving in wind. (cloth simulation baked to vertices.)
Motion trails fx / streaks.
Complex morphing, that neads non-linear blending of vertices.

/Tyrian

About 3: The flag thing, this is usually handled by physics engines (or other procedural animation techniques) these days rather than animators. Is this something you agree upon, within the context of your own experience?

Question 4: In the content creation software these days, creating separate animation sequences is a bit of a pain in the butt. Would you welcome a tool/exporter which moves the creation of animation sequences from the engine's domain, to the animator/content creation software/exporter's domain?

About 3: The flag thing, this is usually handled by physics engines (or other procedural animation techniques) these days rather than animators. Is this something you agree upon, within the context of your own experience?

It`s true that physics engine can handle realtime simulation of one flag, but
whene there is 50+ flags, things get heavy and it`s time to cheat :D

So I would make model format to support direct vertex animation,
it might be big time saver when all else fails!


Question 4: In the content creation software these days, creating separate animation sequences is a bit of a pain in the butt. Would you welcome a tool/exporter which moves the creation of animation sequences from the engine's domain, to the animator/content creation software/exporter's domain?

Makeing/using animation clips is preaty easy in CG softs,
but getting them intact to engine is the hard part.

It`s better to make little tools to animation software/exporter,
than try to make new animation tools to engine.

And please it would be nice to have possibility to make separate
animation clip files, so that no mesh is stored in to same file,
only animation clips. (makes lot`s of sense if multible charachters can use
same animation clips)

/Tyrian

Quote: Original post by wiegje85
Question 4: In the content creation software these days, creating separate animation sequences is a bit of a pain in the butt. Would you welcome a tool/exporter which moves the creation of animation sequences from the engine's domain, to the animator/content creation software/exporter's domain?

A tool that could tag with a header (codename, description, information about amount of frames, FPS etc.) an animation clip and append it to your character file would be very useful.

This tool could be stand-alone, like an Animation Manager. You can have the content file (Character1.max) and the animation clips as separate files (Character1_idle.max; Character1_attack.max).
This animation manager could be used to extract the animation from those action files and append them all to the same engine-specific file for organization, while adding that header I mentioned at first. Helps a lot with organization and even in-game. You parse all the headers and separate the sequences.
When an animation is required, instead of specifying the frame-range (like "35-95", for instance), you would specify the codename ("IDLE") and the scene-management could take care of the rest.

The priority with this tool would be to take the burden of having to split multiple clips inside the same file, in the software. It's very hard to keep track of which sequence is where, in a big timeline full of them.

1.) 24fps is considered "real time" in Maya, but it's pretty easy to tweak an animation to match whatever fps is needed.

2.) It's nice to have the option to use blend shapes. They're good for correcting deformations and keeping models from looking like puppets.

3.)It will limit the realism of organic characters and could make a rig require more bones. I'd opt for blend shapes, but it's up to you to find that happy medium.

good luck

btw:
What's harder for an engine to push, a head 1k tri head with 12 targets or the same head with 12 bones? (I'd really like to know)

Quote: Original post by wiegje85
1. At what frame rate do you usually animate for games? I heard this is 15 fps (and Maya seems to agree), but I also heard this is often 24 fps or even 48 fps.

It depends on the game. If you have hundreds of animating characters on the screen at the same time (like an army), then you probably want a low fps
to save resources. If you only have a couple of animations running, then you will probably want to go at least 30fps.