Game Animation Course

Lesson 1 • The 12 Principles of Animation

Covers squash, stretch, anticipation, and the remaining core principles as applied to games. Establishes the visual language used throughout the course.

Lesson 2 • Game Animation vs. Film Animation

Contrasts real-time constraints with pre-rendered workflows. Students understand why interactivity and performance budgets shape every animation decision.

Lesson 3 • Animation Software Overview

Surveys industry-standard 3D animation packages and their core interfaces. Students select appropriate tools for given production contexts.

Lesson 1 • Forward and Inverse Kinematics

Explains FK and IK chains and when to use each system. Students set up IK handles for limbs and understand pole vector controls.

Lesson 2 • Control Rig and Custom Attributes

Builds animator-friendly controls with custom attributes and color coding. A clean control rig accelerates animation production in all following chapters.

Lesson 3 • Rig Optimization for Real-Time Engines

Reduces bone count and removes non-deforming nodes before engine export. Students meet typical polygon and joint budgets for mobile and console targets.

Lesson 4 • Skinning and Weight Painting

Covers binding mesh to skeleton and refining vertex weights for clean deformation. Students eliminate pinching and collapsing artifacts.

Lesson 1 • Facial and Lip-Sync Animation

Introduces phoneme shapes and emotion-driven facial poses using blend shapes. Students synchronize mouth shapes to dialogue audio tracks.

Lesson 2 • Blocking and Pose-to-Pose Method

Introduces stepped-key blocking to establish strong silhouettes before refining. Students learn to prioritize key poses before adding in-betweens.

Lesson 3 • Action and Combat Animations

Applies anticipation, impact, and recovery arcs to attacks and reactions. Students produce snappy, readable combat clips that feel responsive to player input.

Lesson 4 • Locomotion Cycles

Covers walk, run, and idle cycles with correct weight shift and contact frames. Looping locomotion is the most reused asset type in game projects.

Lesson 1 • Editing and Blending Mocap Clips

Teaches trimming, layering, and blending multiple mocap takes into seamless sequences. Students combine mocap with keyframe overlays to add stylization.

Lesson 2 • Motion Capture Fundamentals

Explains optical, inertial, and markerless capture technologies and their trade-offs. Students choose the right capture method for a given budget and fidelity requirement.

Lesson 3 • Retargeting to Game Skeletons

Maps source skeleton proportions to target character rigs of different sizes. Students resolve common retargeting errors such as foot sliding and shoulder collapse.

Lesson 1 • Layered Animation and Overrides

Applies additive and override layers to combine upper-body actions with locomotion. Students implement aim offsets and weapon-equip overlays without duplicating clips.

Lesson 2 • Transition Conditions and Interrupts

Configures exit time, condition priority, and interrupt rules for fluid state changes. Students prevent animation pops caused by abrupt or conflicting transitions.

Lesson 3 • Animation Events and Callbacks

Embeds frame-accurate events in clips to trigger sound, particles, and gameplay code. Students synchronize visual effects with animation contact frames.

Lesson 4 • Blend Trees and Locomotion Graphs

Uses 1D and 2D blend trees to interpolate between directional movement clips. Students create smooth eight-directional locomotion driven by velocity parameters.

Lesson 1 • Ragdoll Physics Setup

Configures rigid bodies and constraints on a character skeleton for death and impact reactions. Students blend between animation and ragdoll states smoothly.

Lesson 2 • Procedural Animation Techniques

Generates motion algorithmically using noise, sine waves, and look-at constraints. Students build breathing, eye-tracking, and environmental sway without keyframes.

Lesson 3 • Runtime Inverse Kinematics

Implements two-bone and FABRIK IK solvers to adapt limbs to uneven terrain at runtime. Students connect IK targets to gameplay data such as surface normals.

Lesson 1 • Platform-Specific Optimization

Adapts animation budgets for mobile, console, and PC hardware constraints. Students create platform-specific quality presets within a single project.

Lesson 2 • Clip Compression Techniques

Applies keyframe reduction, curve quantization, and delta compression to shrink clip size. Students balance visual fidelity against memory and streaming budgets.

Lesson 3 • Profiling Animation Performance

Uses engine profiling tools to identify CPU and GPU animation bottlenecks. Students read performance metrics and prioritize optimization targets effectively.

Lesson 4 • Culling and Batching Strategies

Disables off-screen animation updates and batches skinned mesh draw calls. Students reduce wasted CPU cycles on characters outside the player's view.

Lesson 1 • Shipping and Post-Launch Iteration

Covers final QA, bug triage, and live-service animation updates after release. Students manage animation patches without breaking existing state machine logic.

Lesson 2 • Animation Blueprints and Scripting

Extends state machines with scripted logic for dynamic parameter updates and custom nodes. Students write clean, maintainable animation code integrated with gameplay systems.

Lesson 3 • Pipeline Automation and Tooling

Builds scripts and editor tools to automate repetitive import, naming, and export tasks. Students reduce manual errors and accelerate iteration across large animation libraries.

Lesson 4 • Crowd and NPC Animation Systems

Scales animation to hundreds of NPCs using instancing, LOD, and shared state machines. Students balance visual variety against performance in dense crowd scenarios.