Character Animation Pipeline

For the purposes of this book, we will only be concerned with 3D animation and how animations work inside Unreal Engine 4; however, it's important to briefly discuss the pipeline used in many industries to create a Character and its animations.

The Concept Stage

The first stage is developing a concept of the Character that we want to create and later animate. This is almost always done in 2D, either by hand or through the use of a computer using programs such as Photoshop. It makes the job easier for the 3D modeler to have several references for how a Character looks, and the relative size of the Character, before starting the process of modeling. Below, we see a basic example of a stick figure Character in different poses. Notice how the Character is posed in different ways:

Figure 10.7: A very simple example of a 2D Character concept

The 3D Modeling Stage

Once the Character concepts are complete, the pipeline can...