How does one get started doing 3D animation and textures and such things?

Factual Questions
1

Lately, all the games I buy seem to come with construction kits. Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, etc. etc. I play around with them and think they’re neat, but I’m always wishing that I could make that “grass” tile look a little different, or add that one particular monster that doesn’t come with the toolkit.

Most of these kits allow you to do such things. I can download stuff other people have created and use it in my lil’ worlds. When it comes to making my own, however, I’m clueless.

For what it’s worth, my background is in programming, so scripting and such is a no brainer.

Here’s my questions, in no particular order:

1 - do most of these gamey things use the same methods to animate stuff? IE, if I create Athena’s Mega Monster for Morrowind, can I also use it in Neverwinter Nights with small modifications? Or are animated monsters platform specific?

2 - What tools do I need to build these? I’m guessing some sort of 3D modeling and animation software is required. What’s the best one? What’s the cheapest one? Do I dare hope for shareware?

3 - How about things like textures, grass, and buildings? My guess is that things that aren’t animated (like buildings) and stuff with minor animations (like grass waving in the breeze) are easier to create than animals, monsters, or people. Are the same tools used to create both 3D monsters and buildings and such?

4 - How much artisitic ability do I need to create one of these? I can draw, sort of. I’m better at downloading pictures from the Net and rearranging them to get what I need.

5 - What haven’t I asked that I should ask?

Thanks in advance!

2

I can sort-of answer a couple of your questions. I know a couple of professional 3d artists who work for game companies and tv/movie animation production houses, and they all got their start at the Art Institute. I think they went through a two-year program to learn all of the ins and outs of modeling, texture-mapping and animating. You probably wouldn’t need to get this involved to do what you want to do. You might pick up a book on 3d Studio and see how you like it.

From what I can recall, my friends mostly use 3D Studio for animation/modeling and Photoshop for textures. These applications do not come cheap, unfortunately.

All of the artists that I know have a lot of general artistic talent, e.g. sketching, drawing, painting, etc., so having some artistic ability certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Does anyone know much about the file formats that games use for models/textures/animations?

3

the animations themselves are the same, but the way that the models+animations packets are stored and read differ from game to game. However, there usually is some cross-game capability provided the games use teh same core engine and there hasn’t been to much modification.

As for animations, if you wanna see if your good at it, download gmax, its the free version of 3dStudioMax, which all hte companies use for models/animations. Texturing is done with Photoshop or some like program and stored in those crazy .wad file things for most games. I merely mention this so if you want to get an idea of what a single tile needs to look like, grab a .wad extractor.

As for ease of creating. Buildings and things like that are usually made by a mapping program (something like worldcraft) and arn’t models themselves, although 3dsmax can be used for mapping. Animating things is just a technique that needs practice to perfect. ANy live things, animals or people, are usually complex models with 40 or so “bones” that determine movement. Animating is a lot like working with stop motion, except the step by step is taken out of the process. You merely need key frames ( a begining and end frame) and the modeling engine will fill in the rest.

Ok, i’ll stop cause i could ramble on about this forever. Download gmax, and run through the official tutorials. They are easy to understand, fun, and give you a good idea of what you’d be getting yourself into.

4

Shareware (as far as I remember, much to early here)

www.anima8or.com completely free relativly easy to start on and like, under a meg or something!?

www.povray.com one of the biggies on the share/freeware end, somewhat more complicated as i understand it tho. i believe you write code rather than use a GUI.

www.blender3d.org supposedly really user friendly, i never got it to run tho :frowning:

hope that helps a little.
for the variious games you mentioned above? thre is a freeware program called mmm…milk… milk something that saves in many of the formats used by the games. Milkdud, milktray, milkshape? Could be milkshape yeah, google and see.

5

I don’t work in the game industry but do a lot of 3D modelling for clients (of buildings and interiors).

I would say that most people I know would build models in Form Z (an easier & more accurate modeller) and then import to 3D Studio to render. (better render package)

If you know any people at Uni they should be able to pick up a student version of Form Z (they (well, used to) offer it very cheap to students on architecture / interior design courses) which will then run for a year. It would give you a feel for the programme and its nuances / capabilities before deciding to buy.

6

If you’re willing to go ahead and shell out for commercial, Bryce is the most accessible, and deceptively powerful.

7

ac3d is a modeller which is commonly used as a GUI frontend for povray. It’s shareware, with a 30 day trial period. It’s pretty cheap ($40?) and seems pretty powerful. (I’ve only played with it a little.)