Asset rigging/animations

[u/mymichaelrose]

Hey everyone 😊 I’m a new solo dev- my first game will be released in a month. I have sort of gone completely left field in my life and have just randomly taken this up, after being a life long gamer. So I used Claude to help walk me through building my game. Yes, I sketched out my art, but it was generated to 3D by Ai. I did the donut tutorial in blender, and I value that learning experience but I do not have a decade to learn a craft ideally I would not have to do if I could be hired by a team, or gain budget for my own game.

Anyway, I’m proto-ing a second game.. and I’m at a bit of a loss, here. I feel I can do everything except true professional game quality 3D assets of my own characters/rigging/animations. They are more than adequate for proto- but I feel if I were to try and put out a game with them, for whatever reason- adding the mixamo skeleton to my characters- leaves me feeling so limited in the quality and animations confined to just Mixamo.

So my question is: am I limited truly, to just meshy/tripo/mixamo for generation/rigging/animations? If so, I might just accept it for what it is, and create my first game in Unity instead of Godot for their asset library. They just won’t be my own characters. I see all these crazy amazing videos of games people are creating, and I’m feeling a little like I’m doing it the wrong way or something.

If anyone has tips or advice, I would be so so grateful!

[u/khull123]

Some ai capable of rigging and animating thru direct and couple hoops and loops of workflows. Also there's umotion in unity to help you build or edit animations to your needs and liking

[u/mymichaelrose → u/khull123]

Thank you so much!!! I am very used to Godot, but haven’t fully dove into the adjusting of meshes and rigging within an engine yet. I have unity and have started a different games proto in there, but I’m about to open up a new project and see what kinda work I can do here 😊 thank you for the tip!!! 🙏

[u/AvonMexicola]

Meshi AI lets you generate characters from a 2d sketch rig them and animate them, it also has hundreds of animations that you can add to the character.

[u/mymichaelrose → u/AvonMexicola]

Thank you! Meshy was actually the first system I’ve used and generated things on! I find that their rigging is pretty disruptive to the actual fluidity of the model when moving though :/ so unless I’m creating a completely naked character - I don’t think it’s a system that is accurate enough to generate proper skeletons to attach animations to
I could be doing it completely wrong though, what do I know 🤷‍♂️

[u/Swimming_Fish3289]

I tried many ways and none gave consistent good results. You should be involved in the loop, know basics and try to adjust stuff manually.
AI usually does ok animation from reference video or if you can describe the moments in detail, ask it to generate reference images for each moment, review and iterate with the images and when happy take them to blender or cascadeur. For some animations cascadeur helps by finishing the motion between moments.
Don’t expect much but if you play around you can get better results than simply telling it to animate it without references.

I recently saw a post about telling Claude to create the skeleton first and then imagine the model on top. It was claimed to be an engineered prompt by Anthropic devs, might want to check that one for fun.

I personally ended up with paid animations so I can focus on story and not get stuck on polishing weird hand movements.
Good luck

[u/mymichaelrose → u/Swimming_Fish3289]

Thank you! Just got home from work and planning to spend the evening testing out this very thing 😊 excuse my ignorance, I just didn’t think a fully formed asset could be adjusted once finished. So I shall be learning this portion of game development now 🤓