Questions About 3D Characters

Character rotation should be enough. If it's just begin & end walk animations you are bothered about then you could probably sort those out with what I mentioned above.

When you say rotate, do you mean actually rotating the character so it looks like its spinning around to face the other direction, or do you mean something like mirroring? Do you have an example file or a sequence showing it? Are you talking about 3D or 2D still? Can I ask any more questions in one paragraph?

Character rotation (animating the character turning from one direction to another).

P.S: one of main issues with 2D animation & switching between idle & walk animations is that often people don't think about which walk frame to start with. A lot of people for some reason start with the character with their legs stretched out to the widest point which looks really stupid to me. For the protagonist of A Little Less Desperation game I'm helping develop Marian exported about 30+ frames per walk direction from Cinema 4D for me & I carefully selected the frames that worked best - I think we used 14 frames for the demo, might be using more for final game - & from those I then organized them so that the first walk frame started more or less from the idle position. It at least made it look like we had a begin walk animation, but unfortunately sorting out a end walk animation is a lot more complicated.



As you can see... not perfect, but it did the trick.

Yeah that's definitely a smart move. I graduated from Animation Mentor back in 2008, so I've learned a ton of animation over the years and have worked on several projects for both indie short films and crappy animated TV commercials. In 3d, it's great to start your walk animation with the legs stretched out because the in-betweens are taken care of by the computer for the most part, so the idle looks natural as it transitions to the walk.

the only advantage i see for "real" 3D charakters is that you can use camera angles to have more dynamic scene perspectives and maybe less hustle when animating something for  all possible directions. 

Hopefully in Vs5 there will be a way for the transitions between idle and walk cycles.

Hopefully in Vs5 there will be a way for the transitions between idle and walk cycles.

I wouldn't bet on this... As mentioned they would have to rework the whole animation system...(for smooth auto generated transitions) 

So its same for the 2d characters as well, isnt it mate?

the only advantage i see for "real" 3D charakters is that you can use camera angles to have more dynamic scene perspectives and maybe less hustle when animating something for  all possible directions. 

haha... Jinx. Pretty sure I said the same thing mate. That's my thoughts on 3D characters too in regards to using them with 2D scenes. I have a lot more control over the 2D sprite versions than 3D as I can manually insert scripts & sounds & control playback order & force which frames to loop - not sure if that's possible with 3D characters!?