This book provides a comprehensive overview of video game technical animation, covering the next generation pipelines that industry developers utilise to create their games. It covers the technical animation workflow from start to finish, looking at both software and hardware, as well as the industry standard processes that all technical animators need to know.

Written to be an accessible technical animation resource, this book combines easy-to-understand principles with educational use cases on how to combine the principles and tools taught within. Example test scripts, animation files, and rig assets are provided as tangible examples that can be modified and taken apart to deepen your understanding. It covers the end-to-end pipeline of technical animation, from the very first steps of placing joints in Autodesk’s Maya to breathe life into your static characters, through tools and automation development, all the way to Unreal Engine 5 integration and optimisation.

Additional resources are available on the book’s GitHub repository. From this resource, you will find example files for Maya and Python scripts that will help with your own work and demonstrations featured throughout this book.

This book is essential reading for early-career game technical animators as well as those studying game animation courses. It will also appeal to technical animators working in the film industry.

Table of Contents

1. Technical Animator

2. Introduction to Software

3. Introduction to Motion Capture Technology

4. A Technical Understanding

5. Introduction to Maya

6. Introduction to Python

7. Python for Maya

8. Maya- Building a Skeleton

9. Maya- Building a Control Rig

10. Introduction to Unreal Engine 5

11. Unreal- The Skeleton Setup

12. Unreal- The Animation Blueprint

13. Unreal- The Control Rig Blueprint

14. Unreal- Physics Assets

15. Unreal- Sequencer Cinematics

16. Unreal- Cloth Dynamics

17. Unreal- The Optimisation

18. Evaluation

Review

“Of all the rigging advice I’ve seen over the years, the detailed rigging chapters in this book are so solid and it gives me joy to see a good resource in print.”

Brad Clark, co-founder of Rigging Dojo.

“This book is not only valuable for someone more junior, looking to start a career in technical animation, but anyone that works alongside or relies upon technical animation. It does a great job of breaking down, from start to finish, what is needed to establish a technical animation foundation for a game.”

Mike Jungbluth is an animation director and game developer who has been working in games since 2006.

About the Author

Matthew Lake is a technical animator working in the video games industry. He started his career producing short movies in the early days of YouTube, leading on to work with the online entertainment network Machinima. Matthew has spent over a decade working on content creation, and after finding a love for interactive storytelling Matthew pursued a career in video games development. After acquiring a Bachelor of arts degree in computer games animation, Matthew went on to work on the multiplayer game Destruction AllStars, a PlayStation 5 exclusive launch title, and most recently worked as the lead technical animator on Fort Solis, a single player narrative game also for the PlayStation 5.