Where To Learn More About Game Animation

Hello everybody, my name is Dan, I'm an animator, and this is New Frame Plus, a series about video game animation.

So, I'm working on a pretty big multi-episode project for this series right now, and I'm very excited about it,

but it is taking a long time. Fortunately,

I do have one more regular sized episode in the works, too - should be out very soon -

but after that, I'm gonna be pouring all of my attention into this big project,

which means that this series is gonna sort of vanish for a little while.

So, since there won't be a lot of New Frame Plus episodes happening in the near future,

I thought that I would list off some other fantastic

resources for learning more about game animation in the meantime. You will find links to all of these down below.

To start, one of your best resources is going to be the GDC vault. This site contains

recordings of just about every talk ever given at a GDC for the last

I don't know how many years. There are some great

animation talks in there, as well as a vast bounty of talks on other game development topics. If you're looking for industry folks talking shop

and explaining how they made awesome things, this is the mother load. Any animators watching

this might be particularly interested in the animation boot camp, tricks of the trade talks,

where a bunch of pro animators rattle off a ton of tips and advice rapid-fire. Now

unfortunately, a lot of the GDC vault's more recent content is behind a paywall, and much like GDC itself, it

is unreasonably expensive. Which kind of sucks. Frankly this vault could and should be one of the best game dev education resources on the Internet.

Fortunately, this paywall only applies to talks from the most recent two years

Everything from GDC

2015 and earlier has been made free to watch, and even the talks that are locked behind the wall are often still available in slideshow

form so you can still get some of that information. Even better

GDC does have a YouTube channel

where they upload some of those recent talks for free viewing, and there are already a handful of animation talks on that channel

so that's a good place to start. I hope they start uploading them there more often.

Fortunately, a considerable number of animation talks given at GDC this year weren't actually at GDC.

Twitch was kind enough to host the Animation Exchange, a day full of animation talks by a lot of the same folks who were giving

talks at the conference proper,

so, there is an entire day's worth of GDC style animation talks

which you can watch for free right now on Twitch.

Animation Exchange was organized in large part by Mike Jungbluth, a veteran animator, who also

participates in the game animation podcast Re Animators and helps to run Anim State, a website dedicated to game animation.

Neither the podcast or the site are updated super often,

but they're both pretty great places to find more animators talking shop. Speaking of helpful online

resources, if you are an animator yourself, you might want to check out the Animator's Resource Kit, created by Adam Turnbull.

It is an immensely helpful site with links to just about anything an animator needs.

You're looking for animation software? Tools? Character rigs? Video reference? Book recommendations? Tutorials?

You can find links to all of that useful stuff through the Animator's Resource Kit.

So, bookmark that place. And there are a lot of other animators out there doing some great

tutorials and analyses and live streams of their work. So let me just rattle off a few here. Let's start with Gwen Frey.

She animated the flame and the flood, she was a tech animator on BioShock Infinite before that,

she's done some work on the upcoming Psychonauts sequel, and she has a YouTube channel

where she started posting some short guides and breakdowns showing her work process.

It's a great way to get a taste of the technical side of game animation,

which is only becoming more important. Next up, Kristjan Zadziuk, a veteran animator who worked on Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell Blacklist.

This guy has a YouTube channel as well, featuring not only a handful of videos on motion capture and some fancy new

motion matching tech that he's been working on at Ubisoft,

but he's recently started a series where he gives critiques on people's animations reels. If you're studying animation

yourself, and you want an idea of what sort of things industry leads and recruiters watch for an animator reels,

this series is gonna be very useful to you. Then there's David Gibson, he is an animator on Overwatch.

He also worked on Evolve, and in film before that. He has put out some videos breaking down his work,

you may have already seen that

time-lapse of him animating Mei's play of the game intro. He gave a great talk on Overwatch's animation at GDC, which is free to

watch by the way, and he also occasionally streams himself working on his own personal project. A really sounding game called Line

He's a fantastic animator,

so watching him work is gonna be a great way to learn some neat tricks.

And to learn a lot more neat tricks,

you should also check out Jason Shum, a senior animator at Riot who not only has a Vimeo channel with videos of his work and

a handful of tutorials,

but he also offers a full-blown online class.

If you sign up, you can get access to his video

tutorial course, and get personal feedback and critique on your own work. If you're looking for some animation fundamentals training,

but aren't quite prepared to shell out the money for animation school,

his course might be worth looking in to. He also runs the Anim Break animation challenge, a monthly themed

contest that anybody can participate in, followed by live critique sessions of the reels people submit.

They even give out some pretty sweet prizes to the winner. Then there's Mariel Cartwright aka Kinuko.

She was the lead animator on Skullgirls, and she's currently the lead animator on Indivisible.

She has given some great GDC talks of her own, and she occasionally

streams herself animating on Lab Zero's Twitch channel.

If you want to see how an Indivisible character comes to life, or if you just want to see a professional at work,

this is gonna be an amazing learning resource. Oh, and there's also Jonathan Cooper. He's an animator at Naughty Dog,

he worked on some Mass Effect games and Assassin's Creed 3

before that, and he's got a blog called Game Anim, where he posts links to a lot of the interesting game animation videos, talks, and

articles that pop up on the internet. Great way to keep up with things. Follow him on Twitter, too,

he tends to share a lot of great thoughts on game animation there.

In fact, follow all of these people on Twitter. Find

animators from other games you like on there, and follow them, too. If there's something interesting happening in the world of game animation,

not only are these the people most likely to be talking about it,

they're gonna be the ones speaking from experience. And I think that'll do it for now. Thank you for watching,

I hope you found this useful or at least interesting.

Like I said,

I've got another New Frame Plus episode coming soon, and then a much much bigger New Frame Plus project coming... not so soon.

I'm really excited about it, though!

And I hope you will all enjoy it when it is finally done.

Until then, if you haven't checked out the rest of my New Frame Plus episodes, here is a playlist of everything released so far.

I hope that'll tide you over until the mega series drops, until then...