Where can I get started with learning to make SNPCS/animations? - Developers

I'm part of a project group that's making some sNPCs for a gamemode, and whilst we have the models for these NPCs the tutorials I've seen only cover how to make humanoid NPCs. I have no idea where to start with making them since I've never worked with them before, I understand that I would use Blender and I'm probably punching above my skill here but any pointers on where I would start? Sorry if this is a bit vague.

What kind of NPCs are you making? This sounds like more of an general animation question.

Quite a range to be honest. Put simply I'd say monsters. The project is a Monster Hunter gamemode, and we're starting with the monsters themselves to get them out the way. Dragon/dinosaur like creatures is mainly the theme of what we're making.

I would just search for "Monster animation tutorials," but really, you're probably not going to find one for your exact situation. The best teacher, in my opinion, is going to be other games and movies with monsters, animated or not. While online tutorials can teach you an application, the way in which you utilise it is going to have to come from slowly developing your own unique style and inspiration bank.

Ah ok, I'm just piecing it together you see. I've found some more info on VJBase, which is a relief since it seems to accommodate my needs, and I've already got a decent idea of the animations needed. Suppose all that's left now is doing it. Thanks

So here's the deal with most of the animations on VJBase -- they animations aren't made from scratch or anything. The abyss walkers from Dark (i think that's the name) were made using the Fallout 4 method for porting animations from 64 bit .hkx files. Which is why they have running but not walking iirc, some issues porting the running animations. The animations are ported from the original game using tools typically found on Xentax or privately released (rare). You'll want to probably start with MotionBuilder, 3DSMax, or Maya. Out of those three, i completely recommend using MotionBuilder as Autodesk built it specifically for animation. But you generally need 3DSMax to import the animations with tools/models. If it's monster hunter you want -- you can actually directly port the animations from MH3 on the Wii iirc -- not sure about the later games, but those ones should be more than enough. That includes player animations and NPC animations. You could actually even retarget the player animations to the GMod skeleton fairly easily and have existing playermodels work on it. Before you get to all that though, I suggest you look upsome basics. What are bones? Skeletons? How do they move the mesh? What is skinning/rigging? What is the purpose of helper bones? Once you know those, I really suggest you look into IK/FK a little and after that just start practicing in MotionBuilder a bit to get the general idea. After that, you're probably ready to retarget animations. Once you have that down, you export the animation as an .smd. I suggest you read all over the Valve Wiki for how stuff works and just look at existing Source game examples such as Blade Symphony to understand Source's animation system, such as 9-way blends, aimlayers, etc. It's fairly complex and powerful, which is how we go the Fallout 4 models with original animations working You can get MotionBuilder/3DSMax for free using a student account on the AutoDesk site which takes like two seconds to do. Mind you, I'm not an animator by any means but I know enough to get the animations into Source and tweak them a bit to look good. You can actually even get animations out of SFM and into .smd. You can PM me if you want and I can show you a bit of how to do stuff since honestly, you're not going to find much animation help particularly for Gmod. Most people don't work with animations at all on the development end.