Animation Onboarding

👋Welcome to the animation department! This document will cover everything you should know as a new animator.   

Our Work 

Our primary focus right now is bringing Morrowinds diverse cast of creatures to life. Our goal is to ship 15 custom creatures in the final game, each creature consisting of 30-80 animations. Occasionally non-creature tasks will be available as well, such as new weapon, NPC and prop animations, however these are a small part of our total workload.

We have a lot of animations to finish, and realistically we cannot give all of them equal attention. For that reason, we typically create placeholder animations by retargeting Skyrim animations. These placeholders are of varying quality and we aim to replace as many of these as we can. We track progress on a spreadsheet here and you can view the current highest priority animations available here.

Assignments 

To avoid cluttering our channels we typically do assignments and handoffs over DM. Since each creature consists of dozens of animations, we assign 1-2 animations at a time, often having multiple animators working on the same creature. You can view the currently assigned animations here.

As a volunteer project, its up to you how much time you would like to devote to the project. We don’t enforce deadlines, however we will check in every two weeks or so. The more animations we complete, the better the final game will look, so the sooner animations are completed the better.

When you have progress to show, please share a recording in #animation for feedback. When you’re done you can turn in files over DM for approval. Then if you're comfortable with it, we also encourage sharing footage of finished assets in the #progress-updates channel. That channel is open to the public and it’s a great place to show the community the awesome work we do!

Timeline 

While the project has no official release date, we have a department goal to be ready for ship by the end of 2025. While work can continue after that point, ideally we should no longer be a barrier to release.

To be ready by then, we’ve split 2024 and 2025 into Alpha and Beta years. Previously we were in Alpha, which meant our scope is locked and our goal is to get all content in game and timing locked. Currently we are in Beta where our focus has shifted to polishing performances and preparing assets to be shipped. 

Process

Currently Maya is our main program for creating animations, although we have plans to support alternatives in the future.

Our animation assets are orgnaized in to Maya projects. Using projects ensures references and textures are automatically linked. We will send project files when a task is assigned to you. Simply set your project in Maya to the folder containing the workspace.mel file.

Due to scope constraints we ask you to follow a few rules when working on animations: