So you have a big animation project, but you don't know where to start. Not a problem. Now, there are two types of character animation. Gameplay and cutscene. We are gonna cover gameplay first, because cutscene animation deals primarily with motion capture, which I'm gonna cover later. For now, I'm just gonna show you how to figure out what you need to know, before you start creating your animations. Otherwise, you are gonna end up wasting a lot of your time making the wrong kind of animations for your game engine. Question 1. Is this game a top-down RPG? A lot of you guys have told me you're working on RPGs. Which is great, because RPGs are simple and require very few animations per character. A solid list of animations you can use to get started is gonna look like idle, move forward, attack, critical, use item, take damage, death, and victory. Everything else depends on how many attacks or abilities each character has. But you will get a lot of mileage out of just starting with the ones on this list. Question 2. If it is not an RPG, is the game in 2D or in 3D? If it's 2D, this generally means you only have to make animations for 2 directions, left and right. And the basic animation set is gonna look something like this. Otherwise, if it's in 3D, like a Mario platformer, you are gonna have to make sure that your animations look good going in all 8 directions. Question 3. If the game is in 3D, is it in first person or in third person? Always pray to God that the game is in first person, because first person means you probably don't even have to animate the body. The only thing that the player will ever see is the environment and whatever is in the character's hands. Sometimes you don't even need the hands. If you're on a budget, you can usually get away with just showing parts of whatever is in the hand. And best of all, you don't have to animate movements like walking, running, and jumping. Because the players wouldn't be able to see that anyway. Now, if the heavens reject you, and your game is in third person, this usually means your f**k. Because on top of all the other character animations, you will also have to animate all the basic movements. Like walking, running, jumping, turning, grabbing edges, sliding down slopes, getting knocked over, and or swimming. If you have been sentenced to third person, the very next question that you need to ask is if the character's movement is separate from the direction the character is facing. For example, Mario is a 3D platformer. But you can't move Mario without also making him face the direction he's going. Which means that Mario only has one animation for walking and running around. Compare that to a game like Fortnite, where the direction the character is looking is completely separate from the direction the character is moving. It's possible to move forward, backward, left, right, or anywhere in between. While looking in any direction. Games like this mean that at a minimum, you will need eight separate animations for walking and eight separate animations for running. One for each direction like up, upright, right, down, right, down, down, left, left, and up left. On top of that, you will also need five additional animations for looking up and down. Looking forward, 45 degrees up, 90 degrees up, 45 degrees down, and 90 degrees down. The basic animation list for these kind of games is going to look something like this. And if you want to copy of that, don't worry, I've made a project outline that you can download, and you can use it to get ahead start on planning what animations you are going to need to prepare dependent on your project. Hope that helps. If you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to like, subscribe, ring that bell, hope you have a fantastic day, and I'll see you around.