Creature Animation for Games: Volume 1

Animating a Pre-Attack Threat Move Using Maya With Ali Pournassari

This Maya workshop is for animators looking to understand how creature animation is handled for non-playable characters in AAA games. Ali Pournassari, Senior Animator at Treyarch, reveals how to approach animating an NPC’s defensive, threatening move before it launches an attack, sharing not only what it looks like, but also how it's approached, why decisions are made, and what it takes to make a creature feel genuinely alive in a real-time game context. 

Whether you're working in the industry or developing your own projects, the principles and workflow covered in this detailed, two-volume workshop series apply directly to production. Working in Maya, Ali reveals how to build the complete movement set for an NPC boss creature from motion capture, covering the full pipeline from raw mocap data through retargeting, cleanup, and polish. The animations covered are idle, turns, and locomotion, the foundation for every other animation in a creature's moveset. Along the way, he digs deeper into the Graph Editor, curve cleanup, weight and timing adjustments, and how to read your own work the way a player experiences it in real time.Ali’s focus is as much on craft and thinking as on technique. He discusses what a combat idle is actually communicating, why turn animations exist as gameplay states and not just transition filler, and how to build a locomotion cycle that sells mass and weight rather than just moving a character from A to B. These are the kinds of insights that come from working on enemy and boss creatures at a AAA level, and they inform every decision made throughout the workshop.By the end of the workshop, subscribers will have a solid understanding of how to approach creature animation for NPCs with a production mindset, including how to work efficiently with motion capture, how to build a movement set as a connected system, and how to bring genuine weight and personality to a creature before it ever enters combat. 

Volume 2 of this two-part series picks up directly where this leaves off, taking the same creature into a full boss combat set. Coming soon.