Question for computer animators and designers

Which is harder to animate?

By this I mean, for example, a walk cycle, a run cycle, an 'attack animation' cycle and an idle animation cycle.

Humanoids have the obviously easy reference material (ourselves) but also slip into the uncanny valley if the animations aren't right, meaning people will notice if something is wrong in the animations.

Spider animations, more limbs to control but lacks the problem of Uncanny valley.

Slime (the type with a smiley face on it)...now slime I imagine is probably the easiest to animate (especially if you make it a cube) and would merely involve stretching said cube to have it ooze along.

Now lets say they're all in the same game, all player characters and are all meant to be customisable. For the sake of ease we'll say they all use the same loot (there are other options, like having the game go 'if X race uses chest they get X loot but then you need to design items that are functionally identical but are designed for the three races anyway). This presents quite the challenge to overcome and I'll ask a couple of questions.

1) The races are incredibly different to each other so it effectively means designing 3 sets of loot per item. Is this a similar problem to CoH's current rigs? Since we're often told that Male, female and Huge all need to be accounted for and designed for seperately but obviously to a lesser degree since all are humanoid in that regards. However CoH has the sliding scales which I imagine would add even more work instead of a static 'race' with no sliders.

2) Two of the races don't even have hands...how would you animate the other two races utilizing weapons?

3) One race has no way of wearing armour, how do you got about representing the armour on that race (a suggestion was have the slime 'swallow' the armour so it floats around inside).

So thats my questions for you people with knowledge of these matters.

For the games sake... I'd definitely say the attack cycle requires more work. If only just because there are so many different ways one can 'attack' even when just limited to one weapon animation.

Let's take a sword, for example. An attack called 'slash' seems like it would be pretty straight forward at first... but how does the character swing the sword? Swiftly, from right to left in a downward motion? Maybe they should go left to right? How fast should they swing? Is it a one handed or two handed sword? What kind of stance should the character take while swinging.

But because this is for a game... there are other things to consider. Like how far away from the body the character needs to swing the sword in order to make it look like they made contact with the target. Or how long it takes to animate. The designers of that attack might have a limit for how many seconds it should take. Or, if not, you may need to determine that number for yourself. If an attack animates too quickly, then it might be over-powered for that attack type.

All very interesting answers.

Durakken's questions first.

The Races in this case are humanoid, Giant Spider and Slime with their own set of animations, breaking it down into the 'basics' of walk, run, attack and idle.

In most games Giant Spiders are usually limited to three basic attacks.
1) The lunging jump.
2) A kind of fang swipe.
3) Curling the Abdomen under themselves and firing webs.

Now these are fine for basic monster characters, after all you don't need that many animations for what is usually a 'mook' creature. However to make them a player character I imagine you'd need more than just those three attacks (or would you?).

Slime allows a LOT of leeway since...well Slimes aren't real, Humans and spiders have recognisable and well known movement patterns but Slimes don't. Slimes can stretch, congeal, form tentacles to lash at enemies or even the good old fashion 'run into the enemy' style attack to cause damage.

Both the Giant Spider and the Slime have...well..very little to grip with, neither has hands, the Spider COULD grip with the fangs but a Spider holding a sword like that would be silly. Now the Slime allows leeway once more because, well, it theoretically could hold the sword in a kind of tentacle grip and then lash out with it. Slimes, by far, at the most versatile purely

Attack animations definitely are something of a stickler, especially if your going for a melee based one. Just swinging the arm would look weird, using examples I know, CoH and a fantasy based MMO based on a popular Paper and Pencil Roleplaying game.

CoH handles the problem of movement by having 'rooting' animations that glue you to the spot and CoH has a wider variety of animations going on. However the 'hit stuff hard with medieval weaponry' powersets (aka Broadsword, Axe and Mace) all share animations with Broadsword being the odd one out and having Parry which has its own unique animation, War Mace and Battle Axe only differ in effects, otherwise the animations are exactly the same.

Now that's fine when all your people are humanoids, you can use the same rig and have them preform the same attacks without much hastle but when the races are so different from each other it represents a real problem.

Hope I've explained myself sufficiently enough, been kind of a long day.

If it's a matter of staging a single scene for daz studio/poser or some such you can do a search for BVH mocap files and you'll come up with all sorts of preset resources, some even free.. I actually didn't read the whole OP so not sure if that's what you're getting at.

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