What this book covers

Chapter 1 , Animation Fundamentals, begins by considering animation formally as a concept—animation at its core. From there, this chapter considers miscellaneous and very practical cases of animation in Unity that specifically involve scripting. This includes working with deltaTime and animation curves and even animating Mesh UVs. Overall, this chapter marks the beginning of our journey through animation and features everything you need to know to move ahead.

Chapter 2, Sprite Animation, explores the world of 2D animation, examining the sprite feature set used to create 2D games, flip-book textures, and planar animation. We consider the Unity Sprite editor, animation frames, frame rates, and how to fix common problems.

Chapter 3, Native Animation, enables us to see animation more generally in Unity, for both 2D and 3D, using both the Animation window and Particle Systems. We look at two very practical and useful projects. First, we create a camera fly-through across a level. Then, we create a dust/firefly particle system, which is very commonly found in fantasy games.

Chapter 4, Noncharacter Animation with Mecanim, teaches you about a flagship feature of Unity, namely Mecanim. Mecanim refers to a collection of features that together make advanced and smooth animations possible, especially for characters. In this chapter, we see the more unconventional uses of Mecanim as we animate doors and other interactive elements in our levels.

Chapter 5, Character Animation Fundamentals, begins with an analysis of rigged character animation. In this chapter, we see how to animate humanoid skeletons and characters for real-time animation. We also consider how to import rigged characters and configure them optimally, ready for animation.

Chapter 6, Advanced Character Animation, follows logically from the previous chapter. Here, we take an imported and configured character in Unity, and then we animate it as a player-controlled character. This character will support idle and forward movement, for both walking and running, as well as turning animations for moving left and right.

Chapter 7, Blend Shapes, IK, and Movie Textures, marks the end of this book. This chapter covers the following topics: Blend Shapes, used to create facial animations and other morph-like motions; inverse kinematics, used to accurately position a character's feet and hands in real time; and movie textures, used to play movie files as a texture projected onto a geometry.