Book Image

Unity Character Animation with Mecanim

By : Jamie Dean
Book Image

Unity Character Animation with Mecanim

By: Jamie Dean

Overview of this book

Game animation for independent developers has taken a giant leap forward with Unity 5's Mecanim toolset, which streamlines the import/export, retargeting, and many other aspects of the character animation workflow. Unity Character Animation with Mecanim is a great primer for getting to know the nuts and bolts of Mecanim and other character animation related tools in Unity 5. It offers you step-by-step instructions for preparing and exporting rigged models and animation sequences from commonly used 3D packages, such as Maya, 3ds Max and Blender. This book explores the new set of animation tools introduced with Mecanim in Unity 5. Approaching its subject matter through a typical genre–a zombie action game, character animation techniques are explored using real examples of player input and interaction, enemy behavior, and other aspects of game dynamics. As the book progresses, the reader will understand how these elements fit together in a small game development workflow. We will begin with a demonstration of the process of getting a rigged character into Unity 5 and setting it up to use provided animation sequences. We will also consider a few industry standard 3D packages and how these can be used to rig a humanoid character for use in Unity 5. We will demonstrate the retargeting capabilities of Mecanim’s Humanoid Animation type by adjusting motion sequences to fit disparate character types in our game. After this, we will look at Ragdoll physics and the implementation of this commonly used technique in a Mecanim workflow. The book culminates with a thorough dissection of the enemy character AI script incorporating the Mecanim elements detailed in the previous chapters. Unity Character Animation with Mecanim will provide you with a detailed exploration of the interaction between game development and character animation, and will broaden your understanding of the rich animation toolset within Unity 5
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Unity Character Animation with Mecanim
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
The Zombie Attacks!
Index

Using a motion capture sequence with a pre-rigged model


To demonstrate the use of motion capture data in Mecanim we will continue with the male zombie character that we worked with in Chapter 1, The Zombie Attacks!.

Getting started

We will begin this demonstration with the basic scene we assembled in the first chapter.

  1. Open the scene by navidating to File | Open Scene.

  2. In the scene file dialog that opens up, select Chapter4_Start from the PACKT_Scenes folder.

    The scene contains our zombie_m character and a ground plane, and is lit with the default directional light and skybox.

    The character already has an animator controller attached to it, though it only has the idle and attack animation sequences that we added in Chapter 1, The Zombie Attacks!.

  3. Move the default camera to a position where it clearly shows the zombie_m character and the extent of the groundPlane in front of it:

Setting up the scene in this way will make it easier to clearly see our motion sequences.

Importing the motion capture sequence...