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

Adding code to the zombie_ready script


The script currently attached to the female zombie, adequately handles its current states: Idle and Walk. We need to add a few lines of code to the script to trigger the face animation:

  1. In the Project panel, scroll down until the PACKT_Scripts folder is visible.

  2. Double-click on it to make its contents visible in the Assets panel.

  3. Locate zombie_ready and double-click on it to open the script in MonoDevelop.

We will start by adding a few variables. At the top of the script, add the following lines of code:

var target : Transform;
var alerted : boolean = false;
var snarlSound : AudioClip;
var soundReady : boolean = true;

The target variable will store the player character's position. The next variable, alerted is a boolean. It is basically an on/off switch that will allow the zombie to go into a new routine.

The next two variables deal with the sound that we will be using to make it clear that the zombie has been alerted.

The snarlSound variable is an audio clip...