In order to closely correspond to the development of a real game, the projects in this book follow a theme of a typical first-person action game—the sort that is often found to be played on PC, console, and mobile platforms—the context is the zombie apocalypse. During the game, our player must negotiate his or her way out of an office complex full of zombies. In terms of character animation, this will offer us plenty of variety in the type of movement required by the player and enemies.

This book will take the reader through the different processes involved in the character animation aspect of game development. It will explain the basic animation tools within Unity, as well as the dynamic Mecanim toolset and how it can be used in the game animation context.

Chapter 1, The Zombie Attacks!, introduces the Mecanim interface and explains how rigged characters can be imported to Unity and quickly set up with animation.

Chapter 2, Rigging Characters for Unity in 3ds Max and Maya, explains the relationship between the Unity engine and commonly used 3D software and how characters can be prepared within external software to function smoothly once imported to Unity.

Chapter 3, Interacting with the Environment, compares a few different strategies for making a character interact convincingly with the environment.

Chapter 4, Working with Motion Capture Data, walks you through the process of adapting motion capture files to animate your character with Mecanim's toolset.

Chapter 5, Retargeting Animation, considers the reuse of animation clips and how animation can be adapted within Unity to suit different character types.

Chapter 6, Talking Heads, demonstrates Mecanim's facial animation capabilities and the scripting necessary to get these working in a game.

Chapter 7, Controlling Player Animation with Blend Trees, explores more of the advanced features of the Animator panel, defining smooth blending between different animation clips with a limited implementation of scripting.

Chapter 8, Implementing Ragdoll Physics, compares the use of real-world physics with the character controller component and how these can both be implemented in a character setup.

Chapter 9, Controlling Enemy Animation with AI and Triggers, demonstrates how scripted behavior and Unity's navMesh navigation system can be used to control enemy character animations within a game.

Modeling, texturing of assets in 3D software, scripting game states, and GUI within Unity. These aspects of game development are beyond the scope of this book.

Understanding key animation concepts is necessary to complete the chapters in this book. In addition, you will need the following:

This book focuses on the character animation aspect of game production in Unity.

If you are completely new to Unity, it is recommended to read through some of the basic introductory material documentation on the official site. If you have experience working with an older version of the software, then this book should give you a good idea of how Mecanim can be used in your pipeline.

If you are new to animation, this book uses some character animation terminology that you may not be familiar with. Where possible, I have explained these terms.

My approach to writing this book comes from an artist, rather than coder background. If your motivation for understanding character animation in Unity is to showcase your artwork in a demo or even a full-scale game, you have come to the right place!

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Choose an appropriate file name for the scene, such as Chapter1_1."

A block of code is set as follows:

var health : int = 10;
var healthLimit : int = 10;

function AddHealth (increase : int)
{
    health += increase;

    if (health > healthLimit)
{
        health = healthLimit; 
   }

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Model tab."

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