#mecanim

Blinds go up, blinds go down (on raycast and click)

Something I made tonight in Unity 

After we got the rider physics system working in the game, the rider was feeling a lot more alive while on the bike. But when the bike crashed and the rider went into a rag doll physics simulation, it all of a sudden felt very static again. We decided to use another Unity plugin from RootMotion called PuppetMaster.

PuppetMaster allows you to blend a canned animation with a rag doll physics sim. The plan was to spawn a rag doll version of the rider when the bike crashed, play a flailing animation, and blend it with the rag doll physics sim. This would make the rider look like they were flailing around in the air, but still behave in a physically realistic way.

Doing this meant learning how to animate in Blender, and then learning how to create Mecanim state machines in Unity, but what’s game development if not a constant learning process!

The first step was to get PuppetMaster integrated into the game and working with our rider rig and rag doll. Here was a test I did changing the muscle weights in PuppetMaster. As I make the muscles weaker, the rig transitions from a rigid static “animation” to a flexible rag doll:

Once that was working, it was time to integrate it into the game itself and get it all working together. As you can see, in game dev there are often a lot of broken steps on the way to having something that works:

Finally I created a couple of animations for the rider:

1) a static position “animation” of the rider posed on the bike 2) a flail animation where the rider would move their arms and legs around 3) a static position “animation” of the rider curled up into a ball

I created a Mecanim Animator that transitions the rider from the bike position, to the flail animation, to the ball animation. Mecanim nicely handles the transitions and blending between the animations. Then we hook it all up to PuppetMaster and configure all the muscle weights so that the rider is still affected by the physics sim. The end result feels pretty great in the game!

Characters for a unreleased game

Things i did:

Lead Artist

Directed external Artists

Oversaw the rigging pipeline

Used a universal custom skeleton to be used for all characters ingame. Used Human Ik in Maya to retarget joints.

Look Development of characters ingame (shaders, lighting, proportions, texture adjustments)