Animation in Unity

During this week’s supervisor meeting, I was advised to create various animations for my monster. Take the ‘attack’ animation, for instance: if a monster can be killed by 5 attacks, there must be one different animation for each attack. Before I start making numerous animations for a monster, it is essential to understand the animation system in Unity and how it works and provides for animators.

Animation in unity can be handled in different ways. The animation can be created by using external methods and importing, or by the Unity in the Animation editor (Menard, 2011, p222). There are 2 different animation in unity systems. We have created animations from outside softwares as 3dsmax or Maya, or from motion capture studios or other sources, animation in unity will be achieved largely through the Mecanim system; otherwise, it may be achieved through the Legacy system (Thorn, 2013, p244).

 What Mecanim provides:

Animations set up for all elements in Unity including Objects, characters and properties.

Support imported animation clips and also animation created within unity.

Humanoid animation retargeting by Avatar system, which is an ability to apply animation from any source to your own model.

Preview, transition and interaction animation clips before gameplay code is hooked in.

Management of complex interactions between animations with a visual programming tool.

Animating different body parts with different logic

Layering and masking features

 A brief Mecanim workflow of animation in Unity

1.       Animation clips imported (external sources or created within Unity)

2.       Animation Controller, which is a structured flowchart-like system, allows animation clips to be organized.

3.       Avatar system

4.       Animation Component

1, 2, 3 are assigned together on Game object via Animation Component. (Figure1). Animation component refers to animation controller, and animation controller refers to animation clips (refer to Figure 1).

What Mecanim provides:

Animations set up for all elements in Unity including Objects, characters and properties.

Support imported animation clips and also animation created within unity.

Humanoid animation retargeting by Avatar system, which is an ability to apply animation from any source to your own model.

Preview, transition and interaction animation clips before gameplay code is hooked in.

Management of complex interactions between animations with a visual programming tool.

Animating different body parts with different logic

Layering and masking features

 The briefly Mecanim workflow of animation in Unity

1.       Animation clips imported(external sources  or created within Unity)

2.       Animation Controller which is a structured flowchart-like system allows animation clips are organized.

3.       Avatar system

4.       Animation Component

1, 2, 3 are assigned together on Game object via Animation Component. (Figure1).Animation component refer to animation controller and animation controller refer to animation clips.

 Figure1: Diagram showing how the various parts of the animation system connect together

More into animation organization, we can import multiple animation clips and create the files to include various types of animation  from movement, attack, being attacked, or jumping, and set it up by informing Unity which range we need to be in the action (Wittayabundit ,2011,P141).

Besides, the layers of systems allow us to decide which animation layer is of higher or lower priority). The different layers animation allow for crossfade and to blend the weights to build up more complex and impressive animation.

Legacy animation system

Within Unity, we also can create animation clips from ”Animation Editor”, and view the data and edited results in “animation view “(Menard, 2011, p233)

The main reason for using this internal system is to continue working with old projects without having to update it for Mecanim.(Legacy animation system, para1).

It seems that Mecanim seems to be recommended for use in most situations. For our pre-production phase, I  plan  to create various animations in early stages, and use this system to blend and mix animations in Unity.

 There are some tutorials I found from digital tutor might benefit us during the animation phase.

1.       how to create a multi-phase boss battle

This tutorial provides the skills to create boss battle for a first person shooter .This course contains how to import boss model, rigs and animation properly. Setting up the detection system, field of view, animation script. Furthermore, enabling and disabling the damages from players. (Kinney,n.d.).

 2.       Quick-Start-to-Unity-Volume-2

This course cover basics of animation and physics in Unity. The range of this course from import rig, animation clips, and Meacanim. This tutorial is designed to beginner as myself who has never used Unity. (Kinney,n.d.)

 Reference:

 Kinney, J. (n.d.).Quick-Start-to-Unity-Volume-2[digital-tutors].

Retrieved from http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1567-Quick-Start-to-Unity-Volume-2

Kinney, J. (n.d.). Multiphase-Boss-Battle-in-Unity. [digital-tutors].Retrieved from http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1343-Multiphase-Boss-Battle-in-Unity.

Unity Technologies. (2015).Legacy animation system. Retrieved from http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Animations.html.

Unity Technologies (2015). Unity’s Animation System. Retrieved from http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AnimationOverview.html

Menard, M. (2011) Game Development with Unity

Thorn, A. (2013) Unity 4 Fundamentals: Get Started at Making Games with Unity

Wittayabundit,J.(2011). Unity 3 Game Development Hotshot.