Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Cleaning a file frequently is always a good idea. However, before rigging and
skinning it is especially important to provide Maya with a simple mesh that is
just polygons and texture without any of the heavy overhead that the extra
nodes bring with them.
Remember that the point of all these Maya exercises is to get the assets into
Unity. We have already seen some of the strange things that happen with
scaling. Scaling a rigged character is certainly possible, but things go much
easier if the meshes are scaled and positioned correctly within Maya's space
before rigging and skinning. It keeps the Maya-centric process cleaner, and
makes for more reliable translation from Maya to Unity.
Step 1:
Open the latest version of Aegis Chung in Maya.
Step 2:
Delete all history. Edit>Delete All by Type> History.
Step 3:
Name the body mesh
AC_AegisChung
. Name the weapons
AC_
Rifle
, AC_
Pistol
, AC_
Knife
, respectively. Name the eyes
AC_LeftEye
and
AC_RightEye
.
Why?
AC (of course) stands for Aegis Chung. Giving objects names that help to
group them together has all sorts of benefits further down the road in
Unity including the ability to quickly search for all assets dealing with the
character by searching for AC within Unity.
Step 4:
Select all the meshes and press Ctrl-G (Command-G on a Mac) to
group them together.
Why?
We need to resize Aegis before moving on. By resizing the group, all the
parts will remain correctly scaled in relationship to each other since they
will all scale around the group's center. This is different than selecting all
the objects and scaling; this will scale them according to each object's
center, and all the meshes will separate from each other.
Step 5:
Create a new cylinder to use as size reference. Create>Polygon
Primitives>Cylinder. Select the Cylinder, and then in the Channels Box,
click polyCylinder1 in the INPUTS section. Change the Radius to 0.25 and
the Height to 2 (
Figure 10.1
). Move the cylinder up so that it's sitting on
the “ground” or Y = 0 plane.
Why?
Back when we were modeling the scene, we discussed briefly that one
unit in Maya roughly equaled one unit in Unity. In Unity, we know that
the First Person Controller is 2 units tall (about 2 meters). If we can get
Aegis scaled correctly in Maya it will save a lot of tweaking time when he's
brought into Unity.
