Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Third, do the animations in place. For animations like walk, run, or jump,
imagine that the character is on an invisible treadmill and while his feet are
moving as though he's covering ground, he needs to stay put, walking in
place. The actual translation of the character will take place programmatically
and the character will move forward, backward, or side to side based upon
user input. Think of the walking-in-place character being in a capsule that is
moved as the animation is played, thus giving the illusion of movement. For
those of you who have done some high-rez work and worked with IK chains
specifically to keep the foot from sliding this will be an adjustment; but in
game walk cycles, the feet should always be sliding. For an illustration of what
this would look like take a look at the animation between frames 300 and
330 in the AegisChung_SingleMesh. mb file on the web site ( http://www
.Creating3dGames.com ). This frame range includes a quick animated-in-10-
minutes walk cycle animated as a stationary cycle. A quick note though; for
standing-still animations (like the idle), keep those feet stationary because
when the character is not moving and the feet slide, any illusion of gravity,
friction, and reality will be gone.
Keep it in one file and note the range. There are actually different ways to
attack this issue. On the one hand Unity allows you to import several files,
each with its own animation. Then these animations can be called up later
and assembled on one mesh. However, I generally find it easier to have
all the animations created in one Maya file and take note of the ranges
(idle: frame 1-240, walk: frames 300-330, etc.). Then when Unity imports
the .fbx we are going to export in a bit, you can tell Unity to interpret these
different animation clips by defining the range of frames that that animation
occurs in. This just keeps all the animations contained in one file and makes
the housekeeping easier inside of Unity.
Step 1: Save a backup copy of Aegis. Use File>Save As… and save the
file as AegisChung-SingleMesh-Rigged . Close the file and reopen
AegisChung-SingleMesh.
Why?
Once animation is started, the file contains keyframes and poses. Although
it's not overwhelmingly difficult to get rid of all the keyframes or to get
the character back into his bind pose (it's pretty easy actually), I always
prefer to save sequential versions of the process in case something
horrific happens. We will animate AegisChung-SingleMesh, but if need be
the unanimated but ready to be animated version is always waiting for us.
Tips and Tricks
An alternative to saving multiple versions like this—and one that we
teach at UIW—is to use referencing. Referencing is the process of
importing an instance of a Maya file that can then be manipulated
(including animated) but leaves the original referenced file untouched.
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search