Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Preferences. Go to the Time Slider section and change the Playback Speed
option to real time.
Conclusion
Lots left to do. This is a seven-step tutorial that will probably take you a couple
of hours to complete. Just animating a game character is worth an entire topic
on its own, so if you haven't a lot of animation experience, don't sweat it. Get
a bit of animation in there and call it good; or feel free to use the AegisChung-
SingleMesh-Animated.mb file to use for the next tutorial.
Tutorial 10.4: Getting Animated
Characters to Unity
In previous chapters I've argued passionately for manually exporting assets
from Maya for consumption in Unity. Because the topic's been beaten pretty
hard, I'll avoid proselytizing too much in this chapter; however, it's important
to note that for game characters manual export carries some real benefits.
The most important benefit has to do with how IK is calculated. In our current rig
and animation, the rotation of all the leg joints has been done via IK chains, and
specifically with the translate keyframes of the foot handles. These calculations
are dynamic within Maya, meaning that each frame isn't just seen as an
incremental rotation difference since it is in the upper body, but a much more
complex calculation of incremental difference in translation of the IK handle, and
then another calculation of how to rotate the involved joints to solve for this IK
handle location. If you've used different 3D applications, you know that IK can
work differently and have different personalities across different programming
solutions. It's no different in the Maya/Unity marriage; and IK might solve great
in Maya and not solve quite so nicely in Unity. Especially if using things like pole
vectors, Unity doesn't always see the IK the same way Maya does.
To help alleviate this, we'll look at baking our animation into all joint rotation
procedures. The IK will then not actually be calculated by Unity at all—Unity
will simply see joint rotation keyframes.
Step 1:
Save a backup version of the file. Save as
Aegis_Chung-
Animated
.mb.
Why?
We are about to bake the animation. Once the animation is baked, it is
very difficult to do any sort of meaningful editing. It's always good to
have a nonbaked version of the file. You may never need to go back to
this unbaked version, but if you need it and don't have it, the animation
practically needs to be started over.
Step 2:
Bake the animation. In the Outliner select AC_Root. Then choose
Edit>Keys>Bake Simulations (Options). In the Bake Simulation Options
