Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Why?
Ambient light can work great in a lot of situations, but in dramatic
lighting situations it's a mess. Turning it off may require some
adjustments to the lighting scheme, but the look will be much more
polished. Importantly, it will allow for some truly black areas where white
text will show up well.
Tutorial 10.5: Animating in Unity
Unity continues to make improvements in functionality and interface. Among
the biggest jumps has been within its built-in animation system. In many
previous editions of Unity, everything (and I mean everything) needed to
be animated outside for any reasonable control. There were eternal infernal
processes of animating a null-object in Maya and then importing that and
parenting a camera to it to get good camera motion; really a pain. And then
there was the awkward time when Unity didn't include any animation at all.
Luckily, all of that is behind us now and Unity has a quite reasonable and
intuitive (if you're familiar with other animation tools) interface.
Still, most complex animation (like character for instance) is best done
outside of Unity in your 3D application. But for some simple moves (camera
cinematics for instance), Unity's built-in animation system works just fine.
In this tutorial, we will organize and animate Aegis so we see him spinning
around slowly in the scene as he idles.
Step 1:
Create a new empty GameObject. Do this via GameObject>Create
Empty. Make sure it's position is at 0,0,0 and name it
AegisGroup
.
Why?
In Maya, when multiple objects are grouped together, Maya automatically
creates a null object to contain the new group. Unity does not do this.
However, by creating the empty game object first, we can then have this
as a container to hold other things.
Step 2:
Make Aegis, the floor, and any lights lighting Aegis children of
this new AegisGroup. Do this in the Hierarchy by dragging those assets
onto the AegisGroup GameObject (which will make them children of
AegisGroup).
Step 3:
Create an animation for AegisGroup. In the Hierarchy panel,
select AegisGroup. Choose Window>Animation. This will pull up the
Animation window and timeline. In the top-left corner is a little red
dot (for record). Click this and a Create New Animation dialog box will
appear. Enter
AegisGroupRotation.anim
in the File Name input field
and click Save.
