Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Mecanim
Mecanim is Unity's animation system. The Mecanim system has been integrated into the Unity
editor, and is similarly designed to be a visual, intuitive tool for the game developer. While the
character and its basic animation clips are created prior to importing to Unity, Mecanim is used to
manage and blend these animations for a smoother, better game play experience.
Best of all, through the use of avatars, Mecanim allows you to take an animation from one character
model and retarget it onto another, rather than having to create an entirely new animation sequence
for the second character. This might sound simplistic, but it is yet another example of the folks at
Unity making something very complex into something very easy to use while saving you hours and
days of work.
After all, this is a book about learning Unity with a focus on scripting, and scripting is ultimately
necessary to integrate the animated character with the gameplay code in order to play the game.
You want to be efficient in your efforts, though—remember, the goal here is to complete an awesome
game and publish it.
Development tools are constantly being upgraded to be more intuitive, more visual, and, most
importantly, more efficient by taking away the burden of creating raw code for commonly used and
oft-repeated functions. Mecanim provides a Visual Programming Tool you can use for complex
animation interactions before scripting the gameplay code.
The creation and animation of 3D character models is done prior to integrating them into your
Unity game project. While character creation is well beyond the scope of this topic, you will learn
the basics of taking a ready-made character and combining it with ready-made animation clips in
preparation for using it in your game.
This section will give you an introduction to setting up a character and its animations using Mecanim
along with accompanying scripting to provide for user input in order to control the character. To
really understand the beauty of Mecanim, you are going to choose a character and configure its
avatar and animation and then quickly apply this animation to a second character, using free content
from the Asset Store. This ability to mix and match characters and animations gives you a huge
library of options for your game prototypes while being mindful of containing costs as you learn.
I'm a Doctor, Not a . . . !
Before going further, I'd like to make a few general observations about working in the game
development industry. There is often a friendly rivalry between the artists and the developers, usually
defined as the creative types versus the logical types. I would encourage you—a beginning game
developer—not to limit yourself to either of these categories.
While artists are in fact creative, the truly skilled artist must have an in-depth knowledge of his or
her chosen medium, which is actually very technical in nature, as is learning and practicing the use
of any tools or motor skills required to manipulate the art medium to take the creative concept from
idea to reality.
 
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