Tag: 3D

Animation Idles

At this stage the character has been modeled, textured and rigged.

His blinking eyes are done with a sprite sheet and a few lines of C# code to play each frame in a sequence. The texture is emissive, so it will glow in the dark. I’ll need to write some code to swap textures based on animations, moods and game states, but that will come later. for now It’s great to see him come to life!

Testing this little guy ingame #robot #roboball #bleep #unity3d #idle #animation #chillin #v2 #3D

A post shared by Rob Elsworthy (@robelsworthy) on

Running an idle animation is easy enough, but it was a little harder to find some info on randomizing idles. A big thank you to GameDevDad for posting a working example of the code required! I’ve just started learning C# and this was a big help.

After a few more animations to test the rigs limits ingame, I’ll need to study how it looks in Unity and fix any bugs I find. Later I’ll take a crack at the smear animations i’d mentioned before, as it involves some re-rigging. That will be a good point to make revisions. I’ve already noticed that the arm sockets have a habit of flipping around even though they are constrained (gimbal locking), and i’m seeing some tiny movement in the feet when they should be locked down. Fun!

Rigging and Skinning

It is CRITICAL to get the scale right BEFORE you begin this stage. You have been warned. Many issues can be introduced if you try to resize things later. I grabbed the default Ethan asset from Unity that is already scaled to the world size and base my scale off of it.

To get the character animating you need to create a skeleton and bind the model to it. You position the bones in 3D inside the model and then use a skin modifier to assign weights to the verts.

Here’s a link on skinning a character in 3Dmax. Again, there are many of these tutorials available online for whichever program you decide to use. I found this guy to be clear and thorough.

The setup for my rig is simple, to test out the range of motion.

Exporting to the FBX file format allows the character to be transferred between programs. Unity uses them directly, and maintains the structure for an easy workflow. Takes are stored as animations, which can be used in the mechanim system with drag and drop functionality.