Tag: animation

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!

Animation Style

Research time! Looking at a lot of Anime gifs lately.

Reminds me of how much I love motion. I’d like to incorporate this where possible, mixed in with a more classical animation style for the character moments. There are a couple of hurdles to achieving that look in 3D I’ll need to solve. Time for some Technical Directing!

  • Rigging the model for Squash and Stretch scaling.
  • Smears on fast motion.
  • Secondary motion/action

Squash and Stretch:

This is a high priority. The first tests I imported to unity scaled the child bones as well as the parent. I haven’t found a good solution yet for this. Counter scaling the child bones to compensate seems like it would have some hidden problems. I remember many issues with scale in the past. Stay tuned for the results!

Smears:

Blendshapes and bones would both work (and maybe some extra geometry). I’d like to have total control of each frame. I’m going to test Vertex Shaders and see how far I can push things. I purchased ShaderForge to test this out. Not cheap but it seems like I’m going to need it for a lot of things.

Secondary Action:

The delay of extra parts like clothes and hair can really enhance the realism of motion as well as add some flair. I’ve incorporated some robot parts that will work for my character. His head bob, antenna sway and telescoping robotic arms will all help. I considered automating these features with physical simulations, but i’m having fun doing it by hand, and the added control is a bonus.