animation
Since I am submitting Trust in Me, my game for the exhibition at the international animation film Fantoche for the Student's Contest at the IGF, I had a reason to collect a lot of material.
So, you may profit as well:
Not only does Trust in Me have its own page now, it also has a video!
You can read more about the concept of the game – and how it failed.
And of course, there are pictures.
Animation curves in the new Unity 3 can not only be used for animation, but can be directly accessed by scripts.
By defining
AnimationCurve curve;you can add a specific curve to the script in the editor. Using AnimationCurve.Evaluate() you can get the y value at a specific time. Using those curves, you are no longer limited to use Lerp() at every corner (or one of the additional functions provided by Mathfx).
Thanks to Mario von Rickenbach who mentioned that in a lesson as an aside …
Exporting an animated armature with a mesh for Unity using Blender 2.5 can be a bit of a hassle. With the armature parented to the mesh, I could either export the mesh or the armature with the animations, but never both.
Having the armature separate from the mesh seemed to have worked – I have now everything set up in Unity, both mesh and armature with animation.
Though the animation looks slighty wobbly …
This might work for simple animations; more complicated set-ups might still fail to export, since Blender 2.5 and Unity3D 3.0 both have not exactly extensively tested.
Eiko Oba explains in an article over at Gamasutra how human figure animation can be improved by understanding the concept of the Center of Mass.
Some skilled animators have the ability to picture and recreate human movement easily. But most of us can't. At our studio we often encourage animators to use reference videos showing a person performing the action they're meant to animate. This helps them understand the movement better, but video can only go so far.
One critical, and often undervalued element of movement is an understanding of the character's center of gravity, or center of mass. I will refer to both as the "COM."
The center of gravity is the point at which the entire weight of a body may be considered as concentrated, so that if supported at this point the body will remain balanced in any position.
Your balance and movements are always affected by gravity. As a gymnast I learned how to control and adjust my body's COM to perform various actions. Tumbling, balancing, and so forth, all require an adjustment of the COM. Some animators I know who are martial artists also understand this concept, so they can see how the COM flows and adjust the character's body appropriately. Adjustment of the COM is something we all do naturally in real life when performing actions like dancing, running, and so forth -- but it's not easy to create this in a fictional character.
I'm not really sure I will be able to use that immediately, but it sure seems handy as soon as I figure out that rigging system in Blender ...
