Self Study 2: Character Animation

This week we were tasked with making a character for that could be at the tourist attraction we modelled and create an Idle, Walking, and Waving/Other animations for it. To complete this I decided to model a generic human made out of block wearing an orange shirt and blue pants (so that I didn’t spend as many hours as last week). As seen here:

To help create this character I used the blender Rigify (an add on used for rigging characters) to create get the general humanoid shape using their human rig as the skeleton thus giving me some proportions to go off. 

I then used this to generate a rig for my character allowing for posing of limbs and thus easier animation. Using the Rigify rig gave me the ability to have better control of the limbs using it’s prebuilt constraints and IK (things to better pose the rig). 

I then saved my project and created a separate save to work on my walking animation. After one failed attempt taking me 2 hours I reverted my save and I consulted images of a walk cycle and created this after two more hours:

After Creating this I saved this and went to my previous save and started working on a Waving animation, This was much easier as I now had the experience of the walk animation and thus had a better understanding of how to animate quickly meaning this only took me ~45 minutes. 

After completing this I realised we were suppose to have both animations in one blend file. I was confused on how to do this but realised that I had missed some material on actions (mapping the animation to a sub file). Once I imported my 2 animations back into my main save as actions I realised why we were supposed to have an idle action, as my actions did not reset to a default state when switch between them (forgot to record evidence of how this looked). After realising that I created an idle animation using the starting waving frame.

This completed the content but also made me confused why my arms weren’t behaving symmetrically, I could not figure out how to fix this.

Tutorial Work

For the tutorial we needed to import the character we made into unity and tie it's animations to user action, this was achieved by setting up some variables that controlled when the animations switched from one to the other, using a unity animation controller. We then created some code to control when these variables changed. Mapping wave to space, and Walk to W and S. I also tried to control the character's run animation speed using the current speed of the character however this did not work as the speed was to varied. All this and a rudimentary door are shown here: