The Beginner's Guide to Animation in Unity (v5 to v2019.2)

This lecture wraps up the bouncing ball demo by adding stretch into the effect followed by a challenge to create a spinning bouncing cube.

A challenge to test your keyframe animation skills

In this lecture we will take a closer look at using curves to modify the behaviour of an object's movement between keyframes.

Extending on the state-machine of an opening and closing door, we will examine how to control when the door opens and closes using triggers. These will allow you to walk a character up to the door which will then trigger the door to open. After the character walks through, the door will close.

This lecture completes the opening and closing door exercise allowing the door to be triggered to open when the player walks through and closes after they've moved on.

In this challenge you can test your skills at using trigger locations to open and close a draw bridge.

In this second part of the draw bridge triggering challenge solutions we will complete the project adding code to the trigger points.

While you can animate all mater of objects and properties in Unity, nothing is more interesting and fun to work with than rigged models.  This video will explain the basics of a mesh, its skeleton and rigging.

Complex animations of models are best achieved in dedicated modelling and animation packages such as Maya, 3DS Max and Blender.  If you are not a seasoned animator and have no experience animating, the best place to start learning is to download a free version of Maya or Blender and consult the respective manuals.  Keyframes, tweening and curves are employed in these packages to create sophisticated actions.

If you are not quite ready to launch into the creation of your own rigged characters - DON'T PANIC - all model resources for the following lectures are supplied.

This short lecture provides experienced animators with the instructions for preparing their models for FBX export formats that are supported by Unity.

In this lecture we will use the free Adobe Fuse softwate to create a 3D humanoid character that we can later use for animation.

With your Fuse character finished it's time to upload it to Mixamo for animation. This lecture will step you through that process.

This article provides information on updating the following exercise to Unity 2019.3+

Mixamo.com, owned by Adobe, is an excellent resource for getting hold of characters and attaching a plethora of animations to their rigs. Through 4 or 5 clicks you can have a fully rigged and animated character ready to import into Unity.  This video will take you through the steps to obtain a Mixamo character complete with animations of your choosing.

In this lecture we will extend the previous and examine how to create multiple animations in Mixamo and string them together in the Unity Animator.

Finally we have a character in Unity. Things are going to get interesting and by the introduction of code you will be able to control the animation state-machine and create a character with dynamic animations that change according to key presses.

This lecture completes the walk and idle animation states and code added to the character.

What is a third person game character if they can't jump. We all know that pressing the spacebar should result in our player character leaping into the air. Here we building on the walking and idle states to include a spacebar jump.

There are two basic types of rig in Unity; generic and humanoid.  While the generic format is used for simple objects, the humanoid rig is far more powerful, besides allowing for compounding animations, control of animation transforms and supporting inverse kinematics, humanoid based animations can be shared across multiple models.

One powerful aspect of using humanoid rigs is that you have a wider range of control over root motion.  This dictates whether or not the animation actually moves the characters transform in the world space.  Allowing an animation to control the movement of a character, rather than relying on key presses that run translation code, if we let the animation move the character in world space we can achieve more fluid results.  This functionality also allows for the joining together of multiple complex animations in which the character is moved and rotated a lot.

Now that we've had some experience with root motion, its time to revise the old character control script used previously.  Instead of programming translations to move the character around we will employ the root motion contained within the animation itself.

Its one thing to move a character around with root motion. It all works well until the character starts walking through walls! In this video we bring back the physics system and combine it with a root motion drive script to control the movement of the character but to also build in collisions.

In this video we will put together a swimming and treading water animation.

This video is an extension to the swimming challenge in which animation curves will be discussed for tweaking the output of the animator.

Interacting with other objects in the game scene are critical behaviours for a third person player character. Depending on the object the player is going to interact with a different animation may be required.  In the game, The Sims, such animations are triggered in the characters by the actual object.  For example, a chair is for sitting while a guitar is for strumming.  In this video we will create a chair object that informs the player character that the appropriate animation to play when interacting with the chair is to sit on it.

In part one you will setup the characters animation and movement controllers.

In this second part of triggering a character to sit on a chair, the trigger component will be added to the chair object. When a player clicks on the chair it will automate the character to walk over to the chair and trigger the sitting animation.

In the final part of this tutorial you will learn how to line up the character's sitting animation with the chair to make the action look more believable. We will also add in code that will allow the character to stand up and walk away.

In this series of lectures you will follow along as we create a character that can jump up and grab a ledge.  It will then be able to shimmy along the ledge from left to right and also climb up onto of a container.

This short lecture covers the difference between Read Only and Readable Motion files and explains how to convert a Read Only motion that cannot be modified in the Animation Window into a format that can.

This video continues the step-by-step climbing up character actions controlled by the keyboard.

This video continues the step-by-step climbing up character actions controlled by the keyboard.

This video continues the step-by-step climbing up character actions controlled by the keyboard.

This video continues the step-by-step climbing up character actions controlled by the keyboard.

Blend shapes allow you to morph the same of a mesh from one state to another.  The technique uses copies of the same mesh in different states and tweens all the vertices at once from one location to another.

This article provides some advise on where to find further assistance for creating blendshapes in third party software.

This project uses the free Boris model listed with other free rigged assets listed at: http://lesterbanks.com/2010/03/22-of-the-most-fun-rigs-for-maya/.  The model of Boris' head is used to create an open and closed mouth as well as eye blink animation.

Sometimes a more natural animation may better be shown as a blending of several animations.  In this video you will learn how to use the characters speed to smoothly blend between a walking and running animation using a blend tree.

In this lecture you will learn how to create a strafe set that blends 7 animations together based on the direction a character is moving.

In this lecture we will add a simple rotation mechanic to the code used for the strafe set to allow the character full 360 movement.

In this lecture we begin our exploration of inverse kinematics. We program and animate a character's hand to move on top of existing animation and examine how Unity calculates inverse kinematics.

In this video we will use the inverse kinematic system to program a character to look at an object. This dynamic animation is added on top of the existing animation allowing for a blend of motions to naturally occur.

Using inverse kinematics we will customise a picking up animation to reposition the characters hand to the exact location of a game object that it wants to hold in its hand.

In this video you'll be given the specifications of a project for you to attempt to complete on your own.  It will challenge all aspects of the knowledge you've accumulated in the course.

In this video we will start building the solution for the project by importing a character with animations, setting the scene and adding initial controller code.

In this second video we will continue working through the picking up a phone and replacing it animation by fixing the alignment of the animations and adding all necessary motions to the animator.

This video is the final part of the solution to the telephone picking up and putting down animation sequence with triggers.

Some final comments from Penny.

Here you will find solution files for the final projects from some of the hands-on exercises from throughout this course.