The Beginner's Guide to Animation (Unity 5 to 2020+)

In this lecture students will learn how the optical illusion of animations works to trick the brain into seeing movement in a rapid succession of images.

Twelve principles of animation were devised in 1981 to assist animators in creating believable movement and characters in their work. This lecture explains and demonstrates each.

In this lecture students will be introduced to keyframes and the concept of tweening.

In this lecture students will start working with the animation window to create a keyframed bouncing ball.

In this lecture students will add a squash and stretch effect to the bounce animation and then be challenged to repeat the task on a cube.

In this lecture students will examine the concept of animation curves and use them to build a planet orbiting system.

In this lecture students will learn how to move an animation to another location within the world and have multiples of the same animation playing in different places.

In this lecture students will be challenged at adding extra keyframes to the capsule squash animation.

In this lecture students will be introduced to the Animator window and learn how to make a door automatically open and close.

In this lecture students will setup the animated door ready to be triggered by a First Person Controller.

In this lecture students will add some simple code to trigger the door to open and close when the player character gets near.

In this lecture students will be challenged to make a draw bridge that opens and closes when the first person controller walks over a trigger.

In this lecture students will complete the challenge to create an automated drawbridge.

In this lecture students will be introduced to the basics of an animated character setup where they will learn about bones, joints and rigging.

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 students will learn to work with generic rigs to begin constructing a simple walk animation.

In this lecture students will complete a walk cycle animation for a simple character and examine the nature of animation cycles.

In this lecture students will examine how to stitch multiple generic animations together and move the game object root location.

In this lecture students will learn about the Make Human free tool for creating humanoid models that can be animated in Unity.

In this lecture students will learn how to put humanoid animations from one character onto another.

In this lecture students will get a quick overview of fuse as well as an understanding of rigging a character and animating with Mixamo.

In this lecture students will learn how import Mixamo animations into Unity and create animation sequences with them for humanoid characters.

In this lecture students will learn how to create a simple controller script to move a character forward and back and rotate on the spot.

In this lecture students will learn how to use script to transition between animation states.

In this lecture students will learn a couple of ways to work tweak animations to get the right effect when code is driving the character movement.

In this lecture students will learn how to work with triggers.

In this lecture students will examine how to make simple blends between the animations and then be challenges to recreate another walk/jump cycle with new animations.

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.

In this lecture students will learn how to introduce physics into an animation and have a collision cause a transition to occur.

In this lecture students will set up an animator to allow a character to interact through animation with another object.

In this lecture students will add a clicking dynamic and code to a game object in order to begin a new animation sequence.

In this lecture students will complete the animation to get the character to sit on a selected object.

In this lecture students will start work on making a humanoid jump and hang from a bar.

In this lecture students will learn how to edit animations in later versions of Unity that set some animations to Read Only.

In this lecture students will add a climbing animation to the scene to allow the character to climb onto of a large container.

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 advice 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.

This link provides further information on the courses you can look at taking based on your interests and skill level.