Navigation Meshes are a tool to create characters that move around intelligently in our world. We'll start by getting an "agent" to go to a destination.

How can our clicks reach places in the world? We'll use raycasts to start building a simple player controller to move around our town sandbox.

We'll take a quick dive into Unity's Cinemachine suite to set up a simple follow-player camera.

It's easy to get animations under control, the tricky part is refining them. We'll do a little of both.

It wouldn't be a day at the pond without some friendly ducks. When the player enters a trigger, the agents will follow them.

After the player leaves the trigger, the ducks will go back to a random destination near their home area.

Subgraphs are graphs inside graphs. Clean up your VS spaghetti and plop them anywhere you want to reuse graphs.

In this video we'll set up waypoints and program our agents to wander randomly to each of them.

Even though we are using the same graph for the NPCs, we can randomize parameters so that they each move differently.

Cars present a situation where the wheels alone are not enough to carve out the nav mesh. We'll use Nav Mesh Obstacles to prevent NPCs from walking through areas where they shouldn't go.

How do you move things in Unity? We'll use Set Position with the logic you've already learned to create cars that travel back and forth.

Custom Events can also send along data, called arguments. This way we can tell each car on the road exactly when to go.

Here we'll use instantiation to spawn ghosts into the world with a puff of smoke. This way we have something spooky for the NPCs to run away from.

After adding some more default behavior, we'll create a script for our agents to see anything on the "Enemy" layer.

It's often unnecessary for something to happen every frame. This is especially important in visual scripting which, for now, is slower than C#. We can improve performance by reducing Update calls.

Now that the agents can see ghosts, we'll get them to run away. We'll find a Nav Mesh Path away from the ghost and ensure that it is a valid waypoint.

In this section we'll switch to a sci-fi action prototype scene to use UVS's State Machines. The resource package will import with a few errors that are easily fixed. I'll also highlight the assets we're using.

Our first state machine will be an automatic door that opens with the player entering a trigger.

DOTween is an excellent free asset for giving us control over changing values over time on Unity components.

We have a turret prefab that has health, effects, bullets, and a firing event. We'll add a state machine and make it so the turret fires when the player hits a trigger.

Now things get interesting! We'll rotate our turret a variety of ways while using Cooldown and Timers to tune the timing of the firing.

Thus far the turret's aim has been automatic and unaware of the player. Let's make it so that the turret fires at the player.

Taking things up a notch, we'll make our turret smarter and much more challenging to go up against. We'll determine the player's speed, and I'll give you a custom predictive aim node for the rest.

Here we'll set up a classic enemy AI state machine with patrol, chase, and attack states.

Starting with the Perception state, we'll create the logic for seeing the player and determining whether they are within attack range.

We'll make the robot have a predictable patrol route (with some random pauses) so the player can study the enemy and plan their approach to tackling or avoiding threats in the level.

Here we'll complete the robot's basic behavior. We'll use DOTween's "DOColor" to change the sword's color in each state. We'll also use Animation Events to control the enemy's attack rotations, giving the player a chance to dodge and attack or run away.

Here we'll walk through the health graph and set up the turret's death event so that it stops shooting at the player.

Congratulations, you made it to the end! We'll have some extra content for you in the next section.