Horse Pack by Kevin J. Barton

Hi everybody,
I'm currently working on my first project for offering in the asset store so keep in mind that I am a little unexperienced
As I am just before finishing, I do have some questions for the more experienced for you:

• Is it common to export every animation as a single .fbx file? I saw that on similar models in the store but prefer keeping all animations in one file.
• Is it correct that all my joints and controllers show up in unity? Or do I have to clean that up before offering in the store?
• Are there some advices you can give me to the model, the animations or the textures?

Thanks, Kev

 

Hello there,

This looks great! Personally I'm not great with all the modelling and animation stuff as I am purely a programmer. But, from experience I would leave all the animations in one file played one after the other so that people can split them up themselves using the keyframes. I don't see why you would have to split all the animations into separate .fbx files.

Great work, Keep it up

 

hey,
thanks a lot for you feedback. Good to hear the opinion of a programmer, cause you will need to work with my stuff the most ;o) So I guess I'll give it a try and upload it as it is. Let's see what happens.

cheers, Kev

 

Very nice! Only thing i miss is a eating animation : p

 

Hi everybody,

the work is finally done and the asset is live since yesterday. You can find it here in the store

thanks again for the feedback and sorry for having no eating animation. Maybe in another version.

cheers, Kev

 

I've found in the studios I've worked in that we prefer the animations broken into each separate animation file using the "@idle, etc" naming convention. When you do that Unity automagically puts all of the animations with the "@" prefix onto the one FBX file with no prefix. This is far superior to putting all animations onto a single FBX file. Why? Because it's not artist friendly by any means to have it all on one file. It's harder to move keyframes and such and it's absolute HELL to change an animation length for say a walk anim when it sits on the same curve as 3 other animations...and it's smack dab in the middle of the animation curve. When each animation is it's own FBX/Maya file an artist can open that animation and change it's timing, length and modify the animation without disturbing the others in any way. Going back into Unity that animation is automatically updated and applied to the FBX model file. I would most definitely stray away from the anims being in a single FBX file for many reasons.

 

Thanks James,
thats the Information no one at the University knew or told me.

But is it only working for unity in that way? Or does it work for projects made in xna for example as well?

I understand the advantages of the way you do it. The new Version of Maya (13) gives you more control of the timeline, but I dont think its comparable to having separate files. I thought it would be more useful for the programmer to have them all in one.

For future projects I will do it your way. So thanks for the advice

 

Well when it comes to selling art assets, you want to cater to what's easiest for the artist. It doesn't matter if the package is Maya, 3DS Max or any other. All packages use keyframes with those keys on curves. It's much harder to edit keys that all exist on the same curve. We learned this lesson working on Skylanders for iOS. As for the programmers, it doesn't change anything for them. When you save out an FBX called "man.mb" and then save out another file with the idle animation called "man@idle.mb"...the idle animation is combine/applied to the "man.mb" file automatically. It's the same exact thing as if all animations were on a single model. The programmers would only ever access "man.mb", same as they would if the animation were all in one FBX. Using separate animation files makes life easier for the artists and gives them versatility for changes an updates.

 

thanks again James,

I will keep that in mind for future projects

regards, Kev