Learning to animate for games

Hi

So I have been trying to rigg, bind and animate a character for my UA submission, I know probably not the best time to try and learn something new. So I grabed my Digital Tutors character rigging video tutorial and my Game Artist's Guide to Maya book, and started away at it.


I almost had a working rig today, everything except the feet moved as I wanted. Then when asking around on the IRC someone told me unity has no IK support. So I'm guessing I have to animate using FK only? How can anything good be achived in FK? The backbone of my character was an IK splin handle and so it moved in relation to itself creating a nice arching back efect. The Legs were IK and so on.

Some people mentined some IK thing on the wiki, but I don't have unity pro. I guess I kneed some help. I don't realy understand the difference between IK and FK as far as how unity processes it, all I know is how much easyer it is for me to animate using it in Maya. Is there realy no way to animate using IK and have it just translate the animation into bone by bone FK information.

I'm rather frustrated, as I have spent almost a week on this and have gotten nowhere. Sorry if my post seemes confusing. I guess I realy would like to know where or how I can figure out what the crap unity and other engines do with regard to animation. I would have thought that IK and FK were just things you use in your modeling app to help you rigg and set up a character, and that once the animation was created it would write out the animation in the exported file as bone translate and rotate comands.

Anyone know of where I can find a tutorial that will help teach me how to rigg and animate a game character that will actualy work with Unity, unlike all the tutorials and books I have already wasted money on. - Jeff

 

I haven't done it myself, but as I understand it you can animate movements using IK in Maya (or whatever else). Then, since Unity doesn't support IK natively, you right mouse click on your models file (in unity), click import settings and check off "bake IK simulation".

 

Thanks your totaly right, it works great! I did a test today on a partialy working rig and the IK bakes into FK on the import process fine. Thanks for the tip! - Jeff

 

I should try to test this out too. I haven't yet delved into IK animation.

My assumption with Inverse Kinematics is that you could take advantage of it for giving a player fine control of the movement of a character's hand. For example if you want the position of a character's hand to follow mouse movement and for the arm to animate appropriately, you would place the arm in the IK chain behind the hand. In this way as the hand position changes the arm would bend as expected.

So do baked/simulated IK animations allow this kind of thing? Or does Unity just turn the IK animation into a animation clip?

 

I'm pretty sure baking doesn't allow that kind of thing. Although with some work ik in unity is achievable. A quick search found this thread on the subject:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=90881

 

Yeah I recall looking at that thread now. I must have blocked it out, because I am procrastinating the plunge into coding behavior from scratch for as long as possible. I haven't bothered with anything more than HTML for nearly ten years. Right now I'm focused more on the art side of things and seeking methods for getting the most out of artist's piece of the pipeline.