Should I use Blender, Unity or both for animations?.

hello, i've recently gotten into using blender for model making, however, this is a pretty big thing i want to know right away.

blender can be used for animations, as can unity, is there any reason to use one over or the other, other than personal preferences or liking one interface better?, are there some animations better done with one in particular?, i'm aware that i should use unity for things like, for instance, rotating a turret, rolling a ball, making something spin around while falling, extremely basic transform related things like that, but otherwise, is one better or worse, or more specialized for a certain thing, or just much faster and/or easier?.

 

Use Blender for anything non-trivial. It has a much more complete feature set (constraints, IK rigs, etc).

 

hm, is it possible to have blender animations and mecanim on the same model and use them both ingame?.

 

Use Unity to move whole objects around and for procedural animation (physics, ragdolls)

Use Blender for character animation and any animation that involves complex motions. Specifically, you should build individual animation clips that can then be played back in Unity.

Mecanim does not provide any animations on its own, it is merely a tool to blend between different animation clips that you create in Blender (or other animation suites).


Here's a typical workflow:

Step 1: You create a 3D character model in Blender and rig it
Step 2: Now you create different animation clips in Blender (in Blender these are called "actions", you can manage them in the "Dopesheet" panel's "Action Editor" mode). For example, you might create the animation clips "Idle", "Walking", "Running", "Jumping"
Step 3: In Unity, you use Mecanim to define how these animation tracks are used. For example, "Idle", "Walking" and "Running" form a single state that blends between the three animation clips based on a variable called "Speed". "Jumping" is activated when a variable called "Jump" becomes true.
Step 4: In MonoDevelop, you code your character controller to move the player model around and set the "Speed" and "Jump" variables in the Mecanim animator instance so the model plays back the right animation clips.

The role Mecanim plays here is that of blending between the different animation clips (eg. if "Speed" is half-way between walking and running) and controlling the sequencing of animation clips - eg. if you had "StandToCrawl", "Crawl" and "CrawlToStand" animation clips, you could make sure that the "StandToCrawl" animation clip has to be played before the "Crawl" state and according animation become active.

 

really?, i recall making a coin rotation animation.... isn't mechanim that "animation" window?.

 

No, it's the Animator window, plus the IK stuff, plus the retargeting stuff and a little more.

 

oh, well i was refering to the animation window where you can create animations, is it possible to mix those with blender ones?.