Where to actually get started?

Hey Unity'ers

So, something which has plagued me for a long time as a dev, is I have no idea on where to start with character animations. I usually stuck with using character prefabs whenever it was required; but usually, my own games in 3D used static models (spaceships etc), or 2D sprite-based characters.

A friend of mine is going through a tough time, so I decided I'd cheer him up by building a little 2.5D platformer featuring a dachshund dog (which he loves), and I could use that as a project basis to learn how to animate 3D characters correctly. Problem is, I don't even know where to start.

I purchased an awesome model on the asset store, which came with about 30 animations. I wrote up a script that just sets the animation to Wrapmode.Loop, and then a method that swaps out the animation based on the character movement (idle, walk, run, jump). I'm guessing however, that this really isn't the correct way of doing things. There's no blend or anything like that - it's a very sudden jolt into the new animation.

All the video guides I'm seeing seem to focus more on using pre-built demo systems from Unity and elsewhere, where everything is already set up; animator controllers, avatars etc, and then using Mecanim to control all the animations from there. But I've honestly no idea on how to start on this from scratch with a model, and a bunch of separate animation files that I'm just controlling via script at the moment.

If anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd hugely appreciate it

- Eoghan

 

Unless you have a specific question to search for on Google or forums/answers, always go to Learn.
In the animations section, there's pretty much has everything in those short vids about using Mecanim, and transitioning animations, and such.

The first step if you wanna use Mecanim is click on your model mesh, and in the inspector switch to "Rig", and choose generic or humanoid. Ofc Humanoid has lots of benefits (ex; the humanoid muscle system), and if your character is a humanoid or similar, I'd choose that.



Then either choose a premade avatar that has exactly the same rig, and which you have already configured before (for another character), or just click apply and see if that checkbox appears next to the "Configure" button. If it does, then everything is fine most likely and Mecanim managed to automatically set up everything. In my case the fingers were a bit confused, but that's a first time it happens. Anyway, if an X appears next to the "Configure" then you gotta go in there and map the bones to the humanoid avatar manually.

Its probably all covered in the learn section, all the way to scripting. I didn't watch all the vids I just sort of figured it out by clicking through and experimenting, and only looked up specifics.