Zeta

OK this sort of started in another thread, but I think it is going to become a full project now so starting it up as another thread.

This is just demoing my first animation pass on the main character for a new game. Tentatively calling it Zeta.

Here is a web demo showing the running animation: http://www.starsmangames.com/test/Zeta.html

For this being my first animation work, I think its rather good! I was expecting this to look much worse!

Got to refine the skeleton influence with some weight painting (I hope I said that right, I have no clue how to do that yet) and tweak a few things here (don't like how the right arm rotates during the animation, although it may be too fast to notice it is rotating on it's own center and rather fast.)

The animation also only looks "good" from a side view. Looking it up front is horrible, but this is for a side scrolling game, though.

I have to say this: IK ROCKS! It's plain fun to move body parts around with it!

 

For your first animation it looks good, i would have honestly said it looked good even if it was your 100th piece of animation, granted i don't know much about animation, but still nice work.

 

Thanks for the positive feedback! Its encouraging

OK, I tweaked the weight mapping on the bones, fixed some mess that was going on with the metal outter-undies dropping on the back on every step, and adjusted the hands animations.

Also alleviated some mess that was going on with the character sort of being too jumpy.

Added more animations too, one for idle stance and another one for running while shooting.

Finally, tweaked lighting and added a mobile diffuse bump shader and a light to see how it may look in a phone.

 

For a first animation, this looks pretty good! When you are ready to polish you might want to do transition animation too, like "Idle to Run" so it look more realistic.

 

Thanks, got to say I never thought about a transition animation from standing to running (although was thinking on a stop animation to make a cool momentum break thing with a bit of sliding.)

I thought Unity may take care by somehow blending the stance... now that gets me to a question: What do I do if I need to transition from... lets say fram 8 of the run animation to the shoot-run animation? You got me thinking and i am guessing it may look wrong since it would start the walk animation from frame one... no?

 

I didn't get my hands dirty with the Unity animation system yet, but from my personal knowledge working with animators in the industry, you should "synchronize" your 2 animation cycles. For example if at 50% of your run animation cycle you have the right foot in front, your run and shoot animation cycle should also have the right foot in front at 50%. Then in code, you start the run and shoot animation at the same percentage your current run animation is at this frame. Again, I don't know if that is possible with Unity, but I'll try it myself soon enough.