This tool was created to test the efficiency of different
trees in various object conditions, as well as a fun way to play with different
spatial partitioning methods.
Mixamo is an online character animation service. They have a crazy amount of animations and automatic rigging for bipedal humanoids. Here is their website if you want to check them out! https://www.mixamo.com/#/
Setup
I began with making my character in MagicaVoxel.
The character must be in T-pose for the Mixamo’s auto rigger.
After just a few steps the character is rigged and ready for animation. Here’s a list of all the animations I was looking to use
Idle
Right/Left Turn
Running Forward/Back
Running Forward Right/Left
Running Back Right/Left
Strafe Right/Left
Jump
Pick Up Item
And of course a Dance
Linking Animations And Movement
With everything we need we can move to Unity
first steps
I started with some simple turning and running forward. Oh and jumping, but that was not quite working as intended.
A few of the problems I encountered where getting the animations
to transition smoothly while also reducing the input lag. As well as matching
the movements, like getting the character to jump in time with the animation.
Spending more time in the editor I found that the exit time
and more specifically the transition time played a large roll. This was the
exact slider I was looking for between smooth and responsive.
I also did some more reading in the unity manual to find that the AnimatorStateInfo.normalizedTime would return the fraction of which the animation was complete from 0-1. This was incredibly useful.
After these improvements I added a few more animations.
Animation State Web
Lastly, I placed a wall to jump over and some coins for the player to pick up
Results
happy dance
I am quite happy with the way this turned out! I went from only dreaming of having awesome character animations to controlling a model of my own around an environment. This gave me a small taste of what I could do with animated characters and I would definitely consider adding them to my next game.
Built in Saxion University’s GXP engeine, using free assets from itch.io
Key Elements:
Player and enemy state machines
Combat combo system
Levels are easily made in tiled and read into the engine as a tmx file. A large 2D array of numbers with each number corresponding to a sprite on a tile sheet.
Collision system using the map 2D array, independent of tiles, rather than having tiles with box colliders.
Maps can be as large as you would like. The tiles on screen are the only ones created and they are never destroyed. Rather once the screen moves the tile width to the right the tiles shift and update their animation sprite based of off the map array.
Shifting viewport
Tile transition Experiments!
By moving each tile in the scene individually you can make some really cool effects
I was messing around with actions in zero engine, and created a combo system just based of moving the sword in 3d space in a 2d game. And created some snake/worms (smrow’s!) AI that gravitated towards the ground for these S like patters allowing them navigate any environment.
