I am creating a game in Unity3D.
My character animation is in the form of stickman animation files but can be either Maya or Cinema4D.
Is it possible to have multiple 3D characters and swap between them in game - however, use the same stickman animation as their movement underneath?
Would the characters need to have the exact same skeleton?
Basically you can use the same animation for more than one model according to the book Creating 3D Game Art for the Iphone with Unity by Wes McDermott (some excerpts available at Google Books.
Citing page 143: Another aspect worth mentioning is that you can reuse animations on different characters as long as their hierarchies are the same based on how the Animation Component references objects.
I tested it some time ago with a 2nd rig being synchronised in parallel and it worked.
So the skeleton should be identical at least the bone names need to be present. Swapping characters is possible and mainly used for death animations. In this situation you have a kinematic rigidbody whose physics components are then transformed into ragdoll. I see no problem to extend this to the whole character.
Related
I have been building a 2D sprite based game for which I want to have the player be able to customize their equipment. This means that although I am fine with drawing the content, I'd need to ensure animations in the game run fine on top of each other. For this, I have been preparing a game object with several children to account for the equipment:
Each of the children runs a single animation and should have to follow the player, which I accomplish by using transform.localPosition = Vector2.zero; on the Update of the script each takes, so they hook to the parent's pivot and follow the player. While this has worked for the most part, there are moments in which all of the objects are not synchronized and as such sometimes the parent object (the body) is seen where it shouldn't since the other game objects should render on top:
Aside from that, to make it easy for the children to follow the parent position I had made sprites which are all the same size, which risks me having to load a lot of transparent space per sprite.
Another problem that I just noticed as I'm trying to address the issue of loading too many useless pixels involves the positioning with other objects such as the Sword game object, which doesn't follow the player fully if I use sprites that are not perfect squares (see this question for details How to align sprites of smaller sizes to a moving gameobject sprite? and this one Sibling sprite doesn't appear to follow main GameObject sprite even when transform.position updates)
I tried to fix this by making the Sword a child of the Hero, but even then changing the position through a function that sets values to add on to transform values of the sword game object only change the position of it relative to the initial value. I attempted changing the pivot of the sword sprites to a custom value to guess where the center of it would align with the main game object and appear in the right position, but even that doesn't seem to work.
I'm kind of getting tired with my current process, as I have to rely on several animations for each of the game objects, both parent and children, so that these obey to different layers in a single animator (or in the case of the sword, a separate animator), all to ensure there is some synchronization that doesn't always occur:
I really don't mind the web that is turning out in what I'm doing, but the fact that I have to repeat it across multiple layers with no real guarantee that all the objects would appear right on top of each other due to the fact of having multiple animations playing, and loading multiple sprites with empty space is becoming more of a chore than enjoyment.
So I think I came up with a possible solution: If I could make a single animation for the whole equipment used at any given point (whether only wearing pants or wearing full equipment), then having this single animation could guarantee synchronization across parent and children without the need for animator layers or special functions to update position or worrying about pivots or square sprites if I can set the position of non-square sprites in the animation, with the downside that I would need to account for every single animation for each possible equipment variation (so if I had even 3 of each sword, pants, boots, etc. that would mean 3^6 animations) and make a more complex web of animator states. The only thing I'd be worried about in this case, however, would be the performance, if having too many animations for a player would affect how fast these load. But at the benefit of eliminating the other problems mentioned, my question boils down to this:
Is it better to have a single game object with animations that change multiple sprites across children game objects and a single animator that chooses states based on multiple variables, or game objects with multiple animations that change a single sprite for each, and a single or multiple animators with multiple layers that choose states based on multiple variables?
There isn't really a set answer for something like this. It really just depends on how good your/the players computer is when playing the game. Sorry if this isn't what you wanted.
I am creating a 2D game and I want to add a shooting animation to my character.
I want to add it in a different animation layer so it will affect only the upper body part of my character while not breaking the basic movements animations such as idle, run and jump.
In tutorials and guides, I saw the usage of an avatar mask on 3D models.
Is there an option to use that masking on a 2D character?
Thank you :)
No, Unity doesn't provide out-of-the-box solutions for 2D Avatar Mask. One thing you can do to emulate this feature is split you character's body parts (arms, legs, torso, etc) into different animations, then assign each a Layer in the associated Animator Controller and control them programmatically via script.
I have a work-in-progress spaceship interior built with Unity (utilizing pre-built assets). It won't move much. The space around it will, similar to how I made an HTML/Three.js version of this concept (although linked example does move ship around space scene while scales are also animated).
With the three.js version, I was constantly fighting with "space" entering the ship; warp beams and planets colliding with the front info screen or passing through the chair (destroying the illusion of massive scale). I was able to resolve most issues, but it was a challenge when everything was in the same scene.
In Unity, is there a way to keep the ship scene separate from the surrounding space "scene", whether it is part of the same scene or in a separate one on another layer, or the same scene with masks that prevent overlap? I don't need a very literal answer, but any guidance that leads to a solution will be promptly accepted.
Yes, it's a very basic and useful aspect of Unity - the layers system.
As you guess you can find endless doco about it at Unity, cheers
Note too - Unity of course has superb occlusion culling built-in. Almost always this will "just work" for you.
Note that (if I read you right) you're doing a scene with a tremendous difference in scales (like "10 cm" objects AND "1000 km" objects at the same time). As you probably know you basically can't do this in a game engine, it's tricky to pull off.
Just BTW this is more a question for gamedev.com
I'm making a 2D plane fighting game for the iPhone in cocos2d. I'm trying to make it so when you shoot an enemy plane, it breaks into a couple of separated pieces that will fall out of sight. What is generally the best practice for breaking one sprite up into many? should I create new images for each separate piece, or treat the initial image like a sprite sheet, and make a new sprite from segments?
Please look at this tutorial
It makes a grid of points then moves the internal (not-edge) ones around randomly a bit so it's not all perfect triangles. Then each update it moves/rotates the triangles separately--then draws them all at once.
You treat the whole thing as a sprite, so can run any of the usual actions on it. This example uses CCMoveBy to move the whole group down off the bottom.
What would be the best way to go about adding collision to my application. Right now I have a lot of jagged walls and a couple of weird shapes that I wanna make collision for but am not sure which is the right path to get the job done. What would you guys do if you had a room full of walls with different shapes and sizes that needed collision implemented ?
I would read a set of articles on collision detection. Paul Nettle used to write about the topic (PDF) and has a nice library for free.
This document will describe a
collision technique that allows you to
move an ellipsoid (a sphere with three
different radii, one for each axis)
through a world that not only properly
detects collisions, but also reacts in
a way that gamers would expect from
the common first person shooter.
This technique also allows for sliding
along surfaces as well as easy
implementation of gravity, which
includes sliding downhill when
standing stationary. This technique
also allows automatic climbing of
stairs and sliding over bumps in walls
(like door frames) and any other
randomly oriented “stair-like
topography”.
You can use Chipmunk physics engine, which has a very good physics + collisions.
Or even Cocos2d-iphone library - 2d game engine with Chipmunk inside. Here are examples of games, created with it.