Having completed all my animations i let myself believe that all my work was done, but this week some issues presented themselves, confirming some fears i'd had whilst creating them.
Our Coder Dean informed myself and Tim that he was having some issues importing the animations themselves into Unity, everything else seemed to have imported fine but that animations refused to play. We attempted exporting our files to fbx format without success, as well as trying to use the mb files that Maya saves to by Default. Again this didn't work. Thankfully after some intense panicking Dean managed to get them working in-game without having to make any changes to our animations or models beyond conforming them to a new naming system. Phew.
Another problem arose shortly after, one that did require some modifications to the animations themselves. Thankfully the adjustments were relatively minor, but i'll explain how this came about. Simply, the way that Dean has implemented character movement in the game, using a cube that traverses horizontally along the screen, meant that the vertical movement from the Jump animation had to be removed. This is because when the jump button is pressed in game, the cube representing the character physically moves upwards, therefore if there was still vertical movement in the jump animation the character would move upward, and this movement would stack with the vertical movement of the cube. So rather than messing with the game itself we decided it would be easier to remove the vertical movement from the animations then import them back in.
The last issue was one that i personally created, and that was due to my decision to split the fail animations. Bugger bugger bugger. When i realised after watching a demo that all the animations were playing from one file i knew i would have a problem, and given the difficulty i had moving a single pose from one file to another i thought i was in for a mountain of extra work...
Luckily however, i found a solution that would have helped me in the situations where i found myself copying from a pose across from one file to the other, and possibly saved me some time too. I discovered that if i simply imported the file for the second part of the animation into the first, despite this creating a second character model, this meant i could simply copy the keyframes across from one model to the other, simple!
And with that, i was certain my work was done. I handed over the files, and Dean imported the character into the game, once tweak had been made the character came to life, or at least, everything except his right arm did.
Frustratingly, we just didn't have enough time to figure out what the problem was, but everything about my character was fine except for the arm, which refused to move from its tock pose. The rig and animation that myself and Tim had made for the Large character all worked fine but for some reason something went wrong with my Small Character, and i have a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with the inconsistencies between models for each of the animation files, though it still leaves me baffles a to why only one of the arm was affected, i am sure however that given enough time this bug would have been fixed.
No comments:
Post a Comment