Tutorial 2: Animation & Unity

For this tutorial, I was tasked with animating a sample .fbx model in Unity. While working with models in Unity is something I've done before, I've never tried to animate a model within Unity. I went into this tutorial with confidence, and it definitely helped. Starting off, the import of the model went smoothly with no issues, and I was able to access the animations and set them up accordingly to the tutorial specification. 

Setting up the 'Idle' animation in Unity did make me a little worried, as the model wasn't visibly idle. The 'Idle' animation included with the sample model contains a single frame and this made it hard to distinguish if my model was animated or not, though thankfully progressing and linking the 'Idle' and 'Wave' animations, I was able to see that the animations included were indeed functioning.

I was able to get the parameters to trigger with code, and was able to use the spacebar to get the model to wave. The next parts of getting the model to move and getting a walk animation to trigger while the character was moving definitely had me a little bit confused. The included model actually has a leg that is twisted 90-degrees, and when paired with the walk animation, produces a funny output. I did bring this up in the 207 Discord, however was told that the sample model is very old and was likely prone to this kind of behaviour. I have a video linked in this post for reference of this issue.

Another quirk with the sample model was the movement controller I had implemented. I don't know if it's a problem with the sample model or if I botched something earlier with the import of the model, but when I hooked it up to a character controller, it would move side-to-side with the W and S keys (unintended), and then rotate with A and S (intended). I was able to semi-rectify this by making the model the child of an empty GameObject and rotating the parent to align the model so it had the right movement. 

Aside from my hitches, I believe that I was able to understand and complete the tutorial content, even doing the portfolio exercise of linking the walk animation to the character controller. I was able to understand the Unity animator, and how it handles animations, I learnt about the animation parameters and how to configure and control those with code, and I was able to further my understanding of Unity's Parent-Child relationships. I think I made good progress on this tutorial.