This week we learned the basic of Unity with Herman. The tutorial can be seperated into several parts: Unity viewport, import FPS file, import maya animation to Unity and editing animation in unity.
Unity viewport is quite like some DCC, we can also hold right mouse botton and WASD to travel in the viewport, which is special. The difference between Unity and DCC is that Unity has two viewports: an editing viewport which is designed for settings and lighting, and a game version viewport which is designed for game designers to check the level or other interactive settings.
We can import maya animation to Unity by exporting FBX files. Some problems come out when we drag FBX files into Unity: we cannot see the animation or even the object. The reason why we cannot see that is because the object is too small. We can scale the object by changing object data. Then we need to drag the take object( the light blue triangle object) on the animated object to activate the aniamtion. However, the moving animation doesn’t show in the viewport because the scale information of animation remains still, which is hard to see. Therefore, we can create a empty layer and parent object under this layer. By scaling the empty layer instead, the object and animation can be seen clearly.
We can also edit the animation by using animation viewport. It allows the animation to become a loop or even combine several animations together. When the first animation finished, the software will automatically activate the second animation. If we double link both of the animation together, the animation will become a new loop and repeatly play the animation.
I really like the interactive design and the structure of Unity, it is much smaller than Unreal Engine, which requires better hardware to drive. Therefore, Unity is a great platform for beginners to learn the basic of game design and game engine. I think maybe I will learn Unity in the future to get a better understanding of game design and its relationship with animation.