Szczesnik - Unity 5.x Animation Cookbook

Maciej Szczenik is an experienced game designer and Unity developer, specializing in gameplay and combat mechanics. His daily responsibilities include motion capture session planning and coordination, creating animation graphs and state machines, and AI design and implementation.

He started his professional career in 2004 at CD Projekt REDthe company best known for the critically acclaimed The Witcher series. Maciej had key roles in the Witcher games, being lead gameplay designer and lead combat designer. He also worked at 11 bit studios, another well-known Polish game development company, famous for the This War Of Mine game.

Maciej gave three talks at the Game Developers Conference and Game Developers Conference Europe. He is also a lecturer at Warsaw Film School, teaching Unity and technical aspects of animation as part of the game development BA course.

I'd like to thank my wife for her support, Kacper Kwiatkowski and Grzegorz Mazur from Vile Monarch for their reviews, Marek Ziemak and Piotr Tomsiski for inspiring discussions about games and animations, and Micha Piekowski and Marcin Iwanek for countless RPG and tabletop game sessions.I'd also like to thank all my friends and former coworkers from 11 bit studios and CD Projekt RED for helping me develop my skills.

Grzegorz Mazur is a programmer who graduated in information technology from Warsaw University of Technology. He is currently co-boss and technical director at Vile Monarch. Previously, he worked for 11 bit studios, where he was lead programmer of This War of Mine and Sleepwalker's Journey. He specializes in gameplay and AI programming and is a teacher at Warsaw Film School. He is also an amateur musician and board game enthusiast.

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Preface

This book describes Unity's animation techniques from a designer's point of view. It is focused on achieving interesting gameplay effects and creating game mechanics. Each topic is presented in the form of a short recipe with a list of steps needed to implement the given feature. All the recipes are prepared in the most condensed forma good basis to build your own solutions on.

This book doesn't cover animating in a 3D package, although you may find some helpful tips regarding Blender 3D in it. A lot of the recipes presented in this book use C# scripting not only for triggering animations, but also for creating interesting motions and effects. If you are a game designer or a Unity developer and would like to know more about what's possible with Unity's animation system, I hope this book will be an interesting read for you. Also, if you have any questions regarding this book or the topics it covers, you can contact me via Twitter (@MaciejSzczesnik). I will be happy to help.

What this book covers

, Working with Animations , describes the tools essential for importing animations from 3D packages. It also covers most of the import settings.

, Working with the Animation View , covers Unity's built-in animation tool, used to animate almost everything apart from characters.

, 2D and User Interface Animation , focuses on animating 2D sprites and UI elements.

, Character Movement , covers different types of movement, using animations and root motion.

, Character Actions and Expressions , is about actions, action points, and facial expressions.

, Handling Combat , covers combat-specific topics, such as using animations for aiming and creating a hit-detection system.

, Special Effects , is not only about particle systems, but also about animating fog, creating wind zones, and even using sound waveforms for animation.

, Animating Cutscenes , describes how to import a cutscene from a 3D package and how to prepare simple cutscenes using Unity's Animation View.

, Physics and Animations , shows how to create ragdolls and break stuff.

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