Spec Anim 2

For Spec Anim 2 we were given the choice of two projects. The first was a lighting/matchmoving/animation project in which students were instructed to film a background plate, use a light probe to gather the appropriate lighting information for the scene, and animate a short piece to then be composited realistically into the scene with lighting. The second project was an exercise in usage and implementation of the Unity game engine, and this is the project I chose to do. In hindsight I would have chosen the other project as it was handled a lot better, however I learnt a lot about using Unity so at least I now have some basic knowledge of how to import my animations into a game engine.

As I mentioned there were a lot of problems with this project, the brief wasn't finalised until fairly late on and it was unclear at times what we we meant to be doing. One thing that was clear was that an outcome of the project was to import assets into Unity and create working scripts. I fulfilled this aspect of the brief by using the mecanim animation system and altering the animation trees, and by using a visual scripting tool to set up a simple puzzle.

Below I've included a brief explanation of the work I undertook and a screenshot to show the outcome. Overall I enjoyed this project as I had to discover a lot about the program myself, however I also found it stressful because of this.

The two levels in the game were created using the terrain editor and the first has been populated with found models and materials as seen above.

I attempted to import animations onto a mecanim compatible model and used a script off the net to try and get it to work. However the model would not move off the spot, so for the finished scene I used a mecanim system that was already set up and altered the blend tree and script so that they would be compatible with the model. The image above shows the jump animation activated on the mecanim animation tree when the player jumps in-game.

The puzzles in the game have been coded visually using PlayMaker to set up Finite State Machines. I managed to do all of this by experimentation, and the final puzzles will only work in sequence with no known errors. The FSM shown above depicts the object's flow of states, currently it's collider has been triggered by the player and by interacting as needed the next state will be activated.

Finally, the second level contains a simple particle system set up to replicate the appearance of snow.