This post is mainly about my introduction to 3D animation and level making environments. In this post I have included some images and a many videos showcasing some level gameplay and some glitches I had with my character. I will explain my ideas and the step by step process I had learnt in class.
Erika-Archer standing on stretched floor in T-pose position
When we first started making a 3d character, I really wanted the character that I eventually chose to have story. This would help me make the level layout for them and give me future ideas for mechanics.
As you can see the character I ended up choosing was "Erika Archer" who was an elf archer from what I remember.
With my 3d character chosen, I opened up unity and pasted in the character. We also had to put the character sheet into photoshop if our model was missing textures but luckily mine did not have this fault. When the 3d model is placed in unity it is standing in a T-pose which is the default pose in most animation software. They are normally used as placeholders for animations not yet completed.
Idle Animation Playing in Game
Footage of my 3D character falling through floor when in walking animation.
Picture of Erika-Archer's walking and running cycle in Animator window.
Just like with 2d animation with the sprite sheet, in 3d animation we are yet again using a timeline and the animator window in unity to animate our character. I had some issues with this as you can see some examples with the videos shown throughout this post.
These issues were later fixed but my colleagues seemed to enjoy that just like with the 2d Megaman animation, I had once again found a way to mess up my character. These were mostly to do with the animation timeline, the walking, jumping, running and idle animations as well.
Just like with the 2d animation, in order to pair the animation cycles together, in the animator window, I would simply just join the connection lines to each individual box and make it a continual loop.
Footage of 3D character limping while in walking animation.
Text
Just like in Maya and blender, adding textures to any object can a complex setup to do so. But in unity, I simple just had to download the texture/asset and add it into unity over any object we created so far. Because of the character I chose, the files that came with it already had the skin and clothing textures included. The picture to the right shows a bunch of them and the individual completed textures for us to play around with.
List of character files/textures in unity
Video showcasing 3D character moving around my tree level.
This final video showcases my 3d level experimentation and final builds themed around the short story I had made up quickly for this "Erika Archer" character. I had coloured the ground baseplate green and used a lighter shade for leaves. I made a small tree and found when played, my character could jump up to the top in one go.
I grouped up the objects and stretched the tree taller and wider while also moving the leaves to an equal distance of each other so it was fair gameplay for anyone who tested it. I also thought I could make smaller logs to parkour over just with 3 cylinders squished together in not only different sizes but different shades of brown too. I would later save this item for my storage of assets to use at a later time.
Also I would like to note that in the video I did not turn the camera, not because I couldn't but because I wanted to try and jump around to the top of the tree without doing so. I had originally planned to have some sort of collectable at the top of the tree too, perhaps a piece of fruit or a dug up trinket scattered across other levels.
Individual still image of my testing 3D tree level.