Set Up Process…
For the final task, we had to use Unity 2D and a premade sprite to animate a character’s idle, walking, running and jump animations. The first thing I had to do before animating the character however is to set up the bone rig in Unity. To do this, the psb. file for the character had to be imported with each of the body parts being located on separate layers within Photoshop. Once this was done I opened the sprite editor and selected the skinning editor which let me set up the bone rig by auto generating the geometry for each layer of the sprite, creating and linking bones for each of the body parts, adding auto generated weight for these bones and setting up the sprite influence which is part of what allowed me to properly move the body parts and their affected layers in Unity’s Animator.
The combination of the IK Manager 2D and Limb Solver 2D components sets up easier animation of the character in the animator by adding realistic connections with the motion of the bones. These chains were used for all of the character’s limbs including both legs, arms and shoulders.
Animating the Character…
Idle Animation
The first animation for the Blue Ninja is their idle animation which would play when there isn’t any input by the player. The animation includes the movement of the
character’s arms and limbs as shown on the video presented. I think that the animation turned out pretty well with the only problem with it being that their was stiff movement of the character’s right knee that sticks out from the rest of the body part’s movements. This animation allows smooth looping for the game it’s used in since the character reverts to their positioning at the end of the cycle.
Walking Animation
The next animation is the walking animation which is the regular movement of the player character in a game.
This animation includes movement of the entire body but however, the animation isn’t as well developed as the idle animation as I had issues keeping the player’s feet returning to the same x position at the end of each step and to counter this I attempted to move the entire sprite so the that the player’s feet return to the same position but this unfortunately resulted in the unnatural movement of the entire body. This animation also doesn’t return the player to their original position at the end of the cycle which is vital to the smoothness of the animation in game.
Running Animation
The second to last animation is the running animation. This animation requires motion in a faster time span since it visually shows the faster movement of the player character.
The animation that I created for the player’s running cycle represents this faster movement and shows the motion of the character’s entire body apart from the chest to the pelvis. The animation does have problems with the not moving in a perfectly natural way due to the lack of looping capabilities while the character doesn’t return to the original position at the end of the loop.
Jumping Animation
The last animation for the Blue Ninja is the jump animation which is often used in platforms to allow players to move across gaps in the terrain or to move from one platform to another.
This animation follows the natural jumping motion used in other media like shows and other games and out of the four animations that I made for this task, I find that this one turned out the best. The smoothness between the end and beginning of the next cycle isn’t perfect but no as noticeable for other animations within this blog, and there was an issue where the feet slide back on landing, but considering this is one of the more complex animation that I made for the task a lot of the animation was done well and in a natural way.