Legacy 2 PBR – a batch Material updater for Unity 5

Posted: July 1, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Asset Store | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

Hey everybody! I just want to take a quick minute to share a cool Unity extension I made that you may find useful for your projects. It’s called Legacy 2 PBR, and its primary function is to automate your Material update process when moving from Unity 4 to Unity 5.

Legacy 2 PBR – https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/39625

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2D Animation, Part 4 – Code Explanation

Posted: April 2, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 2D Animation, Guest Posts | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Previously on the site we hosted a guest series on 2D animation in Mecanim written by game artist Jonathan Ferriter. In Part 3 of the series, Jon showed us how take our 2D animations and implement them in the Unity engine using the two scripts provided in the post and titled Jump.cs and Move.cs.

In that third video, Jon sort of skims through the makeup of these scripts and doesn’t take the time to explain how they actually work, so I wanted to write this post in order to discuss them further. While writing this post I’ve gone through both scripts, learned how they work, and written comments in them so you might better understand their systems. You can download the updated scripts from this link.

Unity_Logo_small  Guest_JonFerriter_2DAnimation

Aside: I had a hard time tracking down the origin of these two scripts, and I can tell they’ve just been thrown haphazardly around the internet as the ‘quick solution’. So there might be a much better way to do all of this. Of course they work, but consider this a word of caution.

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Blend Trees: 1-D Blending

Posted: January 29, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 3D Animation | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“A common task in game animation is to blend between two or more similar motions. Perhaps the best known example is the blending of walking and running animation according to the character’s speed.”

— Unity Docs

What Is A Blend Tree?

A blend tree is a special type of animation node in Mecanim that allows multiple different animation clips to be played at the same time so that an animated object can shift between different motions.  It allows us to maintain a smoothed state of motion in situations where a quick animation swap would otherwise appear jerky and visually inconsistent.

This smoothed motion is created when a blend tree takes a percentage of each animation involved in the blend and combines them into a single unique motion.  The percentage of each animation that a blend tree uses in a blend is controlled by one or more parameters set in our Animator Controller. As the values of these parameters change, the percentage of each animation used in a blend is adjusted in real time.

In this post I want to show you how to set up a few basic blend trees of your own and discuss some situations where blend trees can really help out in your Mecanim development. Let’s go, Warriors!

Aside: Blend trees are NOT the same as transitions. They act similarly, but the key differences are that transitions move between completely different animation states and they do so over a set period of time. Transitions do apply some blending, but only to incorporate a complete, smooth state change. Blend trees kind of “wobble” between similar motions as parameter values change.

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A Warning About My Code

Posted: November 4, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: News/Updates | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Hi, everybody. I’m writing this post to let you all know to watch out for the lines of code that I write in my posts. I’m using the “code” tag that WordPress offers as a way to display code in nicely formatted, color-coded chunks, but there are some inherent problems with the tag itself that I have recently discovered.

If you’ve ever used WordPress for your own blog, you’ll already understand that WordPress really likes to think it knows best when it comes to formatting any custom HTML code you write for a post. It automatically re-formats your code regularly, and I’ve yet to find a way around such a disastrous feature. As such, WordPress has been adding its own special brand of “I’m-Right” HTML code to the lines of C# that I’ve been painstakingly adding to some of my posts.

Example: <br /><br />

I posted this issue on the WordPress support forums in the hope of finding a solution from other bloggers. Feel free to join the conversation: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/why-are-my-code-blocks-being-re-formatted-by-wp?replies=1

If anybody knows any alternatives to using WordPress’s “code” tag that will allow me to display formatted code without any problems I’d love to hear about it. And if you spot any random HTML where it shouldn’t be, please be sure to let me know in the comments or send me an email through the Contact Us page linked at the top of the site.

Thanks,
Adam