Now that GDC is over with, it’s time to get caught up on everything. (By the way, I’ll be putting up source code and a write-up for my presentation sometime in the next couple of days.)
Anyhow, way back in January I helped out at the Madison Global Game Jam. In addition to helping people out with their Unity projects, I squeaked in a short one of my own, which I have posted up on my portfolio page. Check it out and have fun, but remember it’s only a couple of hours worth of work. As such, it requires deferred-rendering capable hardware, and I made no optimization efforts whatsoever.
In the world of game development, you sometimes have to take a cue from the world of boxing, and know when to throw in the towel. I made the decision this week to finally terminate further development on Touch KO, and wanted to write up some thoughts and reflections on the process in hopes that some other developers may find the information handy. (more…)
I recently finished up a new component for Unity as part of a contract job with Mixamo. For those of you who are unaware, Mixamo provides an online motion capture download and retargeting service powered by HumanIK. It lets you use sliders to creatively adjust a piece of motion capture data and then automatically retarget it onto your own hierarchy and download it for use in your game. It’s really slick and pretty affordable, so it’s definitely worth checking out, particularly for any indie developers out there.
At any rate, the component that I created is designed to let animation data, rather than procedural velocity values, drive a character’s motion in space. The component sits on top of Unity’s animation API to let you simply play, crossfade, and blend animations using any of the existing API methods, and the computer takes care of everything else after the fact. The way it works is by tracking the position and rotation of the pelvis in the space of the character’s root node for each active AnimationState and then backward applying this motion to the root node itself and snapping the pelvis back into its position hovering over the root. Since the source code is all available in the project, I won’t belabor the details too much here, but you can certainly ask me if you have any questions. (The one thing perhaps worth mentioning, as an addendum to the video, is that the pelvis forward axis is not strictly necessary for computing output: only for displaying debug information. For computation, the character’s rotation is determined using the pelvis right axis.)
You can download an example project from Mixamo that contains the component as well as a sample character with some animations. Because the tutorial video on the Mixamo website is compressed pretty substantially, I have also uploaded a copy to my Vimeo account in case you would like to watch it in full HD resolution.
Among other things, I’ve been developing some new tutorial videos for a friend (and former instructor) of mine who teaches in LA. He’s been spinning up a program focused on iPhone development using Unity, so I’ve started to put together some introductory Unity videos for him to share with his art students. As such, I’ve added a tutorials section for Unity, which currently features a video on basics. As you can see from visiting the section, I have a few more lined up in the short term, so it will be growing over time. Let me know if there’s anything specific you might like to see in the future.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on a set of scripts in my free time to help get additional relevant data from Maya into Unity. In particular, I’ve been interested in getting things for procedural animation (constraints, expressions, etc.) out of Maya and into Unity automatically, since I have traditionally had to re-code them manually. As such, I’ve developed a Python script that is invoked whenever Unity imports a Maya asset, which in turn adds attributes to the intermediate FBX file for Unity to operate on in an AssetPostprocessor script. Rather than babble, however, I decided to make a video to demonstrate how the tools work. (Click through to Vimeo to view in full HD.)
