Bring your characters to life with the latest features of Unity and Mecanim
About This Book
- Learn the latest features of Unity 5 to develop the most amazing animations for all types of games
- Refine your character animations by applying more advanced workflows and techniques with Mecanim
- A comprehensive book that explores core animation concepts and demonstrates their practical application in games
Who This Book Is For
This book is targeted at hobbyists, students, and game development professionals familiar with the Unity basics, looking to extend their skills and knowledge in the field of real-time game animation. You will need to be familiar with level design and basic scripting in C# and have a good knowledge of game development.
What You Will Learn
- Understand the latest features of Unity 5 such as state machines, meshes, and animation graphs
- Move, transform, and change objects over time using script files
- Use the animation editor and curve tools
- Import and configure externally created animations for use in Unity scenes
- See how to link animations to C# script
- Animate cameras and create a particle system
- Produce sophisticated sprite animations for both 2D and 3D games
- Apply more advanced workflows and techniques to refine character animations
In Detail
Unity is a feature-rich, fully-integrated development engine that provides out-of-the-box functionality for the creation of interactive 3D content. It is an exciting engine that has a rich and sophisticated animation system called Mecanim.
Unity Animation Essentials offers a comprehensive introduction to powerful animation tools and principles in Unity, which can be used to make great games. This book starts by exploring core animation concepts and then dives deeper to demonstrate their practical application in real-time games. This book shares extensive and useful insights to create animations using a professional grade workflow, and to create responses and interactive scenes. Each chapter focuses on a specific range of topics, from timing and events to character animation and particle systems.
By the end of the book, you should be able to fully utilize the powers of Mecanim and Unity.
Alan Thorn
Alan Thorn is a freelance game developer and author, with over 13 years of industry experience. He founded Wax Lyrical Games and is the creator of the award winning game Baron Wittard: Nemesis of Ragnarok. He is also the author of over 10 video training courses and 15 books on game development, including Mastering Unity Scripting, How to Cheat in Unity 5, and UDK Game Development. Besides this, he is a visiting lecturer for the master's degree course in game design and development at the National Film and Television School, London. Alan has worked as a freelancer on over 500 projects, including games, simulators, kiosks, serious games, and augmented-reality software for game studios, museums, and theme parks worldwide. He is currently working on two game projects. He also enjoys graphics, philosophy, yoga, and hiking. More information about him can be found at http://www.alanthorn.net.
