So I was working quite nicely with the Unity third-person controller and (now) legacy animations when I started messing around with the new Mecanim system in Unity. I love the new character controller system, but it has forced me to learn far more than just a basic “how do I upgrade to use Mecanim”. With blend trees, animation state machines, and a new character controller setup, I have been busy trying to understand how these new pieces interact!
Luckily for me Unity has an excellent set of official videos and there is always tons of information to be found online. Unity also just started a beta of a new Sample Assets package to replace their long-standing Standard Assets. Of course the sample assets include first and third-person controllers along with tons of other cool stuff like car and plane controllers (yes! even jet planes :D).
The fun part about learning these lessons is that I can apply it to many of the projects I work on, even if those projects are not necessarily based in Unity. Learning the new Mecanim system has forced me to learn more about blend trees and animations. That, in turn, forces me to look at state machines in a different way than I had been using them.
I’ve still got a long way to go before I will be completely comfortable with the new character controller, but so far I have enjoyed the additional level-of-detail control it provides out of the box. I knew I would have to tackle animations at some point for all of my projects so I think this is as good a time as any to get the preliminaries out of the way. Hopefully I can just enlist the help of someone more talented than me when it comes to the more complex animation needs 🙂
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