Walking Animation and Waving Animation

Model, Rig, and Animation

In order to model the basic shape of the head and torso, I started at the top and extruded downwards, scaling as necessary. This is shown sped up below.

I then applied a mirror modify in order to adjust the shape of the head and torso and to help make the arms and legs. The arms and legs were made by extruding and scaling from the torso.

In order to animate the model a rig has to be created. A rig is a collection of bones, each of which map to a part of the model to move it. The rig was created by creating the spine bones first and extruding upwards toward the head, the arm bones were then created followed by the legs.

In order to create animations keyframes are used. Keyframes indicate where each bone has to move or rotate to. For each animation the starting and ending frames were keyframed first. After that bones were moved and keyframed at various points in each animation to create the desired movement. For the walk animation, one half of the walk was keyframed first (i.e. the left arm and right leg is moved forward, the right arm and left leg is moved backwards). This was then copied and pasted flipped, which created the other half (i.e. the right arm and left leg is moved forward, the left arm and right leg is moved backwards). The creation of the wave animation is shown sped up below.

The final animations are shown below : Idle, Walk, and Wave

Unity

To change animations in Unity an 'animation controller' was used, this determines which animations can transition to others and in what circumstances. The animation controller for the character is shown below. Each animation is it's own state with transitions between them. It starts with the idle animation.

To play the wave animation a 'trigger' transition in the animator was set. This means that it changes to the wave animation when the trigger is activated. It was then made to activate by pressing space. To switch to the walk animation the speed of the character is taken into account. Once this speed reaches a threshold the walk animation activates and once it goes below a threshold the character goes back to the idle animation. You can see these animations in use below.

The scene also contains a 'door' which disappears when the character gets close enough. This was done by adding a 'Player' tag to the character then by adding an area around the door to trigger when an object with the 'Player' tag walked within it. This then deactivates the door object.