🛼 Creating procedural animations in Unity/C#
Did you know we can actually code up movement? :)
When you work on a video game, there are lots of assets you’ll need to create — from 3D models to textures, or musics, or stories or animations. And, sometimes, as an indie game developer, producing a certain type of content might not really be in your wheelhouse. For example, I’m really not good with animations — I know the basics, but then I just spend hours making less-than-adequate movements, and it never truly integrates in my games.
A nice solution is of course to take advantage of the free libraries at our disposal, like the famous Adobe Mixamo animations. But, as a programmer, you have another tool you can use: procedural animations!
Basically, the idea is that, rather than setting up keyframes and creating the movement by hand, you create a script to automatically update the transform of the bones in your model’s skeleton depending on some specific rules. Typically, you can have the position of the body determine the placement of the feet so that the rig always feels in balance, like this:
