How would one go about this? If this was for a movie, I would simply animate the jump like any other action. However, since this is for a video game I can’t do that. Technically speaking, the animation on a game character is just a visual representation of what he’s doing at the time. In a jump, the character physically lifts off the ground, the programmers would be doing this part. Yet how would I (The animator) make it look good. Do I have him go through the jumping motions without leaving the ground? do I make him actually do a jump, (and when in game he will just be physically jumping resulting in a higher jump than I animated) then there’s the issue of airtime, and landing. If you jump in place vs jumping onto something. Both have a different amount of airtime. The could be drastically seen if you jump off of something very large.
Also, I we don’t know how high we want him to jump at the moment.
I think it ultimate is a decision you need to make. I have seen lots of different commercial characters and some have the physical jump actually happen in the animation, some have it programmed in instead.
Personally I think it’s best to leave the physical jumping to Unity and just animate a jump on the ground (without actually moving in the Y axis)
The way I see it is say you want to have jumping as a mechanism to avoid enemy attacks. It would be easier to actually have your character gameobject physically move upwards to avoid the attack. This way you can control exactly how fast the jump will be and how high up you go. If you did it in the animation you will have to tweak your animation each time you want to make a change.
create a JumpUp animation (first half of normal jumping)
create a JumpDown animation (second half; when character is falling from jump after reaching the apex)
create a JumpLand animation (when character hits the ground; think how someone reacts with their body when landing from the air/making contact with ground)
just have your programming team call up the correct animations to the corresponding part of the jump; think modular
Another note, in real life people have to bend down pretty far to jump high, which takes time. In a video game though, characters don’t always move so realistically, because it detracts from gameplay. You can almost completely cut out the “preparation” part of the animation if you need the jump to be quicker, and it will still look just fine.
I want to also add, reference is pretty important. Elaborating more on what Tuah said, he makes a very good point.
I think one thing that would be pretty useful for you is to play some games as reference- I do this all the time and wow does it make a difference in your work. Simply play two games that have different jump mechanics and analyze the jumping to decide which you like better, more realistic physical jumping, or more cartoony unrealistic jumping.
For realistic jumping, play the following games:
Assassin’s Creed (any in the series, as they all use the same character motion system)
Prince of Persia (I have it on XBox Live Arcade)
For cartoony jumping try these games:
Super Mario Bros.
Ratchet and Clank
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade (another title on XBLA; lots of fun!)
Trust me, you will really get a good idea of what to do and how by playing some games as reference- and it’s a good excuse for playing games while at work!
p.s.
Now that I think about it, I think I should go do some work by playing a little CoD: Black Ops for “reference”
