Ballistic ball launch, in a 3D version of Cyberball

Unity Engine
1

Hello, I’m physicist and a C++ (and now C#) programmer, and I need to develop a didactical game for neural activation analysis in autism. I’ve to develop a game like Cyberball (https://cyberball.wikispaces.com/) but in 3D. I’m a newbie of 3D animation, but I’ve found a simple character in Autodesk Character Creator and I’ve made very robotic animation by hand, using Unity Animation utility. Now I’ve to solve the problem of the ball: during the fly, the trajectory is a simple parabola (easy to realize knowing starting point arrival point and max height), but how can I solve the animation of the ball during the arm+hand movements (I mean during the preparation to the launch and during catch)? Do you think that the ball could be a self-standing object or child of the player that throws (4 players totally) ?
Thanks in advance for any suggestion for this particular problem and in general, and if you are interested in this academic project, please feel free to contact me.

My email:
f.serpetti@gmail.com

2

Make the ball a child of the hand game object and then the ball will follow the hand animation whilst it is a child game object of the hand, then when you want to release the ball from the from the hand change the parent of the ball (without changing the balls position) to a root game object and apply a force to the ball then the physics engine will take over and animate the ball flying through the air.
The unity asset mecanim++ has an example of all of this but the asset seems to be abandoned by the owners (no updates, no response from email webpage) however, it is written extremely well written code which is quite frankly brilliant :wink:

3

Thank you very much for your suggestion, I’ll check the example.
If I don’t have a root parent can I set ball.parent to null?