Foot steps and blend trees

Unity Engine
1

Hey, so im trying to add foot step sounds to my character, but im don’t know what the best way to go about adding this feature is.

so far my 3 ideas/things ive tried:

  1. Animation events: i haven’t yet tried animation events because ive done some research and found out that they don’t work with a blend tree so i haven’t bothered trying it.

  2. Animations curves: i was trying to use curves because they blend across animations, but im not having to much luck. sometimes the foot step sounds just dont play. the curve set up i had was a flat line with 2 spikes 1 for when the left foot hits the ground and one for the right.

  3. Raycasts: the last thing i tried was a sphere cast just beneath the foot calling foot step sounds when it hits a collider. but this isn’t working very well at all.

So i guess my question is what is the best method for foot steps? someone said in a post i found “the curves blend across the animations in the same way as any other curve, and I use zero-crossings to indicate when footfalls occur” but i didn’t know what they meant by zero-crossing.

So any help or suggestions would be great.

Thanks ~Scott

2

That might have been me. I set up an animation curve so it looks like a sine wave:

(Sorry, I’m not near Unity right now, so a generic picture will have to do.)

I timed the curve so it crosses that horizontal line (the y=0 axis) when one or the other of the model’s feet hits the ground.

Then I have a simple script that runs every Update. It compares the current value of the curve against the previous value. If the positive/negative sign is different, I know it crossed the y=0 axis that frame, and I play the footstep animation.

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