How to create an animated avatar

Getting Started
,
1

Hi

I just started with Unity and i am completely overwelmed with the amount of tutorials and i can’t find the ones i need. I got the following project:

  1. I want an animation of a walking human, that is basicly walking on the spot, i dont need the background to be moving.

  2. I will measure some gait parameters of a real human being, like velocity, step length, knee angle etc. and these parameters should control the animation in real time. In this case the subject can basicly see his own avatar on the screen.

  3. I want to create different feedback systems. For example when the knee angle is too small, a big circle around the knee should pop up, with a message “Knee angle too small”. OR next to the animation are several bars moving according to the incoming gait parameters, etc. etc.

Now for me this sounds like e very complex problem because i just dont know where to start!

I tried with a 2D platform game, but i dont really want a game per se, I want an animation of an avatar behaving based on some data input in real life.

How do I even begin???

2

You would need to hook into something like the Kinect sensor under Windows. This is not a difficult project for somebody experienced with that, but it’s going to be quite hard for a beginner. If this is some sort of research project, you should consider hiring someone to get you going.

If determined to do it yourself, then do some of the 3D tutorials, and pay particular attention how Unity’s character animation system works. It’s just a transform hierarchy, and given a feed of real-time data, it’s not hard to adjust the avatar pose to match that data. But you will need to first learn about transforms and rotations and a fair amount of other general Unity (as well as C#) stuff to accomplish this.