I’m making a simple game with a hovering robot that can do sword fighting.
I know Unity and 3Ds max, but am not so familiar with animation.
What approach should I use here?
the robot should hover around, controlled by the player
the robot should perform an attach move (on user input), and the movement should provide a sort of backlash to the robot as well (as it hovers)
The mesh is just individual 3d objects, so I wonder if I need to use bones or biped? Or just a hierarchical anatomy and animate the parts in 3ds.
I was considering doing the movement of the robot script based, but how would I give the robot a backlash (since that would affect the location+rotation of the robot as well)?
Okay. I would suggest that you watch a few 3dsmax tuts, that teach basic animations in 3ds max.
Okay, your robot design:
The good thing about your robot design, is that it is not a humanoid robot
but a simple looking robot, that hovers, with one arm and a sword.
The advantage to that, is that you only need a few bones in the arm,
so that you can easily animate him, or his arm, doing attack animations.
Because of his simple design, making animations for him, would be almost
simply easy.
If it were a humanoid looking robot, with 2 arms and legs etc. then you would
have, lots and lots of modelling and bone rigging work to do.
So your simple design, saves you from alot of that work.
Another thing that I would suggest, is to make a backdash animation
for your robot. Because if you do that, it will make his movements look cooler.
And a forward dash animation, might be a good idea too.
Okay. For this case, I would suggest, making the robot from one mesh
and not from seperate individual objects, or meshes. Doing it that way,
will make the robot easier to animate. But, that is up to you.
