does anyone has any tips or even better links to Blender tutorials on how to animate simple characters, but suitable for Unity? I know there is certain way you need to do things in Blender to work fine in Unity.
I’m noob with 3D packages and modeling, but more I play with Blender more I like it! I also purchased Cheetah 3D recently, but I’m using Blender because there is so many tutorials for it.
Anyway, if anyone has any tips or hints related to topic would be greatly associated, something like building a simple human of few cubes and making it walk in Unity would be tops!
There is no such a tutorial that I know of, but it is not difficult. Build the model mesh, unwrap it to get a good UV map, then build an Armature for it. Parent the mesh to the armature and setup your groups of vertex to animate properly. Finally animate the Armature in an Action window, adding one new Action for every cicle you need. Unity will read the blend files directly and will understand each action as a separate animation.
That’s a little easier than the way I did it. I didn’t realize that Unity would understand Blender’s actions, so I animated on the timeline and set the frame ranges by hand in Unity.
Interesting enough, when adding bone they say to resize it by moving one of bone ends, but don’t do scaling as this messes things up. Whatever I do I can’t resize bone by moving one of its ends, bizarre.
Sorry for asking all these questions, I know it’s not a Blender forums…
Edit: never mind, found it, have to be in Edit mode to resize a bone.
I guess you are trying it with a selected bone. In Blender you can select the whole bone or just one tip. Select just the tip and then move it. The reason for not scaling bones in the Edit pose is because it needs to be totally neutral as the Zero from where later on you will animate any parameter you could need (including scale). But just moving away the tip you are in fact getting the same result, making the bone actually longer or shorter.
I need a little help understanding what I’m doing wrong. I made an animation but when I put it into Unity, I get this:
It actually does wiggle once but as you can see, the body is gone and the tail is completely deformed. I imported a .3ds file, unwrapped the UVs for the horn, body, and tail. I ignored the eyes and feet cause they imported last time. I created the bones and grouped them with the Envelope. Then I made my animations in the Pose mode and saved it as a Blender file since it was meantioned that Unity can read Blender files. The body shows up in the preview window of Unity but when I put it into the scene, that happens.
Hmmm… I really can’t tell from the screen shots what the problem may be. All I can suggest is that 99% of the time when I run into something like this it’s because I didn’t rig the armature correctly and there are vertices that either aren’t weighted at all or are attached to the wrong bone. GusM is the Blender animation guru here, maybe he can tell what’s wrong. If after you’ve double checked your rig it still looks screwy, maybe post the .blend so we can dig through it and see what’s up.
Well it’s not like I did a full body bone structure. I just put in a few bones cause I only wanted to see if Blender would work with Unity. Before I was trying to import as a .fbx file but Unity would crash if I pushed the F button. I don’t really know what weighting is so that might be my issue. I’ll have to look up on it.
How much weight is something supposed to have? The body and tail have a weight of 1 and the horn, feet, and eyes have no weight at all. 0_o;
Your problem looks like when you have vertexes not asigned (weighted) to any bone at all. Don´t use envelopes to assign your mesh to the armature bones, better use vertex groups. And don´t use Poses for animating, use Actions instead.
Google for “Blender character animation” and you will find a lot of good learning material. Learn well your tools and you will get a much happier life
Well I was looking at a video about animating and they used posing as their method. ^^; I’m still struggling with the animation window cause the keyframes don’t want to behave like I want them to. >< Every time I click on the Actions window, I don’t see my object any more so I wouldn’t know how to animate it, but I will look that up. I don’t have bones on the majority of the object, just in the end by the tail and in the tail itself. I figured since I was only animating the tail, I wouldn’t need to put in a whole body.
Thanks for the help. I will test them out tomorrow.
It seems the more I group stuff, the more it disappears. 0_o; I grouped my entire object to the bones making vertex groups. I didn’t bother animatng it this time yet since I wanted to see if I can even get the whole object to show up. When I put my object into the scene, there was nothing there and when I pushed the F key, I crashed Unity. (again) I don’t know if it’s the weight issue or the way I did the bones but I’m following the tutorials and making the bones how they say to. 0_o
It is very difficult to know what is going wrong with just your descriptions and the picture you posted. It can be a lot of things. If you want and can, post the blend file and we will be able to take a deeper look at it.
The file you posted is ok here, I just open it up in Unity and I can see the full model fine. I guess you are looking at a copy of the old blender file in your scene: try deleting it from the scene and grabbing a fresh copy from the project. Also, the Unity crash when pressing F sounds like a problem with your system or instalation, it works fine here too.
But in this file you have not attached the meshes to the Armature and you have not used vertex groups at all. Look for some basic tutorials about Blender Modelling, Armatures and character animation, it is worth to learn well the basics of your tools.
I know it wasn’t grouped. I posted the one that wasn’t grouped so if someone else grouped it and it shows up in Unity, then there would just be a problem with my grouping, but if someone else grouped it and it disappeared then it’s a different problem.
It only crashes like that when I import something into the scene and nothing shows up. Otherwise the F key works fine.
