Simple NPC Character Movement with Mecanim

[Jusfowle]

Okay, so I followed along with the Mecanim tutorial to set up an idle, running, and attack animation for a character to demonstrate the animations in Unity for a class assignment. However, I do not want the character to be controlled by the player as in the Mecanim tutorial. I was able to use this Root Motion documentation to create a simple movement along the x axis with the following code:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

[RequireComponent(typeof(Animator))]

public class RootMotionScript : MonoBehaviour {

	void OnAnimatorMove()
	{
            Animator animator = GetComponent<Animator>(); 

            if (animator)
            {
	       Vector3 newPosition = transform.position;
               newPosition.x += animator.GetFloat("Runspeed") * Time.deltaTime;                                 
	       transform.position = newPosition;
            }
	}
}

This worked but the character clips through the terrain at parts and floats above it at others. I had read that CharacterController can be used to supply the slope navigation I am looking for, but it has no effect with my existing code.

As an alternative, I tried using CharacterController.SimpleMove with the following code:

	var speed : float = 3.0;
	var rotateSpeed : float = 3.0;

	function Update () {
		var controller : CharacterController = GetComponent(CharacterController);

		// Rotate around y - axis
		transform.Rotate(0, Input.GetAxis ("Horizontal") * rotateSpeed, 0);
		
		// Move forward / backward
		var forward : Vector3 = transform.TransformDirection(Vector3.forward);
		var curSpeed : float = speed * Input.GetAxis ("Vertical");
		controller.SimpleMove(forward * curSpeed);
	}

	@script RequireComponent(CharacterController)

With this method, the character actually falls to the terrain if placed above it, so I know that vertical movement would work, however it no longer applies the root motion to the animator and therefore will not move in the x axis. I would appreciate any guidance in executing either of these method effectively to have a simple run animation across uneven terrain.

Thank you.

[GXMark]

You will run into average velocity and blending issues across the network if using root motion animations over a network. Because unity physics are not deterministic from client to server root blending causes many issues and is a non-trivial issue to solve. My advise if you want to build up a stable networking solution for animation is to use in-place animation sequences.