TLDR - How to I make a UMA character walk using player input (aka WASD)?
I have created a UMA character. I would like for it to be able to walk and jump and run. I cannot find any video that discusses how I go about this. Someone on reddit suggested downloading animations from maximo with instructions but it had nothing to do with UMA characters.
Thnx
Matt
That’s because it’s not one thing, it is many. You’ll need to learn about character animation with skinned meshes, how to use Mecanim to create an animation state machine, and how to use code to send control input to that state machine. If you don’t already understand the fundamentals of mesh animation and coding it’ll be a significant undertaking, to say the least.
It may be worth looking on the Asset Store to see if someone is selling a pre-made character controller with animations which is close enough to your needs.
You’ve got two options for this part of the overall work.
If UMA exports to FBX then you can export your character and then use the standard Mixamo workflow to get it rigged and animated. Then import that back into Unity.
Unity’s animation system supports re-targeting, so you can download Mixamo animations on a placeholder character and then apply them to your UMA character inside Unity. It’s one of the best things about Unity’s animation system.
Either way, that addresses about half of the “animation” part from above. You’ll still need to learn the other half, and about Mecanim state trees, and how to drive those from code, or find and use something which has handled that stuff for you.
Oh! I’m assuming that UMA creates rigged characters. If the characters are not rigged then you’ll need to use option 1 so that Mixamo does that for you.
To put this in context, for big budget games character animation and controls is often the full-time work of a team of people. Tools such as UMA, Mixamo and Mecanim do a great job of making this stuff accessible to smaller studios and individuals, but there’s still a bunch of learning to cover. It’s not something which can be covered properly by a video tutorial or two.
The absolute shortest route is upload the UMA character to mixamo, go through the auto rig steps, download animations, then setup an anim controller in unity.
That’s as simple as you can list the steps, but of course those big steps are full of many smaller steps.
You can find youtube tutorials that cover the entire process. Many, many youtube tutorials showing this. but as the angrypenguin has said, it will be a series of videos and they wont cover all the problems you’ll encounter. So inevitably you’ll have to learn a lot of stuff before you get it all working predictably.
That is the shortcut way, but you still got to spend probably at least a week full time working out all the kinks along the way that come from not knowing how all this stuff actually works.
We’re not discouraging here, just setting expectations because it seems like you expect a quick, easy process more than it is.
much appreciated. both answers have given me more than I have else where. Lots to learn.