Pun Shooter #9 - Animation? Shoot...

Since yesterday I've been wondering how we should add shooting animations to our game. One route is I ask the original asset author to create them. Another is I try to do this with my appointed go-to Blender animator. Finally, we might animate shooting procedurally.

Back to the source?

Right now I'm unsure about the asset author's availability. Another thing to consider is the number of animations we might need. Say, what would please me?

• Light gun (single)
• Light gun (dual)
• Medium (single handed) automatic weapon
• Heavy weapon (Bazooka, Missile launcher)

Plus, at least some of these (light/medium) should have a running variant. Yea that's a lot.

The Blender way?

How about ordering from my Blender animator? Chill but I'm not sure how to do a Unity (fbx) <=> Blender (.blend/.fbx) round trip. I can export somewhat usable rigs and models from Unity, but so far no luck getting them to play nice with the original Mecanim setup.

(Bear in mind I'm trying to add animations to an existing set, not developing a new set from scratch).

Procedural animation

I did some preliminary testing with procedurally animating the little guys' arms. Initially it was frustrating  but, if nothing else overriding transforms in LateUpdate (this has to be done at every frame) does work.

References

A Unity blog post addresses animation assets - quite possibly out of date.