This week we covered a lot of information and most of it I had not used at all. It was to do with animating in Unity and using mechanim. Animation can be done with 2D art or 3D models through frame by frame animation or keyframes, respectively. Adding to that we have received a brief view on how the production pipeline for the animators works. In an animation clip it contains a mesh model, points to represent the different movements the animation performs and an animation curve to edit the animation. Adding to that in Unity you can control the exact frames you want to take for the specific animation, if the animation clip is using forward or inverse kinematics, if rotation or position will be adjusted by the animation itself or if it will be locked, among various other options.

Another important lesson I learned form this week is the addition of animation events; this means that a method in a script that is attached to a game object with animation can be called. This can prove to be very helpful when linking other events to be produced in the game with the animation itself, like playing audio, or instantiating an effect, etc. we just have to make sure that the animation clip plays correctly until where we set the animation event.

Along with the animation tab and the animations themselves I experimented with mechanim and the animator controller component. With it I created a simple state machine to transition between various animations, apply certain parameters, create layers, among many others. One thing that caught my attention was the use of blend trees. These blend trees allows animations to transitions smoothly by blending similar motions together to create a better intermediate animation between the two. Adding to that Unity is able to mask an avatar. What this does it that it allows the user to overlay one animation over the other for certain parts. An example we worked on was masking a walking animation with a waving animation. So within mechanim after setting up the animation layers the walking animation would play for a certain part of the model and the waving animation would play over the remaining part, essentially creating a walking wave animation without needing a separate one. Before this week my experience with animation was extremely basic and my experience with animation in Unity was non existent. I have learned a lot this past week, and it is information I will be applying to this project and possibly every project afterwards.

Through learning these points on animation and animation in Unity it can greatly help the project as it allows for the game to feel more polished and as if there is more content in it and it possible allows animators to have more time to work on other things.

Progress on the prototype has not changed that much, there has been some more animation included and a restricting on how that was managed. I have to finish the project plan so that production time is not spent wasted on planning.