Unity 5.x Animation Cookbook

• A straightforward and easy-to-follow format.
• A selection of the most important tasks and problems.
• Carefully organized instructions to solve problems efficiently.
• Clear explanations of what you did.
• Solutions that can be applied to solve real-world problems.

This recipe-based practical guide will show you how to unleash the power of animation in Unity 5.x and make your games visually impeccable. Our primary focus is on showing you tools and techniques to animate not only humanoid biped characters, but also other elements. This includes non-humanoid character animation, game world creation, UI element animation, and other key features such as opening doors, changing lights, transitioning to different scenes, using physics, setting up ragdolls, creating destructible objects and more.

While discussing these topics, the book will focus on mecanim, the Unity 3D animation tool, and how you can use it to perform all these tasks efficiently and quickly. It contains a downloadable Unity project with interactive examples for all the recipes. By the end of this book, you will be confident and self-sufficient in animating your Unity 3D games efficiently.

• Importing animations to Unity
• Work with different animation assets and components
• Create, visualize, and edit animated creatures
• Animating game cut scenes
• Design character actions and expressions
• Create gameplay by animating characters and environments
• Use animations to drive in-game logic

Maciej Szcześnik is an experienced game designer and Unity developer, specializing in gameplay and combat mechanics. His daily responsibilities include motion capture session planning and coordination, creating animation graphs and state machines, and AI design and implementation.

He started his professional career in 2004 at CD Projekt RED—the company best known for the critically acclaimed The Witcher series. Maciej had key roles in the Witcher games, being lead gameplay designer and lead combat designer. He also worked at 11 bit studios, another well-known Polish game development company, famous for the This War Of Mine game.

Maciej gave three talks at the Game Developers Conference and Game Developers Conference Europe. He is also a lecturer at Warsaw Film School, teaching Unity and technical aspects of animation as part of the game development BA course.

1. Working with Animations
2. Working with the Animation View
3. 2D and User Interface Animation
4. Character Movement
5. Character Actions and Expressions
6. Handling Combat
7. Special Effects
8. Animating Cutscenes
9. Physics and Animations
10. Miscellaneous